Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    How the mind meets architecture: what photography reveals
    (2011-04)
    In architecture, consciousness finds its own distinct echo. This paper proposes that, in its capacity to give conceptual, sensory and symbolic coherence to mere matter, architecture can be considered analogous to consciousness, which confers coherence and continuity upon the raw data of experience and sensation. It further proposes that the photographic image has a powerful ability to make evident this relationship. Charged with depicting a piece of architecture, the photographer produces images which seek to convey the concepts behind the design as much as the feeling of the finished building. In the photograph, idea and experience coalesce. Building on previous work which looked at how John Szarkowski's photos of Louis Sullivan's work encapsulate a building's art-facts and its life-facts this paper turns its attention to a number of more recent meetings between architecture and photography. As in all her work, Candida Hofer's recent photographs of David Chipperfield's work at the Neues Museum in Berlin are concerned on the one hand clearly to portray the scale and lineaments of spaces and on the other, to convey a sense of their life in time. In his large diptychs of buildings by SANAA, the Swiss photographer Walter Niedermayr manipulates the image to communicate both the experience of these dreamy, floating worlds and the aesthetic sensibility which created them. We inhabit simultaneously the minds of the creators and the visitor. Finally, in Thomas Demand's ongoing collaborations with Caruso St John, a photographic imagination concerned with the scrupulous recreation of spaces meets an architectural practice famously attentive to the specifics of spatial experience. Attesting to what Barbara Maria Stafford terms the cognitive work of images, the photographs resulting from these varied collaborations allow us access equally to the architectural work and to the cognitive processes involved in its creation and its experience. Following Whitman's famous proclamation that all architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it, this paper will ultimately argue that, equally, just looking at pictures of buildings might reveal something about the nature of conscious experience.
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  • Publication
    How the mind meets architecture: what photography reveals
    (Routledge, 2012-05)
    In this chapter, we will look closely at two photographs. The first is one of a series made by the German photographer Candida Hofer of the Neues Museum in Berlin between the completion of its reconstruction by David Chipperfield and Julian Harrap and the installation of its permanent exhibition in 2009.
      443
  • Publication
    Camera in Camera - photographing the room and its view
    (Society of Architectural Historians, 2013-04)
    In his Camera Obscura series, the photographer Abelardo Morrell transforms rooms into cameras and then photographs the transformed space, on whose walls are overlaid images of the world outside, inverted.  These photographs are meditations on the complex relationship between the single room and the camera. As suggested by their shared etymology, both are closed chambers, connected through apertures to the world beyond. But despite their common nature, they can tend to cancel rather than reinforce each other when combined. The open spaces of the landscape and the complexities of the urban scene often seem easier to encompass in a photograph than a single enclosed space. Within the confines of the room, the limitations of the camera's monocular gaze are most keenly felt.  It cannot see what most closely surrounds it. Instead and maybe in compensation its attention often shifts to the view beyond. From Fox Talbot to Kertesz to Wall, there is a rich photographic tradition of registering the view from a room, the window becoming a lens on life outside. However, Morrell turns back from this prospect to register instead the view invading the room. His images gain their power from the interplay between the ordinary intimacy of the interiors of a hotel room, a child's bedroom, an attic and the expansive drama of the views playing on their surfaces. The two realms are co-extensive, so much so that is often hard to know where one ends and the other begins. As at the studiolo in Urbino, a room can contain a world in miniature. Using Morrell's images as a point of departure, this paper will explore how the camera copes with the confines of the single chamber and how, in doing so, it serves to represent and mediate the relationship between the room and the world beyond.   
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