Architects sometimes try on the role of photographers. True, the lens most often includes all the same objects that they are engaged in at their "main job": houses, streets, cities. We present a selection of books with photographs taken by architects. Alas, not all albums can be freely bought in stores: in some cases, you will have to wait for a reissue or search in libraries, the network or at second-hand booksellers. Nevertheless, the selected fragments provide an opportunity to look at architecture through the eyes of those who create this architecture.
Tim benton
LC FOTO: Le Corbusier Secret Photographer
Lars Müller Publishers, 2013
Most of Le Corbusier is known as a modernist architect. He called himself a writer (homme de lettres), because he explained his radical theoretical views in books and articles. He worked both as a painter and as a designer. The least known aspect of his creative interests is photography. Although Le Corbusier himself claimed that he did not see much benefit in this occupation, he managed to take hundreds of photographs in 1907-1917, when the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris acquired three cameras at once and recorded his impressions while traveling in Central Europe, Turkey. Greece and other Balkan countries, Italy. And in 1936, he bought a 160mm film camera and took almost 6,000 pictures with it.
These never-before-seen photographs are collected in the book by Tim Benton, a great specialist in the work of the great modernist - "LC FOTO: Le Corbusier's Secret Photographer". In it, Benton reflects on how the art of photography helped Le Corbusier's “main career”. The photographic material gives a new understanding of his "visual imagination", his changing attitude towards nature and materials in the 1930s, as well as his distrust of progress.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour
Learning From Las Vegas
MIT, 1972
Lessons from Las Vegas, released in 2015 in Russian, is the most famous book in our collection, but we suggest looking at it from a new perspective, as a monument to photography.
Recall that in 1968 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Eisenour, taking their students from the architecture school of Yale University, went to explore the Las Vegas Strip - the main street of the "City of Sin". Among the neon-lit casinos, parking lots and hotels, they set to work with academic rigor and precision. The architects explored the iconography of the shining signs, the particulars of automobile traffic and how the ideas of urbanism were distorted here by the commercial component. Field research helped them see the real city and how modern architecture and urbanism actually work - not how we would like them to work. The study was later released in the form of a book known to us, but we propose to pay attention to its "pictures" - pictures taken during the expedition: on the one hand, they have an auxiliary - illustrative - function, on the other - the text is often secondary, and the ideas described in book, rely precisely on photographs.
In 2008, the Swiss publishing house Scheidegger & Spiess published a book
Las Vegas Studio dedicated to these images. It showed these iconic images in high quality for the first time. It also includes texts by Rem Koolhaas and artist Peter Fischli, in which they reflect on the influence of Venturi and Scott Brown on contemporary art and cinema.
John Pawson
Spectrum
Phaidon, 2017
The book "Spectrum" is about the love of color by the minimalist John Pawson, who, as you know, rarely uses any colors other than white. All 320 photographs taken by him, collected in it, are divided into color pairs. The architect describes the idea of the book rather modestly: "These are just objects that, I think, fit well together."
Prior to becoming an architect, Pawson spent time as a Buddhist monk and sports photographer in Japan. True, without much success: in the monastery, for example, he lasted only a day. However, it was in Japan that Pawson began to take up photography. Since then, he has had a special relationship with pictures. “The only thing I have ever kept are photographs. I don't have any [other] items, nostalgic things,”-
explains the architect.
The idea was suggested to Pawson by Instagram (his
the account there is very popular - now it has 196 thousand subscribers). Some of the images for the book were shot on an iPhone, some on a Sony digital camera, but they are all cropped in a square - after all, this is the only format that Instagram "understood" until recently.
Erich Mendelsohn
Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten
Rudolf Mosse Buchverlag, 1926
Erich Mendelssohn, during his frequent trips to the United States, filmed skyscrapers that struck him. The frame includes landscapes of New York, Chicago, Buffalo and Detroit. Mendelssohn deliberately cropped his shots in thin verticals to emphasize the "high-rise" of American cities. The photographs were included in his book “America. An architect's picture book”.
It contains 77 photographs, some of them belong to Mendelssohn himself, some to his colleagues Knud Lönberg-Holm and Erich Karwijk, and also to the film director Fritz Lang, too.
not alien to the architectural theme. “To understand some of the photographs, you have to lift the book above your head and rotate it,” wrote a fan of this book El Lissitzky. "The architect shows us America not from a distance, but from the inside, leading us along the canyons of the streets."
The first edition of 1926 can be found in libraries or second-hand booksellers. On
Amazon has a 1928 reissue.
Valerio Olgiati
The Images of Architects
Quart Verlag, 2013
In the case of "Images of Architects", the Swiss architect Valerio Olghati acted as the author-compiler. He asked the most famous architects of our time to send him images that would embody the quintessence of their work. 44 architects responded to the request, and their list is impressive: David Adjaye, Alejandro Aravena, David Chipperfield, So Fujimoto, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Stephen Hall, Junya Ishigami, Arata Isozaki, Winnie Maas (MVRDV), Richard Mayerser, Richard, Kazuyo Sejima, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Peter Zumthor and others.
Each of them sent up to ten photographs, in total there were 355 photographs - black and white and color. “Images are explanations, metaphors, memories and aspirations. They show the roots of architecture and expectations for projects. Conscious and unconscious,”says Oljati. The individual photo collections are named, after Malraux's model, "imaginary museums."
The book was published in 2013 and has already been sold out. It remains to be hoped for a reprint.
