Naked architecture

Naked architecture 

As a young architect, I've spent many hours trying to take impressive photographs of famous buildings: well lit, from an interesting viewpoint that afforded some attempt at clever composition and always devoid of people. That last thing was often the most time-consuming, as I had to play a waiting game with passers-by.

Even when I switched to just taking informative photographs, reminders of what I'd seen and felt at this or that part of a building (not necessarily famous), it took me some time before I was ready to accept people in the photographs. That's how I'd learned it: the photographs of buildings should be free from clutter that obscured the architectural features. It was alright to have a single human figure somewhere in the periphery as an indication of scale but that was all.

More recently, this has been turned around: I have become more and more interested in the interaction of humans and buildings, so I'm taking an increasing number of photographs and films exploring just this interaction - registering how people interfere with architecture in their daily activities.

I was reminded of the old habits when a colleague has a problem with a memory bar and asked me to recover its content on my computer. Many photographs were indeed recovered, so I put them back on the memory bar and handed it back to him saying "Here's your porn". He was puzzled and shocked: what did I mean? Well, I explained, the photographs were mostly of buildings devoid of people - naked buildings.

We laughed about it but later I thought there was more to it: architectural photography has some pornographic traits, like nudity and exaggeration. We are taught to lust after famous buildings and their forms. They may remain unattainable to most of us but they are what we would love to possess. Well, at least we have the photographs.