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In Portugal in April, the hyper-reality of this golf resort inspired me to reprise a twenty-year-old project.
Using up-to-date technology made it quite a different experience from last time - shooting hand-held rather than with a monster large format view camera on a tripod.
2000 - Housing development, Cornwall
In Provence last month attending a friend’s wedding, I took the chance to do a bit of architectural tourism. The night before the wedding we stayed in Marseille, so there was an opportunity to look around Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse. The first of his “Unité d'Habitation” buildings, it is a Unesco World Heritage site since 2016 and was a major influence on 20th century residential architecture.
It is built from raw concrete (“ béton brut ”), due to the prohibitive cost in post-war France of building a steel frame, as originally intended. However, this allowed the architect to build something quite playfully sculptural, and this, I felt, was one of the main benefits of seeing the building at first hand.
The intermittent rain and the time constraints imposed by our 8 month old son limited me to a few quick shots, and in fact I missed getting to see the east side of the building altogether.
Inspired by ocean liners, the building sits on top of concrete pilotis. It’s interesting to note how the shape of these was altered in the later iterations of the design, losing much of their sculptural quality. More on that later.
As well as apartments, the building housed two streets of shops, a restaurant, a hostel for residents’ visitors (now a hotel) and on the roof, a running track, swimming pool, children’s art school and a nursery. This was the “vertical garden city” of Le Corbusier’s imagination, and it’s worth noting that some of the apartments are still occupied by their original residents.
There are various sizes of apartment, but most are duplexes that interlock around the access corridors, which thus only occur every third story. Each duplex therefore has a balcony at either end, one of which is double height.
I found this building more beautiful than I had anticipated. One quote I found from a resident said he felt as though he lived inside a work of art.
Still on the trail of Le Corbusier, I also had the chance to spend a few hours in “Firminy Vert”, a suburb of St. Etienne that was masterplanned by Le Corbusier in the 1950s. The name is a clear statement of intent about the town’s future, distinct from the “Firminy Noir” of its mining past. This future was the vision of Eugene Claudius-Petit, who took over as mayor in 1953, having previously met Le Corbusier in the US.
The masterplan included a stadium, cultural centre and a parish church, laid out around a disused quarry, as well as three Unité d’Habitation blocks. In the end only one of these blocks was built, and the church lay unfinished from 1978 until 2006, when it was finally completed under the supervision of erstwhile Le Corbusier apprentice José Oubrerie.
The church of Saint-Pierre de Firminy has been descibed as a truncated cone, or an upturned bucket, but once inside, you realise it makes more sense to see it as a giant bell. The acoustics inside are staggering, particularly whenever a fellow-visitor closes the heavy door behind them. Sadly it’s beyond the abilities of a photographer to capture this, but I hope my pictures give some of the atmosphere and scale of the place.
Even more than Cité Radieuse, this building exists between architecture and sculpture. From the way light enters the structure to the way rainwater is taken off it, everything functional becomes a sculptural element. Three apertures, two in the roof and one in the western wall, project light into the space while forming blocky features on the exterior. A system of concrete gutters for rainwater recovery shelters primary-coloured slots that let light in at head-height, and the eastern wall is drilled through with holes, plugged with glass prisms representing the Orion constellation.
The space below the church, originally intended for parish activities, now houses the “interpretation centre”. Getting all the shots I wanted of the church left me no time for a proper look around an exhibition on the work of Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand.
A short drive from the complex is Firminy’s own Unité d’Habitation, the last of the five to be completed, in 1965. By comparison with the Marseille example, which you sense is a pretty desirable address these days, this one feels more working class and, perhaps not coincidentally, a little more neglected.
The rounded, board-marked concrete pilotis of Marseille are not reproduced in any of the other examples, and this seems to typify a more functional, less playful feel to this incarnation of a, by now, well-established model.
This was one of my favorite recent projects, a really stylish house extension in Stockport for Paula Butterfield. The architect and clients between them have done a great job of making the existing period interiors and the new modern space work together, particularly with some well-chosen furnishings.
In the lead-up to most projects I check the weather forecast obsessively to try to maximise the chances of sunshine, but I've always felt that the best architecture photographs better on overcast days. Especially with the interior shots here, I feel they're more satisfying than they would have been on a sunny day.
Going back to October, I shot this boarding house at Wycliffe College in the Cotswolds for Buttress Architects. It replaces existing boarding houses with an innovative, flexible design in which rooms can be adapted to accommodate the different intakes of boarders and day-boarders each year.
The yellow brick cladding, with deep window reveals in pale stone, has been chosen to be sympathetic to the existing buildings on the large school estate.
In December I shot the offices of engineers Cundall in central Birmingham for Autex Acoustics. Their workspace was in need of expansion so they extended into the floor above the existing office, via a bespoke plywood staircase. A number of different Autex products were used, and in some creative ways.
The ceiling baffles they commonly install were in this case used in a concertina arrangement down the length of the space, and an amphitheatre was constructed from boxes covered with acoustic material.
In the reception area they had used various materials from this project and others to make a geometric wall design that makes for a great feature of the office space and also serves as an introduction to the work they do.
Another innovative use of the Autex materials was a pair of individual work space pods. These were made with a timber frame and lined with acoustic material to make a quiet space to work in.
I photographed this house extension in September, where the clients had gone for industrial steel and glass doors rather than the usual bi-folds. It provides a great frame for the garden, which has also been brought up to date with a modern design. The extension adds space to the kitchen and dining area, as well as an office at the rear of the house. It is clad in black timber, which reflects the sun beautifully.
I spent a pretty serene morning up at Quarry Bank Mill in September, shooting the newly restored 19th century glasshouse for Buttress Architects. It has been transformed from a derelict skeleton back to its original glory.
One very strange thing about being there on such a beautiful morning is the soundtrack - the roar of jet engines from the nearby airport.
Over the course of two visits in June I shot the offices of Adobe at Old Street for Autex Acoustics. The design was a mix of the homely and the industrial, with some playful features including a couple of games rooms.
There were also some pretty stunning views over London, particularly the Barbican and the City.
It's been a busy few months and the blog has been neglected, so it's time to start getting up-to-date. Going all the way back to April last year, I shot this project for my client Paula Butterfield. This is an ongoing project which I've been photographing in stages, so there should be more to see in the near future.
An extension has been added to the north side of the building with decorative brickwork matching that on the existing part of the house, and more modern looking timber cladding in a bar-code design. This was an important part of the project to capture, but as it faces north, it wasn't possible to shoot it sun-lit, other than with the sun directly behind the camera, which would have made for a very flat image. So instead I experimented with adding a touch of diffused flash to fill it in a little, then magically removing the light stand, flash and umbrella from the images.
The extension functions as an entrance hall and utility space with bike storage and a toilet.
Inside the house proper is an open-plan kitchen and living room opening onto a conservatory that brings loads of natural light into the space.
Another Spring project was Chorlton Villas by Buttress Architects for First Step Homes. The houses are designed for flexibility and can be customised to the needs of the residents. The top storey, with floor to ceiling windows, can be used for bedrooms or as the main living space, and there were examples of both in use.
A recent article in The Modernist on Freetown in Sierra Leone had got me interested in African Modernism, and when I visited Uganda at the end of last year I managed to get a few shots of some of Kampala's modernist buildings. This kind of architecture, with it's forward-thinking, confident, utopian ambitions, has a particular resonance in the context of newly-independent African nations. Perhaps the best example I found was the National Theatre, which, like many of our own best modernist buildings, is now under threat of demolition.
Another example, and looking a little better looked-after, is the Bank of Uganda.
One feature I really liked from Kampala's 20th century architecture is the screen walls, as seen here on the Ministry of Education building. All along the road from Entebbe to Kampala I saw shops selling the blocks for building these perforated walls.
Another method of keeping a cool interior - the concrete slats on the post office building, which also still has its fantastic mid-century lettering.
This former mill building looks as if it was inspired by a Le Corbusier housing scheme. I couldn't do better than to get a snapshot of it, but the building is too good not to post here.
And finally this unfinished house in the swanky neighborhood of Bugolobi. It's pretty common to see half-built houses around Kampala, but this one seemed to me to be an accidental tribute to Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion. These houses usually have "Not for sale" painted on them as the owners often live abroad and some have returned to find that their house has been sold by unscrupulous builders.
My friends at Autex Acoustics have been keeping me busy lately. First I shot the new Loughborough University campus at the London olympic village for them. This seems to be part of a growing trend of British universities building outpost campuses in other parts of the country, even other parts of the world. For Autex it was an opportunity to show off a broad range of their products in an exciting new setting.
They also collaborated with Arup, BAM and others on the Circular House at London Design Festival. The idea was to create a prototype for a new way of building in which materials are re-used and recycled and waste reduced. More information here: http://www.buildingcentre.co.uk/exhibitions/coming-soon-circular-house
Then, tacked onto the end of another project, I visited the lovely people at Architecture PLB to shoot the acoustic panels installed at their office.
In September I had a beautiful, misty morning start shooting Norton Priory Museum in Cheshire for Buttress Architects. Above the existing undercroft, they have added a gallery space that provides views of the remains of the priory buildings. There is also an exhibition space, separated from the undercroft by an atrium which incorporates the reception area.
The undercroft is the only part of the original priory still standing, and it was incorporated into a country house that remained until the 1920s.
Going back a couple of months, I shot two projects for Pozzoni Architects. First, two tower blocks in Ancoats that have been re-clad and refurbished, and a residential development in Ashton-Under-Lyne.
Leeds University Campus, Chamberlin, Powell & Bon
I was in Leeds this week and went to see the University campus masterplanned by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who would later design the Barbican Complex.
The grade II listed Roger Stevens Building is especially interesting. Its exterior form shows how the interior of the building works, echoing the stepped shape of the lecture theatres.
It got me thinking back to my art college days when I wrote about Bernd and Hilla Becher's ascetic photographs of industrial structures. Walter Gropius wrote in the Bauhaus manifesto about an ideal state that architecture could achieve when, devoid of decoration, its form was derived only from the function it served. This state was called Der Bau (something like "The Built") and is the root of the name Bauhaus. For Gropius, it was industrial structures such as grain silos and water towers that achieved this state in practice, and his vision was of an architecture that emulated those structures. Documenting them would be the Bechers' fifty year project.
The Leeds campus seems to aspire to this state and probably comes pretty close, though I'm not sure that the staggered concrete tube shapes that are such a strong feature of the Roger Stevens Building aren't decorative. I would say it's sculptural-functional.
Renold Building, UMIST, W.A. Gibbons
Where does the time go? I've been an admirer of this building for so long and only this weekend did I get around to photographing it. That staircase in the centre of the frame is what first caught my eye. It still manages to feel futuristic five decades after its completion. I first saw it from the train on the way into Manchester on the elevated line that runs through the city and provides so many of its best views.
Another striking feature of the building is the concertina-shape of the glazing at this end, which was designed to meet the acoustic needs of the lecture theatres inside.
At the time the complex was built it was called the Manchester College of Science and Technology (later UMIST) and it is regarded as having embodied Harold Wilson's white-heat-of-technology vision. In fact I can't help speculating that it might have inspired those words, given that it is undeniably very white and that in the early '60s everything around it was soot-blackened.
Up close, the block on the left, above, has enough layers of paint on its metalwork that it begins to take on the appearance of woodwork in Victorian houses. It is a strange feeling to watch the future recede into the past.
I had another little trip to the beautiful city of Sheffield and tried taking the multiple-viewpoint panorama idea to the next level. This time I think I've found the limit of how wide I want to go with it.
I think the hyper-reality of it goes a little too far at this width, and the different viewpoints become harder to hide in the tarmac. I like the fact that you're seeing the building in a way that is impossible in reality, but I prefer the subtler effect in the previous attempts. Now it's time to find some more candidate buildings.
This was exciting to discover: I had no idea that Sheffield had its own mini Seagram building aka. the Arts Tower, part of Sheffield University. It's a good example of the way that, very often, the best buildings photograph really well in flat light conditions. I'm looking forward to going back and shooting it again when I've got a bit more time.
I shot the reception area of a new office development in the centre of Manchester, for Autex Acoustics. They installed the lattices you can see hanging in the booths.
And a rather beautiful house remodel in Chorlton for Paula Butterfield Architects.
Then at Easter, after a couple of false starts, I got down to Bath to shoot a new sports building at Prior Park College for Buttress Architects. It has a sports hall, a jaw-droppingly well appointed gym, and it doubles as a cricket pavilion.
I hadn't counted on doing much commercial work this month - the light and the weather aren't exactly conducive to it, and though it turned out busier than expected, I had plenty of time to experiment with new ideas.
Ever since I moved to Manchester the part of Ancoats between Oldham Road and the canal has fascinated me. It has its industrial past written into its architecture, but at the same time it feels like a place that's waiting for something to happen. The Hallé Orchestra has moved into St. Peter's Church as a rehearsal space and a number of creative businesses have appeared, as well as the inevitable blocks of luxury flats. But the streets are still eerily quiet, and among the new and the refurbished are flattened plots, bricked-up workshops and long-closed pubs.
Once when I was setting up my 5x4 camera, an old gent walking his dog came over and told me he could remember people streaming out of the factories and into those pubs at the end of the shift. Unlike the two (equally friendly) high-vis workmen who walked by while I was shooting the picture above ("Can you see something we can't?"), he didn't question why I would be sufficiently interested to point my camera at those buildings.
The feeling I have is that in the New Labour days, the property developers saw no limits to the aspirational "Quarters" they could build around the ring-road, and that semi-permanent austerity has meant the mothballing of those plans here, one assumes semi-permanently. Owen Hatherley points out in his Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain that, perhaps a mile further out of town in Collyhurst "a straggling landscape...demonstrates just how shallow the regeneration of Manchester actually is", but you really only need to cross Great Ancoats Street from the Northern Quarter and you see evidence of that right here. On the other side of the canal is what Hatherley calls the "gentrification frontier" of New Islington, FKA the Cardroom Estate, where, again, the project ground to a halt post-2008, leaving a horseshoe of new housing developments around a substantial wasteland. Here though, sufficient confidence has returned for Urban Splash to start building again. I can't help wondering what 2016 will hold for this area.
The image above would not have been possible to capture in a single shot. The building is too wide and the opposite building too close to fit it all in, so this is made up of 24 frames stitched together. To get this shot would otherwise have required a fish-eye lens, adding a pictorial drama that I didn't want.
I think the effect of this technique is to give it a strange, hyper-real kind of formality which appeals to me a great deal. I hope this formality shifts the attention away from the photograph and onto the subject, so it serves as a document of the building.
The other effect of shooting in this way is that it creates an enormous file. At full size it is 140mp, and could comfortably be printed 4 1/2' wide. Here is another one, from the other side of Great Ancoats. This building is still in use, a living fossil of Manchester's textile industry.
And in Levenshulme, a former workshop for precision machine tools. I feel these work better when the brick and tarmac are dry, so I plan to re-shoot the last two another time. At this time of year though, it takes at least a couple of days after the last rain for things to dry out, and, well...
Meanwhile, on the commercial side of things, I shot this office development for Pozzoni Architects in the centre of Manchester. I like the way it frames the existing (Victorian?) buildings opposite.
The yellow Manchester trams run up and down the street outside, which is a gift to the photographer. The building isn't occupied yet, so in the absence of an available model I had to stand in myself.