Whereas the earlier stereos, taken and printed using analogue methods, were left either untreated or subject only to light interventions (such as the addition of a spot stains of coffee), the stereo prints of Ivry were processed digitally with additional layers added in Photoshop. These in part respond to the architecture of the stereo print itself, as much as the architecture represented with it, re-enforcing its internal frames and borders, and adding colour tints to accentuate the effects of the doubling of the image. Within the example shown here of Cité Spinoza, we see a core at the centre of the image where a detail of the undercroft’s structure and the fenestration of a community building remains legible, relatively stable, but doubled. In the outer regions and margins of the image, however, dynamic effects of compression, overlap and transposition take hold. The Stereo Adapter has re-moulded space radically, the hazard of mirror-play and its distortions introduce a phantom tectonics and a theatrical sense of mobility to this space of vital structure. Pilotis dissolve before they meet the ground, and are eaten by colour as if by acid. At the foot of the image a doubled procession of heavily pruned botanical forms appear, jutting out of the lower, black frame of the stereo, grotesque and gesticulating, like Surrealist marionettes. In hindsight, with these monstrous botanical denizens at the base of the image, the grotto-like enclosure of the wider scene, the tints of green and cerise, we can associate this revisioning of Cité Spinoza with a curiosity from the popular cultural history of stereoscopic imagery: the French Diableries of the 1860s to, roughly, 1900. 2 These were modelled, miniature fantasy scenes of the underworld recorded in stereoscopic photography, peopled by devils in revelry, served by an army of skeletons and young women. The scenes were enhanced with back-lighting and watercolour tints.
Robin Wilson/ Photolanguage
Nigel Green using the Stereo Adapter in La Courneuve, Paris, 2018
After a quite long period of inactivity the Stereo Adapter was reengaged in 2018 for field work in the outer districts of Paris. In research for the Brutalist Map of Paris we had come across the work of Renée Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie at Ivry-sur-Seine town centre. Renaudie’s language of ‘difference’, of the cut and rotated plan in endless mutation, produced the well-known Étoiles D’Ivry. Just to the south east of the town centre is Gailhoustet’s lesser known Spinoza housing complex of 1971, akin to a Le Corbusian Unité, but with the public spaces of the undercroft divided not by regular pilotis, but by a series of monumental tectonic slabs with arches and circles cut-out, a visual play of recessional screens and intersecting spherical geometries creating a sculptural space of promenade with diverse opportunities for repose and for sheltered socialisation. Our use of the Stereo Adapter at Ivry was driven by a curiosity as to what the stereo would do to an already highly complex architecture. We were working toward a particular curatorial dissemination, an exhibition in the foyer of London’s Barbican Centre, Re-wiring Brutalism .
Stereo print of Spinoza Housing Complex, 2018.
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
on site review 39: Tools 10
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