On Writing (about Architecture)
by thomas nemeskeri
I found something interesting when I recently installed Instagram on my phone. Though I was looking forward to sharing my photographs (which, though not all instant captures, captured remarkable instances about the built environment), I knew that many people now use the app, and that like many forms of social media, its popularity has allowed it to create trends, which seems to have led to the ubiquity of so many aspirational selfies and food shots. Rifling through this seemingly endless stream, I saw how flat architectural photography had become. With the proliferation of aspirational and lifestyle snap photography, the photogenic qualities of built space have been pushed to the fore, while the myriad ways in which architecture shapes our lives have been pushed to the periphery. Ironically, despite this proliferation of imagery, architecture is at risk of being marginalised. Contemporary architectural photography tends to focus on the quality of lifestyle that is associated with a given design; idealised lifestyles associated with the promises of modernity, like so much self-referential, glamorous isolation. Architectural photography has a proclivity toward iconicity by virtue of its subject matter – the built world stands as an exhibitive judgement of our relationship to the world, and is so used to represent desired ends. Architectural discourse, which includes photography, fufills this purpose, but it is at best a limited understanding of architecture, and one that can be challenged. Indeed all architectural discourse that (like photography) is primarily visual tends to share this proclivity to contextualise built form as the space of human consumption. The challenge of these forms of discourse is to project the quotidian aspects of the architecture that speak of a broader relationship to our world. Within the medium of photography itself, for example, moments of resistance may be found that suggest more complex sets of relationships and a broader context than the designers’ initial intentions (as the photographs accompanying this text attempt to do). This seductive aspect of architectural photography, reinforced by the increasing realism of rendered scenes that typically precede built space, can dominate the discussion, analysis and public perception of significant architectural projects, to the point that other design considerations, such as responses to particular social or physical contexts, are inadequately addressed or just ignored. At its most cynical, this focus on retinal delight is capable of reducing architectural experience to a series of one-liners; a series of unrelated moments comprising a building. Short of employing collage to point out the fallacies created by some architectural photography, it is arguably writing, in combination with photography, which offers the greatest opportunity for ongoing re- assessment of a number of preconceptions about our relationship to the built environment, which may ultimately translate into an appreciation for the capacity of architecture to reveal and challenge such preconceptions.
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Thomas Nemeskeri :: nemeskeri.ca
this page, from the top: Villa Savoye, Poissy, 2014 Castelvecchio, Verona, 2013
facing page: Condominium construction site, 2004
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