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Inhabited renderings and deserted architecture: the hidden message revealed by photography

This article by Felipe Samarán Saló was originally published in the 11th issue of rita_ magazine with the title “Inhabited renderings and deserted architecture. The hidden message of architecture revealed by photography” and is part of a joint dissemination collaboration. In the following, we present a study on how the center of interest in architecture has shifted from “serving the person by attending to them in all their dimensions” to “generating a universe of surprising, beautiful and photogenic forms and spaces”, relegating those who It will use them to the background or to oblivion.

The center of interest of Architecture has shifted from “serving the person by attending to them in all their dimensions” to “generating a universe of surprising, beautiful and photogenic forms and spaces” ignoring who will use them. Studying the traces of the photographic memory, the phenomenon is detected and helps to refocus the gaze on what really matters.

This dangerous loss of north is ingeniously naked by Bence Hadju in his series “abandoned paintings” removing people from the picture plane of beautiful and well-known pictorial scenes demonstrating the irrelevance of the resulting desert architectural setting.

WHAT ARCHITECTS “DO NOT WANT TO SEE” AND HIDDEN PHOTOGRAPHY.


In a 2015 interview with the architect Jan Gehl, responsible for having made Copenhagen one of the most exemplary and friendly cities in the world, they asked him:

“You said architecture is about the room between the buildings, not about their form. I guess, there might be a few so called “star-architects” who would rather disagree ”.

Let them. There was this guy at a conference in London. He said: «I feel sorry for you, architects. Because your means of communication is a still photo. And on a still photo all you can see is form. So constantly you communicate form to each other and you get more and more obsessed with form. This is not architecture this is sculpture ». Architecture is the interaction between form and life. And architecture is good only if this interaction works. The same is true for cities. It’s not about buildings and streets, it’s about the interaction of life and the physical environment ”.

Photography, the main means of disseminating architecture, has become an end in itself, and on many occasions it is designed “for the photo” rather than for the interaction between the work and the user. In these words, there is a complaint about the objectification of architecture, which loses its reason for being by belittling its mission to create facilitating scenarios for human habitation, to focus on creating mere artistic objects for sculptural observation. Gehl’s architectural and urban prestige makes him the authorized voice to make this call for attention, which, as we will see, is not isolated.

In an interview done in 2017 with the prestigious architectural photographer Richard Pare, to the question of: What is the difference between photographing architecture in a conventional way and from an artistic perspective? This was his response:

“The most ‘commercial’ work is usually reduced to a standardized interpretation, which describes the contours of the building; now it is digitally manipulated to eliminate what architects do not want to see ”. [iii]

What is “what architects do not want to see”? Are things that are deliberately hidden from photography also out of our attention in the design process?

THE INHABITANT AS A SINGULAR AND UNREPEATABLE VALUE OF THE PHOTOGRAPH

Photography was born linked to architecture due to its static nature. It is no coincidence that the first surviving photograph in history, dated 1826, is of the rooftops seen from the Le Gras house of French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Also the first known negative obtained by the English scientist and inventor William Henry Fox Talbot in 1835 is a picture of Architecture. It is a lattice window from his country house. And the first daguerreotype obtained by the French physicist, photographer, painter, inventor and chemist Louis Daguerre in 1838 is the rooftops of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris.

“What is that first daguerreotype on the Boulevard du temple famous for? Not because of the architecture, but because in it the small figure of a living man appears for the first time in history, in the lower left corner, someone whose shoes were being shined and, unlike the people who passed by. at eight o’clock in the morning he remained still during the long minutes that the exhibition lasted ”.

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