Fotografia: The Latest Architecture and News

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Global photography community EyeEm has announced the finalists of their 2017 Photography Awards. Free and open to photographers of all skill levels and backgrounds to submit through the EyeEm web platform and app, this year’s awards received more than 590,000 submissions from users around the world across five categories: The Architect, The Great Outdoors, The Photojournalist, The Portraitist, and The Street Photographer.

The architecture category alone received over 95,000 submissions, from which 20 images were selected by a jury of photographers and editors from institutions including National Geographic and the BBC. All of the finalist images will be displayed at the 2017 EyeEm Photography Festival & Awards in Berlin from September 15-17, where each of the category winners and Photographer of the Year will be announced.

Continue on to see the 20 finalists in the architecture category.

The textures, colors, and details, captured by @hernanmat in these minimalist photographs, show the vibrancy of the patterns and elements characteristic of the local, traditional and popular architecture of Argentina.

By photographing and compiling all these elements into one place, the collection becomes in a way a reflection of the different components of Argentine architecture that occupy the collective memory.

Check out below a stunning selection of minimalist photographs by @hernanmat.

Photographer duo Luc Boegly & Sergio Grazia have released a new photo series capturing the Seine Musicale, which recently opened its doors. Designed as a partnership itself between architects Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines, the mixed-use music and cultural center is located in Paris’ western Boulogne-Billancourt suburb. The project is the latest feature in the site’s Island Master Plan designed by Jean Nouvel. Features include a multi-purpose concert hall seating 4,000, a classical music call seating 1,150, rehearsal and recording rooms and an outdoor park area for visitors and practicing musicians.

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Completed in 2015 at the northern periphery of Madrid, the BBVA Headquarters by Herzog & de Meuron employs a complex network of passages, courtyards, and gardens to create a new corporate campus for the Spanish banking giant. Responding to local climatic needs, the building is recognized for its custom undulating brise-soleil along its facade and pebble-like central tower.

In this photoset, photographer Rubén P. Bescós turns his lens toward the new institutional landmark, capturing the building within its urban context.

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During his frequent travels to Seoul, Hong Kong- and Singapore-based photographer Raphael Olivier noticed a new trend taking the South Korean capital: a crop of geometric, concrete buildings of all genres. He calls the new style Neo-Brutalism, after the modernist movement that proliferated in the late 1950s to 1970s, in which raw concrete was meant to express a truth and honesty. Olivier's observation led him to capture the phenomenon in a personal photo series—a photographic treasure trove of these projects which, when taken as a whole, uncovers a cross-section of this trend in the city's architecture.

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The exhibition 'Sketches of Spain' by photographer Ola Kolehmainen has been recently shown in Barcelona at the SENDA Gallery. The exhibition summarized the last ten years of Kolehmainen’s work. In 2015, the artist was awarded the RIBA Honorary Fellowship for his contribution in promoting the architecture of his generation.

With his particular vision, Ola Kolehmainen seeks to show the constant abstractions that are partially hidden in modern architecture. His photography is dramatic and inspiring, we can find pieces of European avant-garde mixed with the crudeness of the materials and their uses. With minimal format, he shows us details we normally miss completely from well-known works such as the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies Van der Rohe (key architect in Kolehmainen's work), or the Niemeyer Center in Avilés, by Oscar Niemeyer.

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138 images, 14 albums, 20 magazines, 13 original models and one projection are part of Modeling for the Camera: Photography of architectural models in Spain, 1925-1970, the current exhibition of the ICO Museum in Madrid, curated by Iñaki Bergera, PhD of Architecture from the University of Navarra.

The exhibition is tied to the book of the same name that was published in 2016, edited by La Fábrica and the Ministry of Public Works (Spain). In times when 3D visualization software has popularized, accelerated and perfected the rendering industry, both materials choose to value the legacy of architectural model photography in the 20th century.

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Florian W. Mueller's Singularity series is, in the photographer's own words, "just the building – reduced to the max." These deceptively simple shots of the summits of skyscrapers from around Europe and North America, each set against in infinite gradient of sky, are symbols of architecture's effort to reach ever higher in evermore unique ways. For Mueller, who is based in Cologne, they are an attempt at abstraction. In isolation—and especially when viewed together—they are remarkably revealing as studies of form and façade.

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Within the framework of the recent election of Malta to the Presidency of the Council of the European Union—a position that will be held through June 2017—architectural photographer Danica O. Kus has created a photo series detailing Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s Valletta City Gate in Malta.

Completed in 2014, the project is composed of four parts: the Valletta City Gate and site, an open-air theater “machine,” a Parliament building, and landscaped space. Experience the project in beautiful detail though the photo series, after the break.

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As a young boy, Santiago Calatrava's fascination with light in his native Valencia fueled his determination to draw, design, and eventually build. His Ciudad de Artes y Ciencias (City of Arts and Sciences) is a perfect example of the influence of the Valencian sun on the architect's work. The seven cultural buildings define a formal vocabulary all their own, with a dynamism between blanched curves and rhythmic visual patterns. So bright it almost glows on clear days, the materiality of the structures emphasizes the ability of light to outline the spatial relationships between Calatrava's shapes, and shift them as the sun moves through the sky.

In his most recent photo series, Sebastian Weiss has captured the tendency of the shapes of the City of Arts and Sciences to "complement each other and even merge to a harmonic unity," as the photographer himself puts it. The photos were originally featured on his Instagram, @le_blanc, and develop a new way of looking at the oft-photographed tourist spot. His images imagine the complex as a pulsating "light-space installation" of equally systematic and creature-like forms in constant conversation with one another. The series gives the sense of looking at different sections of a particularly beautiful beast—its ribs, underbelly, horns, etc.—captured within the complex's shallow pools.

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Known as one of the world’s grandest subway systems, the Moscow Metro is filled with materials more commonly associated with palaces or museums – marble and granite walls, bronze columns, and lavish chandeliers are just a few of the opulent textures you’ll find beneath the streets of Russia’s largest city.

Despite their renown, the Moscow government almost never allows professional photographers to capture the beauty of the stations. But in 2014, photographer David Burdney was finally given that opportunity. Visiting the system late at night after the metro had closed, Burdney was able to capture each station in its best light, and completely devoid of people.

The main objective of this competition is to select a photograph which will be the main image for a sensibilization campaign named "Cities Without Architecture" alerting to the need of working towards the improvement of the habitat.

A -Theme Area

According to the Un-Habitat (United Nations) Urban Observatory, it is estimated that fifty million people will move from rural areas to the cities in western Africa over the next ten years. In Mumbay, the population has recorded a four-fold increase. Half of the population live in slums, 700.000 spend the night on the streets, 100 million people in the world, mostly kids, have no permanent home.

More than half a century has passed already since Bernanrd Rudofsky exhibited at the New York MOMA a collection of pictures he took during his trips. The exhibition would be named: Architecture Without Architect. This exhibition was shown in more than 80 cities during the following 11 years, and its catalog has become a true referent in what has been called vernacular architecture.

A question arises nowadays: what have architects learned from this famous Architecture Without Architects? But these days there is an even more important question: how much aware are we in the developed countries of the existence of cities without architecture?

With cracked paint, overgrown vines, rust, and decay, abandoned buildings have carved out a photographic genre that plays to our complex fascination with the perverse remnants of our past. While intellectual interest in ruins has been recorded for centuries, the popularity and controversy of contemporary "ruin porn" can be traced back to somewhere around 2009, when photographer James Griffioen’s feral houses series sparked a conversation about the potential harm in the aesthetic appropriation of urban collapse.

A favorite subject within this field is the American insane asylum, whose tragic remains carry echoes of the unsavory history of mental illness treatment in the United States. These state-funded asylums were intensely overcrowded and often housed patients in nightmarish conditions in the 20th century. Beginning in 1955, with the introduction of the antipsychotic drug Thorazine, these institutions were closed in large numbers, never to be reopened [1]. Now, these closed but un-demolished asylums that dot the country are the subject of "ruin porn" that neglects an equally important piece of the buildings’ narrative: the beginning. In his recent photobook Abandoned Asylums, Photographer Matt Van der Velde depicts this earlier period of asylum architecture, when the institutions were built in the belief that the built environment has the power to cure.

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Following the announcement on Wednesday of the winners of the 2017 Pritzker Prize, which was awarded to architects Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta of RCR Arquitectes, architectural photographer Pedro Kok has shared with us a series of photographs of the Sant Antoni - Joan Oliver Library, located in Barcelona, Spain.

As with many of the Catalan trio's work, the library stands out for its materiality and careful construction, making intense use of transparency and light.

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In this photo-essay, Norbert Juhász—a Hungarian photographer based in Budapest—presents a study of the Moroccan Berber villages (around Imlil and the surrounding valleys). Located in the High Atlas Mountains, these remote settlements are increasingly connected to the "outside world." In the words of Juhász, "many are now connected to the electrical grid and have some sort of road access." That said, "mules are still a popular form of transport."

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42 photographs representing all 42 cathedrals of the Church of England by Magnum photographer Peter Marlow (1952 – 2016) are to be exhibited in The Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral. This is only the second time this work has been displayed in one of the spaces featured in the series and the first time the project has been exhibited in this region of the UK.

Videos

The team at TwoEyes Tech made up of HunJoo Song, SeonAh Kim, and Vivek Soni has launched a kickstarter campaign for its TwoEyes VR 360 camera, which is the first binocular 360-degree VR, 4K camera that mirrors human eye sight.

Using two pairs of 180-degree lenses that are placed 65 millimeters apart—the average distance between a person’s eyes—the camera captures 360-degree footage, “just like your natural eyes would view the world.” This footage can be uploaded to 360-degree-compatible social media platforms like YouTube 360, Facebook 360, and Twitter 360, or enjoyed through virtual reality binoculars or 3D television.