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Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, Tate Modern’s Switch House was Tate Modern’s latest extension in 2016, radical in form and surface, yet intimately relative to the vast building to which it joins, which opened as London’s foremost modern art gallery in 2000. Shot recently by Bahaa Ghoussainy, the building that opened in 2016, is a model for museums in the 21st century.
In this episode of “Behind the Scenes”, where we showcase the work of visionary photographers and ask about their experiences beyond what is seen by the public, we present Pablo Casals Aguirre, an architect, professor, photographer, and filmmaker based in Santiago, Chile. Here, he shares his methodology, which he developed with references to cinema, and highlights his intentions of translating the best architectural works into imagery - be it still or in movement.
ACF has released a new series of images demonstrating the recently completed TAG Art Museum, designed by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, as part of the Artists’ Garden project collaborated with Shandong International Coastal Cultural Industry. The museum is located in the West Sea Bay in Qingdao, China. Strung along a covered promenade that weaves through planted gardens and woodland, running along the coastline towards a new marina, the structures consist of 12 interconnected exhibition halls.
Rumor had it that behind the walls of historic subway station Cal y Canto in Santiago de Chile, a hidden ghost station would eventually link to Line 3—a planned route that was part of the original Metro master plan designed in the 60s. Its construction would have been shelved after the magnitude-7.8 1985 earthquake that forced public resources to be redirected for the reconstruction of the Chilean central valley.
34 years later, the Cal y Canto Metro station finally opened its connection with Line 3, the most recent addition to the rapid transit system, thus becoming the seventh line of Santiago after lines 1, 2, 4, 4A, 5, and 6.
In this episode of “Behind the Scenes”, where we showcase the work of visionary photographers and ask about their experiences beyond what is seen by the public, we are presenting Niveditaa Gupta, an architectural photographer, and filmmaker based in New Delhi, India. Through her photos, she looks to create visuals that can prompt a discourse about architecture itself.
In the second half of the 20th century, Soviet architecture has spread a common aesthetic across highly diverse environments, being an integral part in promoting the totalitarian ideology that disregarded local cultures, envisioning a unified, homogenous society. Nevertheless, in practice, the architecture proved itself susceptible to adaptations and local influences, perhaps nowhere more than in Central Asia. The article looks at the architectural heritage of a geographical area largely excluded from the Western-centric narratives on Soviet Modernism, encouraging a re-reading of a layered and nuanced urban landscape, with images by Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego.
Carefully placed within the urban context and the product of searched perspectives and precise gestures, Ateliers Jean Nouvel's mixed-use project Tours Duo is set to become a landmark for Eastern Paris. Located close to the Paris ring boulevard and in the vicinity of a vast expanse of railway infrastructure, the project's site was the main driving point for the design, giving it its iconic shape. The project featuring two inclined towers nears completion, and photographer Jad Sylla shows the structures changing the Parisian skyline.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Few businesses in the United States are regarded with more fondness than mom-and-pop retailers. There’s an “all’s right with the world” quality about owner-run shops that meet a neighborhood’s everyday needs and, through repeated face-to-face exchanges, help people feel they’re members of a mutually supportive community. And yet for a long time, mom-and-pop stores have been under stress. In the half-century after 1950, cars shifted much of United States’s retailing to unwalkable roadside strips and winnowed the ranks of neighborhood-scale mom-and-pops. In the past two decades, the burgeoning of the internet has intensified the pressure on brick-and-mortar retail, a situation worsened by the pandemic.
Rich in symbolism and tradition, religious architecture has always been marked by the grandiosity and extravagance of its interior spaces. For the architects and designers who created these spaces, everything from the scale, to the materials, to the lighting were tools to be used in optimizing their form and function and creating a place for users to connect with their faith.
Halloween is a holiday that centers on space and ritual. Most likely originating from Celtic harvest festivals, Halloween is tied to processions like trick-or-treating, as well as history and spatial stories. The holiday celebrates imagined settings, characters, and events. In similar celebrations like Mexico's Día de Muertos, people gather in unlikely places; cemeteries and graveyards become the backdrops to picnics and celebrations. There, families offer flowers and food to deceased relatives as they celebrate history and the lives of loved ones.
Marking the 80th birthday of architect Ricardo Bofill last December, photographer Sebastian Weiss recently captured the designer's iconic La Muralla Roja in Calp, Spain. The housing project references popular architecture of the Mediterranean and was inspired by the tradition of the casbah. The striking colors that cover the outer and inner facades are selected to both contrast nature and complement its purity.
With the recent completion of several new stations and tunnels, the Athens underground metro expansion and the development of the Thessaloniki Metro system are on a set course to completion in Greece. The construction of a direct connection between the Athens airport and the Piraeus harbour, as well as the development of Thessaloniki’s first metro line, are underway, and images by photographer Pygmalion Karatzas show the new underground infrastructure coming together in the two Greek cities.
As remnants of the Industrial Age, the London gas holders are a fascinating presence across the urban landscape, one which is on the verge of disappearing. The photographic essay Ruin or Rust portrays the uncanny structures as the backdrop of everyday life, capturing their relationship to the urban context. The result of a two-year-long endeavor, this personal project of London-based photographer Francesco Russo frames the dialogue between these elements of the cityscape and the life going on around them, investigating their role in contemporary society and the urban fabric.
Social media is changing urban planning, facilitating the shift from a functional understanding of design to a formal and commercial one. Behind the friendly veneer of spaces conceived as sets for social media content, complex systems of surveillance are being tested and developed. The built environment turns into an attraction, populated not by citizens but rather by users who feel the need to self-document their lives. Public space disappears under the lack of agency and collective use, becoming a stage on which bodies move according to predefined rules and choreography.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
New York City: locked down, empty. It was heartbreaking, of course, but it was also beautiful. For artist Edgar Jerins, that revelation was something of a surprise. Who knew this bustling, chaotic, dirty, vibrant, profane, amazing city could look so … gorgeous when stripped of people and activity? For years, Jerins rode the subway to his studio near Times Square. When news of the spreading pandemic first surfaced—more as a vague, undefined threat, initially—he fled out of fear to the bus, and then, after the severity of the event became apparent and the lockdown began, he borrowed his daughter’s bicycle.
