FABULOUS PHOTOGRAPHY

Architecture thrives on fabulous photography: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-allure-of-photograph.html We come to know many buildings through their photographs; but this expression is now so specialised, so contrived, that the proposition is that we must rely more on Street View to truly understand our places rather than delight in the fantasy world of the fabricated image: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-need-for-street-view-in-architecture.html Photography has become such an indulgence, that we really cannot rely on it to properly know anything about a building other than its appearance defined as a set of exotic images, all carefully shaped and framed by the artful camera. The worry is that these photographs become the inspirations for others, prompting them to strive for things unreal and impossible in an effort to reproduce unique visions that have been recorded as extraordinary slick, sophisticated, and shiny images by the photographer: surreal entities that may even have been Photoshopped in order to achieve the desired outcome.

The struggle for the extraordinary image.

It is as if the building has been doubly manipulated as an expression – first by the architect, and then by the photographer who brings other ambitions, skills, and technologies to the reading of the work that is then publicized in a smart, glossy context, isolated from the ordinary world, a situation that only further highlights the bespoke characteristics of the visions. The real worry is that experience itself is being manipulated by the photographer who is defining ways of seeing a work, prompting the visitor to see likewise, or to want to see in this manner. In Street View, this intent is nonexistent, as the camera nonchalantly travels along the roads recording what the casual eye would see, not bothering about outcome, style, or expression, merely recording what the naïve onlooker would see offhandedly - the unselfconscious everyday.

Probably the most recent extreme example of such stylish photography is that of what is known as 520W28 – the Hadid office’s apartment building in New York: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2021/04/hadid-in-new-york.html The fabulous images of this project in https://www.dothingsnyc.com/new-blog/520w28 create an ambience that one searches for in reality. The critique in https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2021/04/hadid-in-new-york.html becomes muddled by the photographs that present a smart set of images and suggest promised lifestyles, promoting ideas that are so powerfully persuasive that they beguile with a suave ease, stimulating the thought: "If only this was me!" The silent hype and the stark wonder engages both the eye and the feeling mind, fuzzing the real experience with its fizz.

Like the columns, the smaller curved windows do not seem to get photographed.

The Hadid signature - she died 31 March 2016: the name has become a brand, a marketing tool.

Life looking at other apartments: the right side of the frame is oddly fuzzed out - what might it conceal?.

WOW! - but where?

Here the High Line is used as a happy piece of green; it is not promoted as a public way overlooked by private apartments - or vice versa.

But it is not just this photographer who uses the lens to produce images that amaze and command. The collection of photographs below has been taken randomly from Google Images.

The High Line has been cut out to concentrate on the patterning generated by the plan that has been very selfconsciously stepped.

The change in levels seems to lack an easy, natural rigour - any necessity beyond a different, decorative elevation.

This street image creates a civic ambience that identifies a different experience of place.

520W28 becomes part of the background to street life just because it is there;

not because of its essential fit.

Here the building becomes a part of the patterned composition of the city.

The visual sweep of the green High Line underlines the grandeur of the form.

One is never asked to contemplate the experience of  living so close to the public walkway.

The largest bedroom of this apartment seems to get the smallest window.

The structural columns are completely independent of all other elements.

The night image (above) dramatizes the city vista and suggests more intriguing possibilities than those seen in raw daylight.

One can go to the plan to see one concern that these images conceal: the columns in the rooms. Somewhat like elephants, these are never photographed to read as they would appear in the various spaces. One can glimpse the columns in the background of the curvaceous facades, with the suggestion of their irrelevance when it seems that they are dominant pieces in the rooms, filling corners and shrouding vistas with their significant mass, while pretending not to be there, concealed by their bland whiteness.

The expression during construction highlights the columns.

The change in levels apoears more of a complication than a happy resolution.

The column becomes an awkward intrusion in the smaller spaces.

It is not as though the columns fade into the background of the different spaces they inhabit.

One does wonder how one retrieves the soap when it slides into the columned corner.

In a similar manner, the division between the bedroom balcony of one apartment and the living room balcony of the adjacent apartment is shown as an apparently random, ad hoc dividing line that seems to have only one, somewhat apologetic intent -  not to interfere with the ambitions of the sweeping forms of the facades. The dividing screen's role in separating private lives appears to be an irrelevance. The planning does not look to have the authority, rigour and clarity expressed in the sculpted elevations that 'reign supreme.'

The slick, stepped identity of the facades is not replicated in the plans that seem to work hard

to fit the various functions in and around the step in the building.

What seems clear is that the fabulous photographic images of the building are all-important, more essential than any consideration of the experience of living in these rooms, in this place, at this location. The implication is that life will be just as fabulous as the photographs if you live in this Hadid building, and if you see it in this special way.

One is left wondering; just what do we want from our architecture today - a truly meaningful life subtly supported and enriched by interactive place, its integrity; or an engagement with the suggestions of heroic, fabulous images and their re-enactment? Should we redefine our efforts in architecture as the desire to shape a vital and committed everyday, and see what this might look like before we continue to commit to smart visuals? Do we need to engage more with Street View in other ways to help break this alluring photographic habit of delighting in arty, piecemeal portions that distract us from wholeness?