The Design Museum marks Sir Terence Conran’s 80th birthday with a major exhibition that explores his unique impact on contemporary life in Britain. Through his own design work, and also through his entrepreneurial flair, Conran has transformed the British way of life. As well as this, his design studio and architectural practice have a world wide reach. The Way We Live Now explores Conran’s impact and legacy, whilst also showing his design approach and inspirations. The exhibition traces his career from post-war austerity through to the new sensibility of the Festival of Britain in the 1950s, the birth of the Independent Group and the Pop Culture of the 1960s, to the design boom of the 1980s and on to the present day.

To compliment the exhibition, the Design Museum in collaboration with Blueprint,  has produced a book that features an exclusive interview by Johnny Tucker with Terence Conran and contributions from Deyan Sudjic, Stephan Bayley, Christopher Frayling and Fiona MacCarthy.

Blueprint has 10 copies of the book and ten pairs of tickets for the exhibition “Terence Conran: The way we live now” which runs until 04 March 2012 at the Design Museum. For a chance to win, send us your details including your name, email, contact number and address at info@blueprintmagazine.co.uk

Pierre Cordier’s piece, Chemigram 8/2/61

This exhibition contends that while the conventional camera has constrained the photographer to look into a viewfinder and gaze out at the world, the camera-less photographer has been freed to gaze within. Shadow Catchers brings together five of the most prominent practitioners of camera-less photography: Floris Neüsuss, Pierre Cordier, Garry Fabian Miller, Susan Derges and Adam Fuss.

The exhibition, which comprises some 75 images and a video installation, elucidates the underlying philosophy and intriguing aspirations of its protagonists, who have all worked with the medium for at least 20 years. Shadow Catchers then, can be seen as a forceful argument for the relevance of this marginalised practice, particularly as one that holds the promise of opening new channels of visual expression.

Miller epitomises this attitude; by shining light directly onto photographic paper, with coloured glass or liquid placed in between, he creates images of luminous colours. Susan Derges’ series of landscapes is constructed using direct digital scans and dye destruction prints, assembled together digitally. The technique accomplishes an uncanny comingling of the observation of the real with a private imagination. Framed in arches, they are pervaded by a fairy-tale ambience, of the Grimm kind. Derges’ and Fuss’ works in particular, are suffused with a spiritual sensibility. Though Fuss can be more overtly symbolic: his photogram of a snake swims up towards the heavens.

Camera-less photographers argue that there is an authenticity to their works. According to Derges, ‘working directly, without camera…offers an opportunity to bridge the divide between self and other.’ In theory, it circumvents the criticism that the camera forces us into a voyeuristic position, and hence a superficial view of the world. Of the processes used here, the photogram and chemigram involve the direct contact between what is depicted and the photographic paper. The contact, which can last days, records traces of existence much more intimately than the remote, split-second gaze of the camera.

There are problems with this argument. In order to appreciate the works fully, the process must be known by the viewer; they do not stand alone. Additionally, this direct translation has restricted the medium to subject matters of a certain scale. Neüsuss’ photogram recreation of William Henry Fox Talbot’s pioneering negative exposure image of a window is already quite a large-scale piece, which suggests the need to formulate new approaches should the medium wish to engage with, say, architecture and urbanism.

What makes camera-less photography exciting is that it is in a hyperactive state of experimentation and the way it stands as an antithesis to the documentary strand of camera photography. As illustrations of such a compelling theory however, these images appear underwhelming. Miller’s minimalist abstracts lack both the depth and the brilliance of paint pigments. The shadows caught in the net of photograms have little visual complexity. But, as Borges said of beauty: ‘epigones, those who frequent already lyricised themes, usually achieve it; innovators, almost never.’ This is not to say that the images in this exhibition are not beautiful and enchanting – they are – but a masterpiece of camera-less photography has yet to appear.

Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography exhibition is at the V&A until 20 February 2011

Alexandra Road Estate, today renamed as Rowley Way

A selection of a dozen social housing schemes (out of a total of 47) designed for the Camden Council by a coterie of in-house architects and completed in the period between 1973 to 1981, is on display at the NLA galleries on Store Street. These architects were working under the helm of Sydney Cook, who sought out fresh architectural voices; his agenda was ‘geared towards producing ideas and the emphasis was on youth.’ Each project is illustrated with handsome black-and-white photographs by Martin Charles, taken in the early days after their completion. The show has been deftly – though conventionally – curated by Mark Swenarton; with just enough descriptive information and illustrative photographs for the viewer to envision each project as a whole.

At its formation in 1965, the Borough of Camden was the third richest borough in Greater London (after Westminster and the City); with this affluence it initiated what would be the last great social housing programme of the past half-century. Each scheme was built in an unapologetically modernist style, the sheer bravery of which is highlighted when one considers that the apogee of modernism’s failure and disenchantment – the partial collapse of Ronan Point – occurred in 1968.

But this ‘Camden crew’ was part of the generation who were reacting against the ideals posited by Ronan Point. They shunned the high-rise, and in its stead, proposed a model of low-rise, high-density housing usually of no more than five or six storeys high. Under the guiding hand of Sydney Cook, certain qualities emerged that came to be defined as the ‘Camden style’. This includes the stepped section that allows for large, private, external terraces to be open to the sun, which was employed in Peter Tàbori’s Highgate New Town One, and to quite spectacular effects in the Brunswick and Neave Brown’s Alexander Road estates. One of the most important concept was the design of front doors that are accessed by staircases directly from the street and this was implemented in most of the projects on display. Internal spaces were also given their due consideration; Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth’s Branch Hill and Maiden Lane One provide sliding partitions open to user-configuration and ample skylighting. The sheer size of the outdoor private spaces, the thoughtfulness evident in the detailing and the conceptual standard of these ‘social housing estates’ put many of today’s ‘luxury’ private developments to shame.

The exhibition however makes little qualitative assessment, and this, rather than giving the freedom for the audience to interpret, rather restricts viewers from forming a considered response. In the accompanying texts we are not told what worked and what didn’t. This approach fails to address the all-too-familiar scenario where the application of sound theory does not translate in reality, for reasons that may or may not have been due to their architectural conceptions. The most telling case being Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens, loved by architects for its ideas, not-so-loved by the tenants who have to live there. We cannot hope to gain a full understanding of a building’s successes and failures merely from the gleaming images of photographs.

Martin Charles’ immaculate photography, though, is a delight, exuding a similar visual seduction to a Michelangelo Antonioni film. These photographs are however equally the strong and the weak point of this exhibition. They are brought to task by the video installation, after an hour perusing images of white, pristine, rectilinear forms, it comes as a shock. To use Bernard Tschumi’s terminology, it might be described as the shock of the erotic irruption. In a series of provocative ‘Advertisements for Architecture’, Tschumi famously showed images of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in brutal decay. It is that kind of shock. The film on show is a documentary about the Alexandra Road Estate – which has since been renamed as Rowley Way – put together by its tenants and is one of the schemes on display. Although the gently-curving housing block is far from close to terminal decline, it has nevertheless aged in accordance with its time. Heaps of foliage and brightly coloured personal belongings clutter the terraces, the concrete streaked with lines of soot, dirt and watermarks: an architectural photographer’s nightmare. But, as Tshumi contends: ‘Rot bridges sensory pleasure and reason.’ What Tschumi wants to alert architects to, is the importance of experience. What we do inside and around a building and how our actions both affect and is affected by the spaces the building affords; and how it alters over time, both in appearance and programme. These constitute a part of the whole experience of a building, and what this otherwise inspiring presentation denies the buildings is their experience, a whole 30 odd years of it.

In a world whose consumption pattern makes possible the thought of planned obsolescence in the design process, relative durability should be seen as one of the remaining great markers and affirmation of architecture’s relevance. A building, once built, cannot be so easily torn down, even after the fashion for its style has passed. The passage of time should have been seen as an asset in the assessment of buildings and not an embarrassment to its pictorial perfection. To celebrate good architecture and its impact, we need to convey them in their entirety. At the most fundamental level though, Cook’s Camden is a success; it is irrefutably a good-looking exhibition about good design that manages to stir curiosity about a typology that affects people’s lives the most.

Cook’s Camden: London’s great experiment in social housing, NLA, WC1E. Until 27 November

A Grammar For the City, South Korea, Collage, View to the City, 2005, by Office KGDVS

Brussels-based Office KGDVS, founded by Kersten Geers and David Van Severen, has been a long-time collaborator with photographer Bas Princen. Their latest project, the Garden Pavilion, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Working together on and off since the start of their careers, this collaboration was in some ways an inevitability, but also a new development: until now Princen has only documented the practice’s completed work.

A Grammar For The City, South Korea, Collage, View From the Mountain, 2005, by Office KGDVS

In 2008 he recorded Office’s Belgian Pavilion, titled After the Party, which contained and reorientated the existing 1907 pavilion. Consisting of a large steel wall, which encircled the building, it forced visitors to encounter the existing architecture in a different way, before providing the visitor with an enclosed, contemplative space inside.

Reservoir (Concrete Rundown), 2005, by Bas Princen

In the same year, the practice was invited by Ai Wei Wei to design a house for the Ordos project in Inner Mongolia. Its villa, 25 Rooms, explores the notions of boundaries and social order. Crucially, however, it also looked at ways, within the requirements of residential architecture, to provide ambiguous spaces. Each of the building’s spaces, positioned around an internal courtyard, were designed so that they could serve any function. Office KGDVS’ work plays with architectural mass and the precision of large-scale buildings in their environments. ‘Detail is not a tectonic thing,’ says Geers.

Cité de Refuge, Ceuta, Collage – View From the Sea, 2007, Office KGDVS

In a complementary way, Princen’s photography treats surfaces and textures as architecture in their own right. The images he creates offer an alternative representation of space, which is ambiguous and focuses on the placing of architecture in its environment. His 2003 book, Artificial Arcadia, documented the transition of the Dutch landscape through a careful analysis of land use. The textural quality of his images convert any sense of place and use into abstractions; a recurring theme in Princen’s work. His recent exhibition Refuge: Five Cities at the Storefront Gallery in New York investigated the urban condition in five cities that have undergone massive redevelopment in the past 50 years. It is not a documentary in a traditional sense, but an investigation of form, mass and texture in an unconventional vision of modernity.

Office KGDVS’s Cité de Refuge, Ceuta, Collage – View From the Mountain, 2007

The recent collaboration between Office and Princen builds on these shared traits. The exhibition, Garden Pavilion (7 Rooms / 21 Perspectives) discusses the failures of architecture while simultaneously highlighting the discipline’s potential. The existing Garden Pavilion was extended by Office KGDVS to form a galleria made from a lightweight, reflective silver canopy. To continue the dialogue between photographer and practice, and incorporate this project into the wider collaborations, Princen’s photographs of the extension became part of the installation displayed inside the pavilion.

Superieur Court, 2005, by Bas Princen

Princen’s photography was juxtaposed with collages by the architects, which are produced as part of its working process. ‘Perspective for us is first a way of composing things, arranging elements and putting them together as architecture,’ says Geers. ‘It is the idea of intention, the photograph is not a reality but an arrangement, as are the collages.’ In an accompanying text by Christophe Van Gerrewey, the author states: ‘the perspectives of Princen long for authorship and particularity; the perspectives of Office want to shed their artifice as a layer of skin.’

Garden Pavilion (Office), 2010, by Bas Princen

The project addresses how any attempt to communicate architecture is bound to be unsuccessful. For the practice, when an idea is represented in any form other than its construction, it is compromised. Equally, they say, an architecture project will always be a flawed and imperfect translation of the original ideas: ‘The project and principles are perfect,’ says Geers, ‘but are bound to fail.’ One does not have to accept the slightly negative dogma of the architects to appreciate the collages and photographs on a purely aesthetic level. Taken together, they add critical questions to the debate about the representation of architecture.

Old Street, from the series A Metaphysical Survey of British Dwellings (with Otto Nooa), 2010

Last year, the New York Times (NYT) commissioned Edgar Martins to create a photo essay about American housing abandoned in the credit crunch. He produced a series called Ruins of the Second Gilded Age. After accusations of digital manipulation, the images were pulled from the NYT site. Martins has emphatically stated that ‘I never sought to pass the work as something it wasn’t,’ and has made clear that the hoo-hah hints at a ‘society that is particularly sensitive about its own crisis.’ The UK-based Portuguese photographer believes that the meaning of the world is no longer carried on its surface, if indeed it ever was. ‘It’s about time the Purists come to terms with this,’ he says. Perhaps the NYT should have realised a little earlier that it wasn’t dealing with a photographer from the realist tradition.

The very subject of Martins’ latest work is artifice. His most recent series, A Metaphysical Survey of British Dwellings, reveals one of the most mysterious visualisations of the built environment to be produced recently. Buildings of breezeblocks and blanked-out windows stand isolated in empty streets, where time seems suspended beneath a jet-black sky. Is this an abandoned civilisation, or a place captured in dream-time, or an exercise in stripping back to reveal an aesthetic free urbanism? ‘All of these,’ says Martins. It is also none of the above.

The location was actually a Potemkin-esque mock-up town built for police training. ‘It is a highly restricted site,’ reveals Martins, ‘which took me two years to get access to. This ultra-realistic specialist training centre is not just a simulacrum of contemporary British towns but also acts as a metaphor for the modern asocial city’. Its very subject is a pretence.

Martins says the Metaphysical Survey, his latest and perhaps most explicitly representational, relates to what French anthropologist Marc Augé called the ‘ethnology of solitude’. We can see here a new sort of Augé’s anonymous ‘non-places’, which constitute his Super modernity. The series was originally co-credited to Otto Nooa, a pseudonym Martins coined ‘to underscore the ambiguity of these images, by completely distancing them from context, space, time and author’. Only one image contains human presence – in Poppets, a woman leans on a corner, perhaps eating an apple. ‘In most of my series there is always a single figure somewhere,’ says Martins. ‘It provides scale and form. It is a vessel of sorts – a vessel that we, the viewer, can immediately embody.’

Martins’ work draws deeply on ideas about perception. To him, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, is key. The principle states that at a quantum level the act of observing alters what is observed. Martins interprets this as ‘a performance of space’. He continues: ‘I like the possibilities that they open up… if one is able to slow down time for long enough one may just be able to capture this. I do not see the objects and/or landscapes depicted in my pictures as that, but as events… They portray a memory of an event’.

Growing up in Macau, China, a densely populated former Portuguese colonial enclave full of go-go neon casinos, Martins was fascinated by the speed of construction and culture of constant change. ‘There is no doubt that it awakened my critical eye…It changes at such a fast pace that it is marked by the sense that things are forever unreachable’. There, he studied philosophy, which helped him ‘to cultivate and develop abstract thought’. Initially, these thoughts were expressed in writing – he published an ‘experimental biopoetic- philosophical-novel’ at 18. He went on to study photography at the Royal College of Arts and The London Institute, and, since then, his many photographic series have been exhibited widely and collated in books.

Martins’ first retrospective, The Wayward Line, opens at the Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris on 20 October. He will come to it from photographing hydro-electric installations in remote Portuguese hinterlands. Doubtless those pictures will continue his personal exploration of reality’s mysteries. ‘When I produce images,’ he says, ‘I wrestle with photography itself. For the most part it is a solitary experience. And it is this that I seek to convey to the viewer’.

The Balfron Project is a large-scale photographic event to be staged on the 18th November 2010, at the eponymous New Brutalist icon in East London, a mere kilometre north of the glistening glass towers of Canary Wharf. The Balfron is the latest in Simon Terrill’s Crowd Theory projects and for the first time Terrill is working outside of his native Melbourne to create his mural-sized photograph.

Crowd Theory is an ongoing series of ‘photographic performance’ events that invite a local community to congregate in a specific location where they each have an affiliation to. Terrill’s process on the day of the event itself involves much lighting, soundtrack, and some instructions, nevertheless the enactment of each individual is allowed to unfold spontaneously, thus presenting us with a latter-day Pieter Bruegel picture that is at once staged and extempore. He permits a certain degree of chance and chaos whose outcome cannot be forseen until the day of the event itself. Terrill plans to produce the project in other cities and countries, allowing the project to further develop as a response to these shifts.

Simon Terrill, Crowd Theory - Southbank, 2007, 1.8m x 2.4m, type C print, produced in association with Footscray Arts Centre and City of Melbourne.

A certain unfamiliarity with the area, together with having to face a very different social space means that the Balfron Project has taken a lot longer to realise than with Terrill‘s previous locations. Designed by Ernö Goldfinger in 1963, the Balfron Tower was finished in 1967, just a year before the Ronan Point debacle and the increasing public backlash against Modernist high-rises. Unpopular both with the public and the residents, the Balfron and the Trellick – its sister tower by the same architect – have lately grown on the public’s affections, or at least those of the younger, more urban, and design-conscious crowd.

A reading of J G Ballard’s ‘High Rise,’ (inspired by the Trellick Tower) was the catalyst for Terrill’s choice of the Balfron tower, and has lead to the first time in which he had cast an iconic building as his setting. As part of the process of gathering data, which includes interviews with its residents, Terrill has also taken up residence in the tower for the past six months, in a faint echo of its late architect. Goldfinger and his wife famously moved in to the top floor for two months to vet his user’s response to the building and as a publicity stunt to convince the sceptical public that his building was livable. While Terrill is not unaware of this connection, he denies any symbolic gesture to his reenactment.

Footscray, 2004, 180cm x 240cm, type C print, produced in association with Footscray Arts Centre.

There are certain characteristics that underlie all of Terrill’s chosen sites: a high population of immigrants and areas that have experienced extensive post-industrial gentrification. He is interested in places of transition, which all parts of a city are in one way or another, although Footscray and the Southbank in particular – two of his previous locales in Melbourne – have undergone quite a radical change in the past two decades. It is imaginable that London‘s Poplar may very well follow on their heels, with the coming Olympic Games being billed by the Olympic Board as the biggest regeneration programme in Europe.

Though Terrill emphasises that “this is not an overt theme within my works,” the audience is divided, “some people see them as very political, others as purely pictorial. I stand back and let people bring their own interpretations.” Asked whether working with such a divisive and visually assertive building as the Balfron has posed any particular challenges, Terrill admits that it is certainly a significant factor for him to reflect on, but says that “the focus is on the picture, and to capture the relationship between people and place.”

For more information on the project, visit http://balfronproject.co.uk and http://www.simonterrill.com

Chris Greenaway
 
This image and the ongoing series from which it is taken is a means of exploration in isolated public spaces. It looks at these areas after dark, and manipulates the lighting to scrutinise the relationship between the purpose of the place and how it is actually perceived. It is manufactured to be found curious how signage designed to encourage the safe crossing of pedestrians is turned on its head to display scenes that would create unease and connote danger. Being someone who frequently walks at night, this represents a personal reflection on my feelings, a response to the barrage of media stories concerning senseless attacks and muggings that appear so rampant across the country. It comments on how poorly lit areas are ripe for trouble, and the effect that feeling insecure on the streets can have on the lives of the community.

Alick Cotterill

Many results of 1960s planning disasters can still be seen today, neglected by councils now just as their design was neglected 40 years ago. In this instance, some effort has been made to provide recreational areas for the younger generation, but even this has been not been properly thought through. With the multifunctional court here completely unlit and its surroundings not faring much better, it’s no wonder that stereotypically these types of places are seen as unsafe, shady locations. The photographer provided the light seen here bathing the court. It is clear that the recreational parts were added far later than the 60s, yet it seems lessons have not been learnt.

Brooke Phillips

This picture shows the re-branded southwest train, which runs between Brockenhurst and Lymington as the Heritage Line. The heritage service was launched on May 12 2005. Given that it was only a few years ago that slam-door trains were the main stay of the South of England railway services, the surprisingly nostalgic train is idyllic and proud when making the 30-minute loop back and forth between its 3 close stops everyday. However changes to replace the heritage line with modern trains will take place in May 2010. So it seems that it may have been no more than a marketing exercise and excuse to run time-expired rolling stock as the heritage line.

Maddie Waters

As Southampton is famous for its twin tide and historic water front, I chose to photograph the River Itchen after visiting various locations around the area. This particular photograph was taken early one morning from underneath the horseshoe bridge on the St Denis side of the river. The image shows a silhouette of the recent developments of Bitterne Manor. As daylight breaks over the river, beautiful reflections are generated making for a good image. I used a long shutter speed and an Aperture of F22 to allow the camera to pick up the reflections on the water but keep the buildings in shadow. I chose to loose the detail of the buildings so to allow them to appear as one block colour against the water. I wanted to create a contrast between man made buildings and the natural environment.

Pawel Miatkowski

The history of Bournemouth Pier starts in 1859, when it was 1,000 ft long  and ended with a T head, which was washed away after marine teredo worms caused damage to wooden pile.  In 1880 Pier was reopened with a new iron construction. In years 1945-1950 the pier was reconstructed again, and in 1960 the seat pavilion was added. Between 1979 and 1981 the structure was strengthened with concrete and an entrance was built. Today it is part of a beach leisure center surrounded with nightclubs, restaurants and hotels. It is a romantic and historical place; there are lots of events going on. I decided to have a look what is underneath, to the part that is not visited by many people. I chose evening hours when it started getting dark – I was able to take long-exposure pictures, to capture the movement of water and the light reflections between the pier’s symmetrical construction.

Rebecca Starsmore

The Ryde Paddle Steamer lies rotting on the Isle of Wight.  This vessel holds a huge amount of history.  Two years after its launch in 1937 it was commissioned by the Royal Navy as a minesweeper, then as an anti-aircraft ship.  It is one of the few remaining vessels that were present at the D Day landings on Omaha beach. Since then it has been converted in to a gin palace, a floating hotel and finally a nightclub.  Unfortunately now it has been left to rot.  The Paddle Steamer Ryde Trust is putting in a huge effort to raise £7 Million in order to save it and restore it to its former glory.

Suzanne Williams

I have always been interested in architecture and the adaptation of old spaces for modern purposes such as tourism, industry and housing. This image shows the modern use within the ringing chamber of Winchester Cathedral. The sweeping ropes seem to mask the stone arches and old timbers, and highlights the human involvement that still occurs in this ancient Norman Tower on a day to day basis. In this photo the ends of the ropes are looped onto a set of hooks that can be raised and lowered from the ceiling, this is so that they are safely out of the way when they are not being used.

James Clark 

This image inspired me to begin a series documenting houses that are situated directly by electricity pylons. It began as an exploration into our attitudes towards energy in today’s increasingly power-hungry world – everyone wants to reap the benefits, yet few would volunteer to suffer both the visual and much-debated physical side effects of living in such close proximity to a pylon. However, estimates show this is a burden that 23,000 UK households must bear. This project also touches on the theme of sub-urban spread – like many others, this pylon out-dates the houses around it, calling into question the judgment used in town planning during suburbia’s outward sprawl.  

An image of 'interrupted urban landscape' from Robert Polidori's book, Metropolis

As slideshows, audio and video clips are integrated with photography on the internet, and documentarians become more interested in the built environment, photographer David Cowlard looks at the effect this could have on the representation of architecture

The expansion of digital imagery and electronic media is transforming the world of publishing. As photographers and news organisations start to present visual stories as part of an integrated approach to online rich media and video documentation, the way that photography reaches new audiences is changing too. Running parallel to this is a broader trend within documentary photography and photojournalism to focus on the contemporary urban condition.

It is worth remembering a statement by the late photographer, curator and influential critic John Szarkowski, made in an era of ascendant American documentary. In the introduction to his own architectural study of Louis Sullivan’s work, The Idea of Louis Sullivan, 1956, he notes; ‘In our own day perhaps the best architectural photographs have been the casual products of the photographer-journalist, where the life that surrounds and nourishes the building is seen or felt. If to such an approach were added an understanding of architectural form, photography might become a powerful critical medium, rather than a superficially descriptive one.’

With an increased number of photographers covering urban issues, there is now a real opportunity to open up a narrative engagement with architecture that is informed by broader social questions. The issue of housing, for instance, is starting to figure dramatically within photographic coverage of the recession. The 2008 World Press Photo of the Year was won by Anthony Suau with his image of a house repossession in Cleveland, USA, while images of tent cities across America have become an important feature of news reports.

Praying to Jesus, March 2009, Bruce Gilden/ Magnum Photos

The difference now is that this documentary approach can be integrated with other forms of digital communication. Street photographer Bruce Gilden has recently published an essay on mortgage foreclosures in the US. Gilden works with the acclaimed Magnum photo agency and his work is part of a redirection within the agency to produce photographic slideshows with accompanying soundtracks and textual information including interviews with his subjects and contact sheets. Such slideshows are quickly being established as the best way to showcase new photographic material.

House, March 2009, Bruce Gilden/ Magnum Photos

Magnum’s approach shows a potential for extending the narrative structures of news stories. Not only do slideshows increase the amount of information that can be presented on a building, but the shift also signifies the expansion of professional collaboration. Magnum’s In Motion section calls upon the skills of field recordists, multimedia producers, sound designers and creative directors in addition to the vision and tenacity of the photographer. This is something to be celebrated. Just as architecture is always more than the work of one person, similarly in publication, the best results are achieved when people’s contributions reach further than the sum of their parts.

House, March 2009, Bruce Gilden/ Magnum Photos

But this movement towards the production of rich media is not confined to high-profile, established organisations like Magnum. In fact, the slideshow format is rapidly defining the immediate future of the newspaper photographer. Both the New York Times (NYT) and the Guardian had their departments merged in their new purpose-built offices so that new media technologists are alongside print journalists. This process is breathing new life into news organisations at a time when traditional print journalism is in decline. The US-based Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media report for 2009 noted that newspaper audiences in the US were bigger than ever if online readership is taken into account. These results show the potential for the development of new means of presentation.

The Guardian’s head of photography, Roger Tooth, oversaw this integration and now produces both image galleries and audio slideshows, which, Tooth admits is very much in its infancy at the Guardian. It was only recently, in the wake of the L’Aquila earthquake in Italy, that an eyewitness report was incorporated into a slideshow on the paper’s website. There is, however, increased cross-fertilization between the picture desk and the audio department with all photographers now trained in audio recording.

This same process can be seen in the way that stills photographers are now shooting video. Tooth confirms that in news coverage especially, video is increasingly irresistible. Although the Guardian’s video department is still quite small, he is clear that with advances in technology it may soon be the case that video will dominate. Evidence of this trend can be seen with the work of Guardian photographer and film-maker Sean Smith. His film, Inside the Surge was shot in Iraq and received the Royal Television Society’s Award for Best International News Film in 2008. This is the first time a newspaper has won an award for television.

These developments in digital technology and electronic publishing have so far been pursued much more thoroughly outside of architectural photography, but they demonstrate an opportunity to experiment and engage with new forms of publication. Indeed, adopting different viewpoints and photographic visions allows for a wider contextual understanding of architecture and the built environment. Architectural photography, on the whole, has become locked within its own narrow set of parameters at a time when most other forms of photography have seen a relaxing of rigid defining categories. This becomes apparent when looking at the photographers who produce work that is influenced by architecture but that operates within documentary or fine art genres. There are a growing number of professionals, such as Robert Polidori, Claudio Hils and Gabriele Basilico, who engage with architecture and the built environment on a narrative level.

Sao Paolo, by German photographer Claudio Hils, published in the book, Dream City

Photographers who are concerned with the life that surrounds a building and are informed about architecture could be the life-blood for changing the way the built environment is photographed. Theirs is not a new approach, however. In 1969-1970 the Architectural Review published Manplan, a special photographic series that explored contemporary problems, from transport and health to more abstract thematic discussions such as ‘frustration’. It mixed the work of staff photographers alongside that of guest photojournalists including Ian Berry who, at the time, was working for the Observer’s colour supplement. But somehow the spirit that drove the Manplan series has been lost over the decades.

Many architecture practices want to see their buildings photographed in an informal way but, in most cases, these images are for internal use rather than publication. While publishers can play some part in this, more needs to be done by architects themselves to make this type of imagery pre-eminent over the ‘hero shot’. The consequence of the constraints imposed upon architectural photography is that it simply becomes visual propaganda.Art director at Property Week, Richard Krzyzak acknowledges that architectural photography plays a key part in the marketing of buildings, and concludes that commercial property is ‘all about image.’ He sees enormous scope in the possibilities of moving beyond the ‘empty frozen moment’ of much architectural photography and widening the focus to include photographers who explore urban landscapes.

While it is still the case that architectural photographers produce fantastic imagery that explores the space and detail of new buildings, the problem is that this only tells a part of the story. Rather than showing the coincidence of design and its humanistic potential, far too often the image is devoid of any life at all. Maybe it is time to widen the view and let in the unexpected.

Architectural photographer Richard Bryant offers his perspective of London in a photographic exhibition at Somerset House. Moving from the ‘bucolic West to the developing East’, the selection of images works its way across London, within the confines of Somerset House’s grandiose Terrace Rooms.

This particular photo essay of his native city was commissioned by a New York publisher – and the exhibition is a slimmed down taster of the book. Bryant presents a somewhat idealised, although not necessarily sanitised, portrait of his diverse city. The flavour of the images is more guidebook than photojournalism – the colours are somewhat heightened so that even drab greys look vibrant, and any people that appear are always optimally placed, such as the mum-with-pushchair mirroring the action of a banksy mural.

But his taste in subject matter is catholic – picking out obscure corners of the city such as the tucked away Dennis Severs house and a 50s caff in Lambeth – and rendering them inviting. The huge and beautifully clear prints lend an air of grace and calm to all his subjects, and as a Londoner, it is heart-warming to be reminded of what a visually rich city London can be.

Richard Bryant’s Greater London is on at Somerset House until 7 June

Luisa Lambri ‘Untitled (Casa de Baile, #03), 2003

It’s looking like the 101-year-old Oscar Niemeyer won’t get the chance to put a final flourish to his career by adding a new project, Plaza of Sovereignty, to his masterwork, Brasilia. Yet if you want a reminder of the architect’s past brilliance, then it is worth looking at a collection of new work by Italian photographer Luisa Lambri currently on display at Gallery 32 in London. The photographs on show are a celebration of Niemeyer and the result of a trip the photographer undertook in 2003.

Casa das Canoas is Niemeyer’s own house built in 1953 in Rio De Janeiro, ‘Casa do Baile’, a dance hall in Belo Horizonte and built by the architect in 1942. Lambri’s work gives a new dimension to the operatic work of the modernist master, focusing on its details and interaction with the immediate surrounding area rather than focusing on the scale and the architecture. The photographer has well captured the aesthetic language developed by Niemeyer, a language saturated with distinctive geometry as well as organic curves.

A particular example is the collection of shots taken by Lambri at ‘Casa do Baile’: yes, the photographer is pointing her camera at Niemeyer’s work, but she is also reporting and investigating what is beyond.  She is looking out to the landscape, subverting the point of view and giving context to the architect’s masterpieces. Also on display is an unusual shot taken at the Ministério da Educação e Saúde (Ministry of Education and Health), in which Lambri decided to frame a section of wall built in glass block, forming a rigid grid of lines, which seems melting when reflected in the black concrete floor.

Organized by the Embassy of Brazil in association with Thomas Dane gallery, Luisa Lambri’s exhibition will be running at Gallery 32 until 11 March.

Above: Luisa Lambri ‘Untitled (Ministerio de Educacion, #02), 2003

Above: Luisa Lambri ‘Untitled (Casa das Canoas, #16)’, 2003

At this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, Blueprint’s acting editor Tim Abrahams interviewed Philippe Starck about his new furniture for Cassina. The range, entitled the Privé Collection, is designed to accommodate and facilitate sex. A slightly truncated version of the interview appears below.

Philipe Starck (Ph.S): You want me to explain it? You know, I’m not so interested in ‘design’ by itself for the product, especially now it’s so trendy. I always try to work with a concept, a real idea and later I just apply it, not the contrary.

I have worked on this idea for little more than ten years… If we hope that love is everywhere, we can be sure that sex is everywhere. And if you go to the movie – sex; if you watch tv – sex; open magazine – sex; conversation – sex. Sex is everywhere. And yet, not in furniture. Now, you can see a new generation of sex toys everywhere, you can see even a new generation of sex shop everywhere, but strangely, nothing in furniture. That’s why you have the sex-toy, and you have not the playground to play with. That’s why I said, something is missing, something is not coherent. Why, there is a taboo ? If there is a taboo, I love to break all that!

I was always very interested by the woman. Often, I heard that the woman is a little bored, to make love everyday, the same thing, in the same position, in the same bed – they want some thrill, they want some surprise. But in regular apartment, you have the bed, or, the bed, or the bed, and perhaps, Sunday morning they can try the carpet. But, the carpet is not very good for the back! They do it one time, and after they don’t do it again for three months. That’s why, why not make a collection which can help the comfort for the woman? Because I think the woman can have more pleasure, if she is more comfortable. That was the woman’s part.

Also, for the man: man has changed. Because now, because of the healthy attitude, even some artificial pills, now man can have a much longer sexual life. If a guy can have sexual capacity till eighty years old, still the body is not of twenty years, and the pieces in Privé can help with adjustment in high position things like that.

That’s why, between the comfort of the woman, the comfort of the man, and finally, why not just make things more playful? I design that.

It’s very easy to design something, we can say, ergonomically sexual. But when your grandmother arrives or mother-in-law arrives on Sunday afternoon to drink your tea, it/something like that can be a little embarrassing. That’s why the trick of this collection, the first collection, which speaks clearly about sex, which have really a sexual function, but plays a double language, it’s like the Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. That means, in the day, we have something very clean, timeless, no imagination; it’s a very simple, well done, good quality, elegant. But – at night, the beast is back and, everything is open. That is the story of this collection, and I think it’s important to make something in that, because sex is everywhere, is everything.

Tim Abrahams (TA): So you say you’ve been developing this idea for ten years?

Ph.S: Oh, more.. because I don’t find the right tuning, the right balance, the right double language, and finally, I find it recently. I have designed a lot, a lot, a lot about that, and it was either too complicated, too much costly, too heavy, it become too much like a machine and when they become mechanical they become expert thing, which a is a little “uh-oh” because, we love sex but we are not professionals! Sadly, we are not porno-stars. That’s why…

TA: Is there a key to that double language, what was the key to solving that?

Ph.S: It’s this: the white and black, day and night, this cocktail of three elements; take Cassina – so chic, so bourgeois, so well-known, like the Queen of England; in this put the technology, with hydraulic things, and finally bring the concept. It is just a proper balance.

TA: Did you need to convince Cassina?

Ph.S: Strangely not. Strangely not. I spoke with a lot of people before… There has been something of a rebirth at Cassina, it’s a new team, new energy and they love it. I was very, very scared, especially with the catalogue.

. . .

Ph.S: I will give you the black catalogue. The Black catalogue comes sealed. With pictures by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.. And after, it becomes a lot more interesting. And that is more interesting than the chair, if you agree… And we used real porno-stars to have a real fuck in the photo session.

TA: Yeah?

Ph.S: Not so bad, eh? It’s the first time we speak like that in furniture business. With the bed, it’s very symbolic.

TA: So how much research did you do?

Ph.S: Three times a day! (Laughter)

TA: So no, but seriously, to what degree is it..

Ph.S: Yes, seriously, three times a day.

TA: Was it an exercise in ergonomics..

Ph.S: Oh, yes yes yes, we have to retake measurements, and try a lot of heights; no no no, seriously, I worked on it sincerely, to see what is useful, what is not, and thing like that. Finally, it’s simple. But just to have a stable arm-rest like that, can change everything.

. . .

TA: I read you opened your first company in 1968 in Paris?

Ph.S: Uh, perhaps, yeah.

TA: It seems to be quite a significant date, quite a symbolic year?

Ph.S: Well, ’69 is better! (laughs)

TA: But that year, in terms of the atmosphere in Paris, making the impossible happen..

Ph.S: Strangely, it is much more personal than that. Because I am very schizophrenic; I never go out, I never speak to anybody, I live on a small island, no car, no electricity, no water, it’s like that. But when I was young, it was a lot worse. And one day I said ‘Okay, either I commit suicide, right now, or I go to a psychiatric hospital, or I must make something.’
And the first thing was to decide to create, because it’s the only thing finally I know how to do, and perhaps I am invisible, but if I create something perhaps people will see me, I shall exist in the eyes of the people in front of me.

TA: And the purpose of the company was. .

Ph.S: Just to oblige me to go out from my dark hole.

TA: Well, it’s worked!

Ph.S: It worked, a little too much! Because since this time, I never had one minute for me, I travel one million kilometres by air, and I am very happy, because as Art Director of the Virgin Galactique we shall go to space but also we shall use the technology to go to Japan in two hours. Perhaps we shall save a little time this way

TA: And so that’s Virgin Galactic?

Ph.S: I am art director, means I manage the spirit of the company, the graphic works, the rocket, the space port… I am excited about the democratisation of space, because before space was owned by military people and now, it’s everybody.

TA: And so where does the first flight go?

Ph.S: Into space and come back, the first one is (whistles up and down)

TA: Wow, so that must be really exciting to be involved with that.. level of technology..

Ph.S: Yes because you know, it‘s interesting because it’s real strong first blood, it‘s no more fashion, not like the mainstream conversation in Paris or at dinner, in the city, its no more Sex in the City, it’s going into Space. It’s a big image.

TA: It doesn’t get much bigger. And how does that, the idea of wide open possibility, the idea of space, how does that inspire you?

Ph.S: Well you know it’s a new thing that interest me, not space but how animals see space, the biology which goes with the astrophysics, the mathematics, the quantum mathematics and thing like that, that’s my DNA. My father had aircraft company; I was raised with this idea. My normal life is in that; the mistake is the design!

TA: Did you work with your father or was it just something that was around?

Ph.S: No it was around, it was just my way of thinking.

TA: Do you think that has inspired your design earlier and this is a natural..

Ph.S: Oh, clearly, clearly. 5f you see a plane, you must create it, if you don’t want this plane go down, you must be rigorous. I try to be creative, I try to be rigorous.

TA: I think that space is a good way to wrap up…