Photographs.
How I look at architecture: travelling, on site and in pencil.
Travels
February–May 2018, a gap year devoted to European architecture: Scandinavia in winter, Hamburg and Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Vorarlberg and Tyrol, then Italy down to Sicily. From twentieth-century masters to sites under construction, one question: how we build, and for whom.
Alvar Aalto at home
Alvar Aalto's studio (1955) and house (1936) in Helsinki: northern light, bent wood, furniture and space conceived in a single gesture.
Light without the source
Scandinavian design turned the lamp into an architectural object: slats, rings, stretched fabric or perforations hide the bulb and let you see only the light it reflects. An answer, no doubt, to winters spent for much of the day under artificial light.
Northern light
Helsinki and Espoo in winter: from Engel's neoclassicism to contemporary chapels, buildings that capture a rare, low light.
Oslo, the reclaimed harbour
On the old harbour, the Opera, the Barcode towers and the new library under construction: a whole district turning towards the fjord.
Hamburg, Berlin: dwelling
The brick of workers' districts, its contemporary heirs, the concert hall on the warehouse, and student housing made of stacked containers.
Prague, panel housing
An exhibition on Czechoslovak prefabricated-concrete housing estates, and the city where the ruptures of post-1989 can be read in the landscape.
Vienna, from Loos to Hadid
The rejection of ornament, the Secession, then a contemporary university campus: a century of ruptures in the same city.
Vorarlberg and Tyrol: building right
A precise and sober building culture: concrete, glass, structural timber, earth, and an architecture that takes the valley and the lake into account.
Italy, the old city
From Venice to Sicily: the city on the water, the painted façades, the Roman cisterns, the Italian-style theatre and the Greek theatre facing the sea.
March 2016 and February 2017, from the Daurade to Saint-Cyprien, on both banks of the Garonne. A city without building stone, which built everything in fired brick: the ordered façade, the suburban house, and the blind wall that keeps the imprint of what was demolished.
Brick façades
Brick does everything: the wall, the ornament, the window surrounds. Stone and render only play a supporting role, and it is where they appear that tells how the building was made.
The wall laid bare
When a house disappears, the neighbour's wall remains standing and keeps the section of what once leaned against it.
August–September 2016, from south to north: Ho Chi Minh City, the highlands of Đà Lạt, the coast (Nha Trang, Hội An, Đà Nẵng, Huế), the Red River Delta, then the mountains of Sa Pa. A country read through its matter: the narrow plot, brick, timber framing, and a city rebuilding itself at great speed.
The narrow plot
The tube house (nhà ống): four to five metres on the street, twenty or more in depth. Only the street façade is composed, often with a wealth of detail; the side walls stay bare, waiting for the neighbour.
Brick, from earth to wall
From the 8th-century Cham towers to the brickworks of the delta, the same material, shaped, dried, fired and stacked almost entirely by hand, and mostly by women.
Towers and temples
Stacked roofs, verticality, ornament carried right into the skin of the building: a grammar ranging from the monumental pagoda to the family tomb, between tradition and contemporary expression.
The changing city
Subdivisions on the dunes, towers under construction behind fishermen's shacks, landmark objects: the contrast between precarious housing and the emerging city is visible to the naked eye.
Timber, roof, frame
What shelters and what carries: tiles, lattices, half-timbering, a frame raised before the walls.
March 2016, two days between Osaka, Nara and Kyoto. The monumental timber of the temples, the threshold between room and garden, and a city of tightly packed plots where every era keeps its place.
Monumental timber
At Tōdai-ji in Nara, the timber structure is shown as it is: posts, brackets, stacked roofs, at a scale few timber buildings have ever reached.
Thresholds: inside, outside
Galleries, deep eaves, sliding partitions: the boundary between interior and garden is a thickness you inhabit, not a wall.
The tight city
Each building on its own plot, with no common envelope: timber houses, narrow blocks, viaducts and towers sit side by side without lining up.
February 2013, two days in Manhattan, from the ferry at the southern tip to Central Park. A city read in height and in depth: the stacked eras of Lower Manhattan, the void of the memorial, the 1916 rule that sculpts the towers, and Wright's spiral facing the park.
Arriving by water
The free Staten Island ferry leaves the southern tip every half hour. It is still the best way to read Manhattan: from a distance, as everyone arriving across the bay once saw it.
Lower Manhattan, stacked eras
Around Bowling Green and Wall Street, the colonial town, the young republic and the financial centre share the same streets. The nineteenth-century monuments still hold their own at the foot of the towers.
Ground Zero, twelve years on
In February 2013 the memorial has been open for a year and a half; all around it, the new World Trade Center is still rising from the ground.
The South Street port
On the East River, the wharves of the old port, its preserved sailing ships and the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset.
The vertical city
From Herald Square to Columbus Circle, a century of skyscrapers: the 1916 rule that sculpts the silhouettes, Art Deco, then steel and glass.
Wright's Guggenheim
A continuous ramp around a void, facing Central Park. In February 2013 the rotunda hosts the exhibition devoted to the Japanese Gutai group.
Central Park
An entirely constructed landscape, laid out from the late 1850s by Olmsted and Vaux within the grid: a lake, bridges, a terrace.