A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Photographs and Buildings (mainly)
The photographs that Adrian Forty (AF) has taken fill his books and fuelled his teaching. It shows how architecture, for AF, could contain everything worth thinking about. Rather than see himself as a photographer, AF took photographs to do a job. It was always a matter‐of‐fact collection of images, whose principle use was to serve as the bedrock of his lectures and teaching. On the other hand he often spent many hours photographing a building, so clearly his relationship to photography was also – as it must be for all those architectural historians and critics who take photographs in this way – never quite contained within its classificatory system or the rationale imposed upon it. AF's gesture in inviting a leading local tattooist, Les Skuse, to come and give a talk to his students reflects his panoramic curiosity about everyday things that are taken for granted. It is hard to remember a time before concrete, or before AF was interested in concrete. AF quickly came to think of concrete not just as a building material but as a cultural medium. AF described photogénie as ‘the process by which photography turns ordinary things beautiful’. If ‘photography's main service to concrete was to enhance its properties’, then AF's own relation to photography was to resist that movement and to make images that did not enhance or exaggerate the aesthetic value of architecture over our social and lived relation to it.
Photographs and Buildings (mainly)
The photographs that Adrian Forty (AF) has taken fill his books and fuelled his teaching. It shows how architecture, for AF, could contain everything worth thinking about. Rather than see himself as a photographer, AF took photographs to do a job. It was always a matter‐of‐fact collection of images, whose principle use was to serve as the bedrock of his lectures and teaching. On the other hand he often spent many hours photographing a building, so clearly his relationship to photography was also – as it must be for all those architectural historians and critics who take photographs in this way – never quite contained within its classificatory system or the rationale imposed upon it. AF's gesture in inviting a leading local tattooist, Les Skuse, to come and give a talk to his students reflects his panoramic curiosity about everyday things that are taken for granted. It is hard to remember a time before concrete, or before AF was interested in concrete. AF quickly came to think of concrete not just as a building material but as a cultural medium. AF described photogénie as ‘the process by which photography turns ordinary things beautiful’. If ‘photography's main service to concrete was to enhance its properties’, then AF's own relation to photography was to resist that movement and to make images that did not enhance or exaggerate the aesthetic value of architecture over our social and lived relation to it.
Photographs and Buildings (mainly)
Borden, Iain (editor) / Fraser, Murray (editor) / Penner, Barbara (editor) / Fer, Briony (author)
2015-03-24
7 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
Survey on the main defects in ancient buildings constructed mainly with natural raw materials
| BASE | 2010
| Taylor & Francis Verlag | 1977
Expansive admixtures (mainly ettringite)
| Online Contents | 1998
Engineering Index Backfile | 1967
| DataCite | 1902