Architecture, and late modernist architecture especially, is physically changing and susceptible to decay and erosion. Our photographs of Álvaro Siza’s Ocean Swimming Pool span five years. It was important we showed both the process of restoration and change as well as the relationship between the materials used and the structures’ magnificent and ever-changing natural setting.
We have been making work in response to Siza’s architecture since 2017 and this exhibition will be followed by our third Scopio publication on Siza in June 2023.[1] We were not trained as architects and we both have come relatively late to the world of architecture— we approach it as artists and collaborate from the dual perspective of our own very distinct artistic practices. Collaboration makes a lot of sense. Architectural experience is rich, multi-dimensional, multi-sensorial and two people working together are much better than one in seeking to photograph the architectural experience.
John Szarkowski’s photographs of Louis Sullivan’s architecture mark a particular influence and we have adapted the title of Szarkowski’s 1956 book, The Idea of Louis Sullivan for this project. Szarkowski stated he was interested in architecture’s “life facts” as well as its “art facts” and this was borne out in his approach, deliberately framing Sullivan’s architecture in relation to life on the street.
Szarkowski presents three or four black and white photographs of one building— we have many more and our pictures are in colour and durational. This long-form temporal relationship to architecture is important in an age and culture of image glut, speed and transience.
Time is central to photography. Photography is of the moment and instant, and in our pictures we are very much aware of this through the shadows that play over the structures and our sense of how the architecture’s appearance is always changing during different light and different seasons. The pictures for this publication accent both the dramatic shifts in effect between overcast and bright sunlit days on Siza’s architecture and the constant tidal movement of the waters.
All photographs become interesting as documents in time. Of course, architecture changes in time too, but buildings are (usually) more permanent than photographs. That said when John Szarkowski was photographing Louis Sullivan’s buildings in the early 1950s many were in states of disrepair and quite a few were subsequently demolished, so only the photographs remain.
One of the issues that interests us about Sullivan’s architecture concerns his use of ornamentation and how this was seen not to fit the modernist narrative integral to his statement “form follows function”. It was Frank Lloyd Wright who championed ornamentation in Sullivan and referred to his poetic lyrical style.
One of our simple discoveries in picturing Siza’s architecture is the way in which modernist structures are never blank. The white wall is animated by cast shadows, brutalist surfaces decay and wear beautifully. And this becomes for us a kind of ornamentation.
Architecture can be brought into the contingent world through showing its context, its relation to the street and the people who use the buildings in the case of some of Szarkowski’s photographs. This context locks the architecture in a particular time and counters a desire to idealise and separate it off from the lived world. Much as we may show architecture in context, we still think there is a certain reverence in our photography and a recognition that there is something sublime and transcendent in our experience of architecture. This is very much to do with its form and the experience of form beyond function.
[1] Our first two volumes in this series, published in 2020, responded to Siza’s Serralves Museum, The Carlos Ramos Pavilion, Porto School of Architecture and his Bouça Social Housing. The project is now expanding to include other architects and two further publications will follow in 2023 on Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion, in San Vito d’Altivole, and Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena, both in Italy.
Liverpool (UK) / Porto (PT) | January 2023
Mark Durden & João Leal
