HIROSHI SUGIMOTO AND ARCHITECTURE by benjamin iborra wicksteed

This words and studies are a way to see how there is a big process of thinking and making behind hiroshis work.



For understanding better this idea, we will focus in hiroshis architectural work, where he tries to explain the beginnings of modernism via architecture.In this photographs, pushing out his old large-format camera’s focal length to twice-infinity, he discovers that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography.Transformation architecture into art in a frame is not an easy task, and in this work we can find different buildings from different parts of the work and with different styles although they are all from the twentieth-century.

We can find different buildings in different sites of it self, where the amount of abstraction is different. Some chosen photos are going to be explained as the mechanism of finding all this secrets and ways of arriving to the final brilliant image. So, the Studio will be from less to a more abstract photograph.

CASA BATLLO

We will start with a peculiar photo, where the style of the building chosen is different to the others, it’s the “CASA BATLLO” in Barcelona, a Modernist house (In Spain, the movement was centered in Barcelona and was an essential element of the Catalan movement Modernisme. Architect Antoni Gaudí, whose decorative architectural style is so highly personal that he is sometimes seen as practising an artistic language separate from Art Nouveau, is nonetheless united with the movement by his use of floral and organic forms).
Here is the transformation from real to a Hiroshi photo (to see more detail click in the image).

The transformation in the image is amazing. From the fist to the last one we can see a different perception of the space, but Cleary the same.
This transformation begins by eliminating the colours, what makes the space more homogeneous and the colour and forms begging one.
In this house, the detail is very big and important like we can see in the nat ural photo, where the material of the sealing, the floor and the decoration are so powerful in the space and so in relation to the form witch in the hiroshis way of seeing, those disapp ear and get lost in the purification of the form and colour.
So as a main difference, we can see that the photo is loosing real information, but winning a way of feeling the real form of the space.
Also by doing this technical way of shooting as we will see in all the photos the image wins relief.

VILLA SAVOYE

The second photo, is the The Villa Savoye.The Villa Savoye is considered by many to be the seminal work of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Situated at Poissy, outside of Paris, it is one of the most recognisable architectural presentations of the International Style. Construction was substantially completed ca. 1929.The house was emblematic of Le Corbusier work in that it addressed "The Five Points".The firsts decision is what part of the building to shoot, and in this case, the d ecis ion is to make a photo of a façade like if it was an elevation witch would make the photo more abstract.
Then, when the position is taken, the mind does a difficult and really impo rtant process, to eliminate colours.

In this case, the abstracting process is different. We can still recognize the building, without loosing any important detail. The plain is now the real theme, where this one is represented in two terms, the façade, and the rest of the frame.The form of the villa savoye survives to the abstraction of the photo, witch means that its pure design has no superficial and in a way useless elements.
The façade is a white plane that seems to get out of the image, and the landscape with the grass, the trees and the sky seem to stay in an other plane making more important the main theme, the building(see the image bellow).

BARRAGAN HOUSE

The third election, is a photo, where the abstraction makes one more movement to art, a more far away from a real perception.It is the case, of the fabulous photo of the “ barragan house” where the use of vivid colour is very important for the architect and that one of the most important matters in the house, is the light.

In the last case, hiroshis transformation of the villa savoye, the images loses details from the reality, details that are not important for the spirit of the building, but in this case, after the hole transformation, the picture doe sn’t lose any information from reality, it just makes it feel different because of a new texture, colour and composition. So we could say, that now, the principal themes are colour, plane, and composition, so that the picture transforms into different shapes and geometries that could be interpretive in many ways if we didn’t know the real image or saw the image for a wile.