Silence is so Accurate

Boston City Hall, Boston, Massachusetts, 1963-68

The Timeless Spirit of Modern Architecture

The buildings featured in Christoph Morlinghaus’s photography may be modern in design, but they are timeless in spirit. His view of modern architecture is tragic because it is sensitive to modernism’s historical aims, yet also coolly detached from the heartbreaking failure of those goals. This is underscored by the sheer emptiness of the buildings, whose spectacular forms and daring structures are beheld by none. Beyond modernism, Morlinghaus’s work also investigates how form gives expression to new and old interpretations of faith, from the ghostly interiors of a Brutalist church to the hollow religiosity of an overblown Doha hotel.

Unseen London Peter Dazeley

Photographer Peter Dazeley spent four years London’s hidden nooks and crannies for the book Unseen London. A Londoner born and bred, he was driven to action by the gradual dereliction of Battersea Power Station, witnessed from his apartment on the opposite bank of the River Thames, near Chelsea Bridge. “It seemed odd to me that if you live in a listed building and you change the windows, the whole force of the law comes down on you” he says. “Whereas, in Battersea I saw a succession of developers remove the roof, then one of the walls. They ravaged the building.”

Some of the places he has photographed simply suffered at the hands of progress, as a bigger, better, more brazen building took its place. Some, whether for safety or secrecy, have remained accessible only to a select few, their existence a closely guarded secret. But many, too, are the victims of decades of disuse, of dry pockets and defunct industry. They have become weathered spaces where pigeons and foxes mingle with leaves and vines, shattered plaster, tumbledown stone and rusted iron, the body of the building eating itself from the inside out.

Daniel Buren’s ‘Observatory of Light’ at the Fondation Louis Vuitton

French conceptual artist Daniel Buren has created a temporary, site-specific work for the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton building, in the Bois de Boulogne park in western Paris. For “Observatory of Light,” Buren installed 3,600 pieces of glass in a 13-color checkerboard pattern on the building’s translucent, curved glass sails.

“El Roure” Community Centre and “La Ginesta” Library Calderon Folch Sarsanedas arquitectes

From the architects:

A three-in-one cultural facility that emphasizes the landscape values of the site A unified design is required for a building with three different purposes: a theater that seats 350, a 1.260 m2 public library and a community centre with a great amount of different activities and services. The site, with a rather triangular shape, is a shore of the stream meander with a big old oak tree to be preserved than will name the Centre.