Seamless: Digital Collage And Dirty Realism In Architecture

Author(s): Jesús Vassallo

Source: Log , Winter 2017, No. 39 (Winter 2017), pp. 45-65
Published by: Anyone Corporation

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26324002

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 Seamless:
Jesus Vassallo

Digital Collage
And Dirty Realism
In Architecture
Editor's note: The following is Photography and architecture have a long history of mutual
excerpted from the book of the interference. Their complex and sometimes troubled rela
same title, recently published by tionship dates back to the dawn of photography in the 19th
Park Books. Seamless elabo century, when exposures were so long that buildings were
rates on the circumstances and almost the only viable photographic subjects. Photographers'
products of three contemporary early obsession with architecture was reciprocated by archi
collaborations between im tects and architectural historians who quickly detected in
age makers and architects in the new medium an unprecedented capacity for recording
Switzerland, Belgium, and the detail and transcribing space in two dimensions. As archi
Netherlands and ultimately tects co-opted the new technique by becoming photographers
focuses on the intersection of themselves or by commissioning photographers, they in turn
digital visual culture and archiexerted their influence on photography at a decisive moment
tecture at the heart of these col of its formation.1
laborations and its relevance for Architects initially used photography to record historic
current cultural discourse. monuments for preservation or to internally keep track of
complex construction projects. By the end of the century,
with the advancement of printing techniques, architectural
photography began to be used as propaganda to disseminate
images of new buildings, thus becoming embedded in the
larger apparatus of mass media. The initial instrumentaliza
tion of photography by architects therefore revolved not so
much around its seductive powers but around its capacity to
contain information, to function as a document of record.
This emphasis on objectivity became deeply influential at a
moment when photography was starting to be perceived as its
own discipline and beginning to grapple with its difficult rela
1. This history of mutual influence is at tionship to painting, which it eventually replaced as the pre
the core of my interest in the relationship
between photography and architecture. See
ferred medium for representing the human environment.
Jesus Vassallo, "Documentary Photography The initial, straightforward relationship between archi
and Preservation; or, The Problem of
Truth and Beauty," Future Anterior 6, no. 1 tecture and photography was symptomatic of a shared con
(2014): 15-35
dition: each discipline could be alternately considered either
a utilitarian trade or a fine art. In architecture this condi

tion was summarized by Nikolaus Pevsner's memorable

+5

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2. Reyner Banham's account of this
transatlantic process is especially lucid. It
could be described as a dissection of the
architect's insistence on being obsessed
with the "bicycle shed," instead of the
"cathedral." See Reyner Banham, Concrete
Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and
European Modern Architecture, 1900-192$
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
}. The larger historical trajectory of the
relationship between architecture and
photography is the topic of my forthcoming
book, Epics in the Everyday: Documentary
Photography, Architecture, and the Problem
of Realism.
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but reductive dictum: "A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln
Cathedral is a piece of architecture." Pevsner's statement,
precisely because it was polemical, became deeply influential
as a framework for discussing architecture's limited ability to
understand the objects produced outside of its learned circles,
near the boundaries between construction and architecture.
Consider, for instance, Walter Gropius's and Le Corbusier's
fascination with grain silos, which they regarded as the ver
nacular products of a American culture of engineers and
industrialists, or Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's in
fatuation with the commercial buildings of Las Vegas, which
they saw as an expression of unregulated capitalism and
which they focused on precisely because these buildings were
generally rejected in academic circles.2
Photography too is often considered in terms of its use
value as an automatic record of what is in front of the cam
era, from mug shots to scientific photographs. At other times,
depending largely on who is behind the camera, a photograph
is regarded as a visual construct worthy of consideration as
high art. It is precisely because of their shared capacity to op
erate at these different registers that the relationship between
architecture and photography is so complex and so fruitful,
as it allows for a series of oblique connections between high
and low modes of production and evaluation. It then becomes
interesting to imagine what would happen, for example, if
Walker Evans photographed Pevsner's bicycle shed. Would it
still be considered a building, or would it become architec
ture? Assuming we would ascribe a value to such an image,
what percentage could be allotted to the original anony
mous construction and how much to the photographer's eye?
However we look at the problem, it is clear that architects and
photographers have long been engaged in an effort to make
sense, culturally and aesthetically, of the things around us.'
The shared cultural positions of photography and archi
tecture, then, can be regarded as evidence of the complex pro
cesses through which a dynamic culture assigns and reassigns
value to its objects. It is fitting that this history of interac
tion began in an era of feverish invention in which industry
introduced new technologies at a pace far exceeding soci
ety's capacity to assimilate them. This not only displaced the
standard appreciation of materials and objects but also meant
that for the first time in history a new material order was be
ing developed at a pace so brutal that it threatened to obliter
ate all previous layers of the built environment, especially in
the rapidly industrializing cities of Western Europe. In this
46
Log 39
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4. Reading these words, it is impossible
not to anticipate how later generations
will regard our way of interacting with
images as archaic and based on heavy and
antiquated handheld devices.
5. The artist Thomas Demand beautifully
expressed this new autonomy and inter
connectedness of images when he noted,
"I'm at the end of an entire chain of worlds
of images that present themselves to me. All
my experience, everything I essentially am,
is largely the upshot of things passed on to
me. We all know that. I endeavour to put
myself in a position in which I can actually
add something to the chain." Demand, "A
Conversation between Alexander Kluge
and Thomas Demand," in Thomas Demand
(London: Serpentine Gallery, 2006), 60.
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context, photography emerged as a way to freeze time, to pre
serve the rapidly vanishing qualities of these places, if only in
an image. Thus this almost immaterial technology triggered
a radical reevaluation of the way we relate to physical reality.
Nostalgia, at least as we understand it today, could not exist
without photography.
A Digital Turn
We now find ourselves in a similar moment of rapid change as
digital technology is transforming photography and archi
tecture and the ways they interact with the world. The effect
of digital technology on photography has been to accelerate
a series of historical trends, including the increasing num
ber of circulating photographs and their diminishing sta
tus as objects. Early photographic techniques, whether they
involved fixing positive images directly on metal plates or
negative images on waxed paper or glass plates, were cumber
some and delicate processes. As a result, the limited number
of prints and negatives that were produced retained a certain
value as objects, and the passing of time has only added to
the aura and preciousness of these photographic relics, now
often preserved in archives and museum vaults. As photogra
phy evolved, it also became a process of democratization and
thinning: the introduction of ?5-millimeter film and com
mercial processing houses, the popularization of the snapshot
among the middle class, and the massive reproduction of pho
tographs in the illustrated press all contributed to the emer
gence of a condition in which the ubiquity of images devalued
the single image as an object.
In this regard, the advent of digital photography and its
incorporation in social media has finally allowed photography
to fulfill its promise to be everywhere, infinitely reproduced
and totally emancipated from a physical manifestation.4
Photographs are today as close as they have ever been to be
coming virtual or mental images. The current condition of
infinite multiplication and instant access to images can be seen
as a point of saturation within a preexisting process, a turn
that is fostering a mechanism for the reception, construction,
and communication of meaning through the aggregation of
images. In our new digital ecosystem, images detach them
selves from their creators and their original locations in the
world, thus becoming the context for other images.5 This new
associative logic based on chains of images puts forward the
possibility of a universal visual language capable of overrid
ing the broken English of Internet captions.
47
Log 39
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Opposite page: Philipp Schaerer,
Sihlholzli 7, image montage, from
the "Boltshauser" series, 2011-12.
Original in color. © Philipp Schaerer.
All images courtesy the author.
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The introduction of digital processes has also weakened
the historical process of photography as an indexical link
with reality. Although photography was initially perceived
as an absolutely objective record, when the technology be
came more popular it was soon revealed that photographs
too could be manipulated. The history of photography can in
many ways be told through the development of techniques
to control and construct the image beyond the primary act of
framing. Already in the mid-19th century, photographers re
touched their negatives and prints, adeptly cutting and paint
ing directly onto them in order to sharpen profiles, suppress
distracting skies, or improve the balance of light and shadow.
Later, movements like American pictorialism or the German
new vision generated an array of forms and visual effects that
went well beyond photography's initial mandate to be a re
cord of reality.
Thus we can say that the introduction of digital photog
raphy and postproduction is initially no more than the literal
transposition of a set of analog processes to the digital work
space, with the increased capabilities and technical nuances
that inevitably accompany such translation. What is perhaps
most interesting about this phenomenon is not the degree to
which the switch from analog to digital allows for a greater
degree of manipulation, but rather that it democratizes and
opens up this possibility to a wider public. This democrati
zation of forgery shatters the indexical link of photography
with reality. We are now much more vigilant when we ap
proach an image, aware that we may be looking at something
other than a registration of reality. In severing the umbilical
cord between the photograph and its object, the introduc
tion of the digital blurs the division between observation and
action, between representing the world and proposing new
worlds. Once we assimilate the idea that a photograph can
be manipulated or constructed, it no longer matters whether
it actually has been or to what degree. When photography's
illusion of neutrality dissipates, the act of making a picture
becomes more than ever a charged statement about how the
world could or should be.
Yet another interesting and largely overlooked develop
ment that accompanies the digital turn is the adoption of a
shared software platform by many different visual practices.
Today, the same digital workspace and associated family of
programs are used by photographers, filmmakers, graphic
designers, architects, and artists of all disciplines. This
shared workspace enables transfers of technique and content
4-8
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 between different disciplines that were previously impossi
ble, or at least less fluid. Again, this has intensified an exist
ing trend - namely, photography's gradual shift from being
considered a discipline in itself to a medium that is strategi
cally co-opted by other disciplines within the larger field of
art.6 Examples of such appropriations include the works of
6. A good example of this is the pivotal role
that photography has played in ephemeral
art practices such as installation or
Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, all of
performance art. them working on the fringe of architecture.
7. Philip Ursprung has written extensively
on the wider implications of the increased Architects, with a few honorable exceptions, seem to
importance of images in the field of archi
have been more wary of embracing this creative instrumen
tecture, a development that he explains as
part of a wider "iconic turn" in contempo talization of photography, clinging instead to their traditional
rary culture. See Philip Ursprung, "Built
patronage of commercial architecture photographers. But this
Images: Performing the City," in Images: A
Picture Book of Architecture, ed. Ilka Ruby,has changed dramatically in the past decade as the necessity,
Andreas Ruby, and Philip Ursprung (New
York: Prestel, 2004), 4-12.
brought about by the contemporary market of architecture,
8. Schaerer went to work for Herzog & deto present their projects in a photorealistic fashion from the
Meuron after graduating from the Ecole
polytechnique federale de Lausanne in
earliest stages of design has prompted architects to fully and
2001. He left the office to start an indepen explicitly engage in the business of making images.7
dent practice as an image maker in 2007.
The accumulation of these developments in the object
hood, indexicality, and disciplinary standing of photographs
is precisely the context in which the collaborations between
artists and architects are starting to emerge as early and
promising manifestations in architecture of a new literacy
and engagement with images. As was the case in the 19th cen
tury, the period between the introduction of a new technol
ogy and its full assimilation by society is always an interval of
fruitful exchange, of productive appropriation and misuse.
It is fascinating to note that the projects and conversations of
our protagonists, despite their noted erosion of photography's
marriage to reality, seem to recurrently gravitate toward cer
tain discussions of realism, whether regarding the form, the
content of the images they produce, or even the articulation
of their working relationships. Perhaps the reaction to the
first wave of digital images has been the realization that real
ism is not a default but rather a powerful strategy that can be
put to work to very specific ends.

Internal Vision

Let us first consider the problem of realism from the stand

point of technique, of how photography and digital technology
become instrumentalized in the production of architectural
projects. The collaboration between Philipp Schaerer and Roger
Boltshauser is especially relevant here, since Schaerer was

Schaerer, Sihlholzli 2, image

part of the first wave of architects to master the production of
montage,
from the "Boltshauser" series, 2011 - digital images during his stint as a young designer in the of
12. Original in color. © Philipp Schaerer.
fice of Herzog & de Meuron.8 Visualizations of the type that

Log 59

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 Schaerer produced early in his career usually rely on the ca
pacity of three-dimensional modeling software and rendering
9. It is interesting to note that Schaerer
already kept the importance of three engines to simulate photorealistic environments. A geometry
dimensional models to a minimum in his
is modeled in the vacuum of virtual space, to which light and
work as a visualization artist for hire,
developing most of his images, including material effects are applied in order to generate an image;
the introduction of textures and light
since these technologies have their limits, postproduction is still
effects, in a postproduction software.
10. For more on Edouard Baldus and his necessary, which is when additional details such as people and
relationship to architecture, see Barry
Bergdoll, "A Matter of Time: Architects and
context are usually added as embellishments.9 Schaerer's series
Photographers in Second Empire France," of self-initiated images are, in contrast, generated directly by
in The Photographs of Edouard Baldus, ed.
Malcolm Daniel (New York: Metropolitan
splicing together photographic materials in the workspace of
Museum of Art / Montreal: Canadian
postproduction software: they are not renderings but montages.
Centre for Architecture, 1994-).
11. Since Baldus used a wet collodion Schaerer's virtuosity and precision in handling photo
system - involving wet glass plates - it was graphic fragments amounts to an internalization of photo
necessary for him to keep a fully working
darkroom facility on the job site. graphic processes as a drafting technique, in which digital
technology affords the necessary degree of control to turn
photographic material into a projective medium. Everything
in Schaerer's "Bildbauten" series, from the spare composi
tions to the no-frills attitude toward framing and lighting,
speaks of a drive toward objectivity and rigor that is equally
indebted to documentary photography and technical drawing.
In fact, the language of frontality and objectivity that he de
ploys can be traced back to earlier examples of documentary
photography, to a time when this discipline was in formation
under the influence of, among other professions, architecture.
The features of frontality and clarity seen in Schaerer's
work today were first introduced in their purest form in pho
tographs taken by Edouard Baldus during the construction
of the new Louvre in Paris in the 1850s.10 Baldus had made a
name for himself when he participated in the Mission helio
graphique of 1851, a large public commission for a group of
French photographers to travel the country to record ancient
monuments for their preservation. The committee, com
posed of architects and architectural historians, that commis
sioned and reviewed the photographs found Baldus's images
to be the most satisfying. He tended to frame the monuments
in isolation, without distracting elements around them, and
rendered them in sharp contrast, which allowed the detail of
the facades to be read clearly.
Soon after, Baldus was commissioned to join the team
of the architect Hector Lefuel and spent a decade document
ing the construction of the new buildings in the Louvre
complex, setting up a permanent photography studio on the
construction site.11 Baldus's role in this project was not so
much to publicize the new building as to help document and
keep track of the complex construction process, facilitating

52 Log 39

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 IMUbg.jfti,

Edouard Baldus, Imperial Library of the

Louvre, 1856-57. Salted paper print
from glass negative. Collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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12. French photographers working for pub
lic clients, especially Eugene Atget, in turn
became a key reference for the pioneers of
American documentary photography in the
early 1920s - including Berenice Abbott and
Walker Evans - as they carried out large
public projects funded by the New Deal. I
argue that this strain of photography, with
its objective style and urban subject matter,
continues through the generation of the
"New Topographies" photographers in
America, especially in the work of Bernd
and Hilla Becher and their students in
Diisseldorf, and extends to the generation
discussed here.
Philipp Schaerer, Facade study for
the Ozeanium building by Roger
Boltshauser, 2014. Original in color.
© Philipp Schaerer.
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communication between the architect and the teams of
draftsmen and artisans producing plaster models and execut
ing the ornament directly on the stone walls. Arguably, the
years working with Lefuel, during which Baldus's photo
graphs became part of a massive set of construction docu
ments, changed his approach to photography and influenced
the rest of his career. His famous renditions of the finished
pavilions almost literally resemble architectural elevations
due to his care to avoid perspectival distortion and search for
an even light that maximizes detail.
Baldus was in turn deeply influential during his time,
clearing a path for subsequent commissions of architec
tural and urban photography, such as the Parisian surveys of
Charles Marville and Eugene Atget.12 As photography sought
to define itself during the mid-19th century, a certain imper
sonal and technically oriented approach to framing and light
ing came to be sanctioned and appreciated as architectural,
rather than painterly, in what amounted to an identification
of an architectural visual language with a notion of realism.
Baldus is here a case in point; in his prolonged collaborations
with architects he actively imported conventions of architec
tural drawing into his work in order to construct an objective
visual framework. While for Baldus and his peers architec
tural frontality and clarity were imported into photography
as a way to imbue the work with a sense of scientific objectiv
ity, for Schaerer — working 150 years later and in response to
the distorted perspectives of digital renderings — it is archi
tecture that borrows from the conventions of documentary
photography to reinstate its own realism.
The association of a notion of technical precision with
one of objectivity is what allows architect Roger Boltshauser
to assimilate Schaerer's interpretations and visualiza
tions of his work as truthful to his own original intentions.
Boltshauser understands Schaerer's images as documents
internal to his production, and it is curious to note that this
also occurs in the other pairings described here, in which
the architects regard the artists with whom they collabo
rate as somehow embedded in their practices and possessing
an increased intimacy with their projects, as opposed to the
banalization that occurs when commercial architecture pho
tography is involved.
While precision is one of the traits that has allowed this
instrumentalization and procedural incorporation of images
to accelerate in our current condition, seamlessness is perhaps
an even more important driver of this process. Traditional
Log J9
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 physical collage techniques expose the disparity of the frag
ments being put together and thus call attention to the impos
sibility and precariousness of the ensemble. Because the union
is impossible, traditional collage becomes a provocation, a dis
ruption of the real. Digital collage, on the other hand, is often
seamless, concealing its own traces and thus merging portions
of the real into a plausible alternative. While traditional ar
chitectural collages operate in a rhetorical mode, the stealthy
manipulations involved in digital postprocessing are more am
biguous when it comes to revealing their ultimate intentions.
Therefore, when Schaerer builds frontal images of mas
sive clay walls for Boltshauser, neither of them has to worry
about the viewers considering these pictures as rhetorical
statements. We do not look at such images as visual statements
that say "wall" and then try to figure out the significance of
such a statement vis-a-vis its context; instead, we read them
through their capacity to convey the properties of a specific
wall, as studies of the different ways to articulate a vertical
mass through its detailing, much like the tectonic and sculp
tural effects Baldus captured in his photographs of the Louvre
facades. When we compare the collaborations of Baldus and
Lefuel in Paris with those of Schaerer and Boltshauser in

Zurich, we see two perfectly symmetrical moments in his

tory in which the emergence of new technologies — first ana
log photography and then digital postproduction - enabled a
gradual internalization and instrumentalization of the pho
tograph as a technique for architects, initially as pure docu
mentation, now increasingly as a projective device.

Dirty Realism
Despite our tendency to think of digital imagery in terms of
smooth surfaces, fluid dynamic simulations, and parametric
models - virtual realities that can be generated ex novo on the
computer - perhaps the most intense and lasting effect that
the digital will have on architecture culture will be its capac
ity to once again bring attention to the real by operating on
its fragments in a postproduction space in order to generate
alternative futures, what we could describe as a practice of
engaged digitalism.
This leads us to question the ambition and ideology be
hind Schaerer and Boltshauser's projects and other emerging
digital practices that mess with the real. It becomes important
to consider the content of the images they produce, to ques
tion how and why specific fragments of reality are chosen and
then combined, and what their emphasis on materials says

56 Log;?

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1?. The description of this process is
indebted to Nicolas Bourriaud and his view
of how art articulates its political role,
more specifically as described in his lecture,
"What Is the Exform?: Culture, History and
Rejection in the Google Era," Amarcordian,
January 20, 2014, http://amarcordian
.blogspot.com/2014/01/nicolas-bourriaud
-what-is-exform.html.
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about the intentions of the authors. In that regard, Schaerer
and Boltshauser's fixation with mud, Filip Dujardin and
Jan De Vylder's extreme vernacularism, or Bas Princen and
Kersten Geers/David Van Severen's global ruins all seem to
align with a certain aesthetic of defeat, of antimodernism,
which can all be labeled as dirty realism.
Clearly these practices respond to a perceived need to ex
pand the range of tones and cultural material that architects
can deploy in their projects, and they situate themselves in
opposition to the sleek aesthetic imposed by the architectural
establishment in its service of global capital. This alternative
attitude has a basic political component: by reclaiming dis
carded and overlooked objects, our protagonists challenge the
definition of what is and is not architecture. By bringing the
spoils of their explorations into the precinct of high architec
ture culture, they also inevitably trigger a process of revalua
tion - they displace what was already there.1i
The ongoing collaboration between photographer Bas
Princen and the architecture office of Kersten Geers and David
Van Severen perhaps most explicitly and self-consciously en
gages the art-historical process just described and its political
underpinnings. Through their explicit conversations about
image-making and their discussions of figures like Ed Ruscha,
Lewis Baltz, or Luigi Ghirri, they actively situate themselves
within a specific tradition that deals with the abstraction and
decontextualization of repressed fragments of reality in order
to transform them into provocative aesthetic statements.
Their collaboration is also especially useful for this dis
course because they work in a parallel method in making
images and tackling similar themes but employing different
modes of production. Their joint exhibition in the 2012 Venice
Architecture Biennale was an essay on the differences be
tween more traditional collage, as practiced by the architects,
and the seamless postproduction favored by the photogra
pher. While the exhibited images reflected a common ground
and a set of shared references that enable an active conversa
tion, they also revealed, under scrutiny, that the authors come
from two very different traditions.
The perspectives of Geers and Van Severen, with their
burnt-out whites and abrasive gray tones, initially bring to
mind the work of Lewis Baltz. They share with the California
photographer the determination with which they isolate and
decontextualize their buildings, as well as the capacity to take
banal components and abstract them into prototypes that can
be replicated. But by refusing to use the full capabilities of
57 Log ?9
Rem Koolhaas, illustration for
Exodus; or, The Voluntary Prisoners of
Architecture, 1972. © OMA/AMO.

digital collage and adopting instead an intentionally archaic

technique, the architects connect to a very different tradition
of making images, one rooted in a certain lineage within ar
chitectural history.
Their collages speak a language that reminds us of those
produced by Rem Koolhaas in London in the late 1970s, as
well as the Italian Utopian projects of the 1960s that influenced
Koolhaas, and, of course, of the radical collages of Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, who in the 1920s borrowed this technique
for the first time from his friends in the dada circles of Berlin.

Continuing this lineage of architectural collage, the visual

language of Geers and Van Severen's perspectives stakes out
a position of radical exceptionality, one of constant and dia
metric opposition between their projects and the contexts in
which they sit.
What sets Geers and Van Severen apart from their
predecessors is that the projects they propose are actually
quite mundane, and not so different from their surround
ings in their scale and scope. Think, for instance, of Mies's
famous collage for a skyscraper in Friedrichstrasse and its
radical opposition to the 19th-century city around it, or the
way in which Koolhaas's Exodus project or Superstudio's
Continuous Monument assert themselves in contrast to the

landscapes they traverse. With the exception of A Grammar

for the City, their project with Pier Vittorio Aureli and
Martino Tattara - who more forcefully try to continue the
Utopian lineage just recounted - Geers and Van Severen's

58 Log V)

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OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van

Severen, House in Merchtem, Belgium.

Photo © Bas Princen.

built projects, in their modesty, depart from this tradition to

become a different animal.

Projects like the computer shop in Tielt or the weekend

house in Merchtem initially present themselves, as images,
in a similar fashion to their more monumental precedents:
they clear a space in the Belgian sprawl in which they unfold
according to a hard compositional logic. Yet because of their
small size and the finite quality of the fragments that make
up the buildings - modest swathes of curtain wall and brick -
they easily come to be regarded as reorganizations of generic
elements, perhaps not unlike the clutter of vernacular and
commercial constructions around them.

This application of the mechanisms of a certain Utopian lin

eage at a more domestic scale is especially poignant in the case of
the house in Merchtem, which in its linear sequence of open and
closed square volumes becomes a homey or miniaturized ver
sion of Koolhaas's Exodus project. This radical domestication of
Dutch dystopianism is fascinating, and also very fitting for the
architects, especially if we consider that Marten van Severen,
David's father, designed and executed the interiors and furniture
for some of Koolhaas's most seminal and relevant projects. The
finite quality of their buildings and their embrace of the small
scale of commercial and domestic architecture saturate their

vignettes with a certain pathos and affection, an unexpected

turn that becomes the most remarkable feature of the work.

The images of Bas Princen, on the other hand, connect at a

deep level with the work of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri.

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 Ghirri, unlike Baltz, did not use photography as a radical tool
for abstraction and decontextualization, but rather developed
a capacity to traverse scales and categories in his work, which
is always ambiguous and inclusive in scale and transcends all
genres that it initially takes on. In Princen's photographs too,
architecture and landscape are always intertwined: architec
tural objects are not fully removed from reality but instead
dissolve and blend with the landscape, sometimes receding to
the margins to enunciate a new definition of architecture that
transcends building. While Baltz uses photography as an asep
tic tool to extract parts of the built environment and present
them to us as a catalogue of specimens, Ghirri and Princen
present the things they find in the world to us already filtered
through their personal experience: their photographs are
fragments of their lives rather than fragments of the world.
This biographical component is perhaps linked to the
early days of the daguerreotype, when photographers were
sent to the ends of the earth to record the monuments of an

tiquity and of distant cultures; upon return, the albums they

assembled were as much a testimony to the existence of those
monuments as to the transformation that the explorer had
undergone during the journey. This tradition of travel may
well explain the influence of painting on Princen's photogra
phy, his avoidance of strong lines of contrast, and his effort
to work exclusively with tones, a feature that places his work
in a conversation with the Dutch Italianate painters who, just
like him, traveled south to bring some of the golden haze of
the Mediterranean back to Northern Europe.
Despite the differences in their modus operandi and
visual language, both Princen and Geers and Van Severen
operate according to a tradition that we could describe as a
hunter-gatherer realism. They scout for discarded or re
pressed objects, places, or references, things that they detect as
charged with a certain energy, and retrieve them by including
them in their image production, which becomes both an act
of criticism and a way to articulate a political position. They
present us with the broken by-products of modernity and
force us to imagine that we can still work with them, despite
evident conflicts. The distinction in this regard boils down to
the tone with which they present their findings to us. Geers
and Van Severen recombine these fragments in order to gen
erate a message that is both boldly explicit and explicitly con
tradictory, while in Princen's work, which is more poetic and
less didactic, conflict appears as a pervasive emotional condi
tion that displaces the conceptual aspect of the images.

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 Radical Contextualism

It is interesting to contrast the hunter-gatherer mode of appr

priation with the way in which photographer Filip Dujardin
and the architecture office of Jan De Vylder focus instead on
the site as the locus of realism. In their case, it is through in
tervention that the context itself is transfigured into the pro
ect. The architects and the photographer therefore operate
from within, manipulating what they find and then stepping
back to contemplate the work. A good way to elaborate on thi
distinction is to compare Geers and Van Severen's House in
Merchtem with Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu's Hous
43. Both projects are strikingly similar in scope and structure
which makes their conceptual differences even more apparent
In both cases the architects were commissioned to remodel

a modest house sitting on a long and narrow plot fronting a

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Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu,
House 43, Ghent, 2004. Photos © Filip
Dujardin.

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 road and to extend it toward the interior of the block in a lin

ear fashion. Solids and voids alternate in both projects, form

ing a sequence of outbuildings and courtyards between party
walls unified by a sliding glass roof that can turn some of the
outdoor spaces into interior spaces depending on the weather.
For Merchtem, Geers and Van Severen chose to ignore
the existing house - it actually became the guest house, and
is never shown in publication — and focused their energies
on the new extension, which they laid out as a series of four
square spaces: two open courtyards, which share the slid
ing glass roof, one enclosed room, and a walled garden at the
back, which opens onto an alley and a landscaped area inside
the block. The square precincts, rendered in brick and painted
white, act as neutral frames for a series of distinct objects - a
raised swimming pool, a concrete table, a stainless steel cylin
der containing a bathroom - which in their sculptural pres
ence become the inhabitants of the abstract cubic volumes.

With House 4} in Ghent, De Vylder Vinck Taillieu take

a very different approach. While the initial layout is almost
identical to that of Merchtem, the articulation of the old and
the new is radically different here: the existing house and the
new outbuildings are treated as one and the same thing. The
back facade of the existing building is cut open and mostly
removed to connect it fully to the new spaces beyond, which
in turn adopt the same roof pitch as the original house and
the other houses in the block. New and old materials are used

indistinctly throughout the project, so that we perceive the

whole as a single building formed by an amalgam of brick, tile,
and greenhouse-glass partitions. In its fragmentation and mix
of materials, the house becomes the protagonist, creating the
illusion that it has actually generated itself, or at least that it
has been made from within, as if transforming inside a cocoon.
The same could be said of Dujardin's images, which ap
pear to be self-generated combinations and alterations of
existing elements, always strongly tied to a specific place.
This is especially true of his condensed and sublimated city
images, such as Guimaraes or Middleburg, in which the pri
macy of context is taken to an extreme as the photographer
tackles a series of recurrences over time in the built environ

ment and accelerates them to render the city as an explicit,

even obsessive, collective project. Like his architect collabora
tors, Dujardin's hand is quick to disappear once it has worked
its magic, leaving us with the illusion that the works gener
ated themselves spontaneously. This logic of intervention,
whereby the artist's work is limited to the introduction of a

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House 43. Photos © Filip Dujardin. series of actions in a context that otherwise has its own dy
namic and history of transformation, presents us with an ex
panded field in which architecture and life become enmeshed
and inseparable.
As opposed to Geers and Van Severen, De Vylder and Du
jardin suggest that it is no longer possible to establish a "clear
ing" in the Heideggerian sense, that it is necessary to embrace
the state of saturation and act on it from within. It is hard not

to see their collaboration as a response to a larger realization:

namely, that as a civilization we have reached our maximum
footprint on this planet, and that therefore it is our duty to
constrain ourselves to working within our own shadow. Their
insistence on elaborating on what is already there, to surren
der at least partially to the inertia of the places where they
work, is therefore a liberation: while apparently relinquishing
some of their agency, they actually find a new freedom and
new relevance.

The work of De Vylder Vinck Taillieu and the images

of Dujardin are never just a reinstatement of the places and
cultures they find; on the contrary, their interventions are
always provocative and critical. By engaging the very specific
properties and articulations of common architectural ele
ments and materials and proposing unexpected occurrences,
they suggest that there is always an escape from the norm,

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Filip Dujardin, from the "Fictions" se that the world is teeming with nascent possibilities for living
ries. Original in color. © Filip Dujardin.
in new and more pleasurable ways. By establishing such con
nections between the built environment and life, they both
open up a new relationship to culture, no longer regarded as
a heavy burden to either discard or painfully carry on our
shoulders, but as a repository of things that have their own
energy yet depend on us for continuous reactivation.
This is perhaps their greatest contribution, but also what
they have in common with the other architects and photog
raphers discussed here. Through their unconventional and
stubborn insistence on reality, these artists and architects of
fer us the return to a broader material culture, this time with
the freedom and the mandate to make it our own. At a mo

ment when more and more of our world is being transferred

to the digital domain, through their work we seem to gain the
necessary distance to once again appreciate and engage objects
and materials, and thus to reimagine their potential.

Jesus Vassallo is a Spanish architect

and writer. He is an assistant profes
sor at Rice University and editor of
Circo magazine.

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