Issue 14
DATE
STORY TYPE
AUTHOR
13
BOOK REVIEW
11.25.2024
A Mind-Body Experience of Architecture, Delivered in a Photo
by Marianela D’Aprile
13
PERSPECTIVE
11.18.2024
Seeing Chinatown as a Readymade
by Philip Poon
13
PEOPLE
11.11.2024
The Place of the Handmade Artifact in a Tech-Obsessed Era
by Anne Quito
13
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
11.04.2024
How a Storied Printmaker Advances the Practice of Architecture
by Diana Budds
12
PEOPLE
10.21.2024
Sounding Out a Better Way to Build
by Jesse Dorris
12
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
10.07.2024
What It Means—and What It’s Worth—to Be “Light”
by Julie Lasky
12
PERSPECTIVE
09.23.2024
Redefining “Iconic” Architecture and Ideals
by Sophie Lovell
12
PERSPECTIVE
09.09.2024
Surrendering to What Is
by Marianne Krogh
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
08.26.2024
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything
by Zach Mortice
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
08.19.2024
What Does Your Home Say About You?
by Shane Reiner-Roth
11
BOOK REVIEW
08.12.2024
Is Building Better Cities a Dream Within Reach?
by Michael Webb
11
PEOPLE
08.05.2024
The Value of Unbuilt Buildings
by George Kafka
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
07.29.2024
Future-Proofing a Home Where Water Is a Focus and a Thread
by Alexandra Lange
11
BOOK REVIEW
07.22.2024
Modernist Town, U.S.A.
by Ian Volner
11
PEOPLE
07.15.2024
Buildings That Grow from a Place
by Anthony Paletta
10
URBANISM
06.24.2024
What We Lose When a Historic Building Is Demolished
by Owen Hatherley
10
PERSPECTIVE
06.17.2024
We Need More Than Fewer, Better Things
by Deb Chachra
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
06.03.2024
An Ode to Garages
by Charlie Weak
10
PERSPECTIVE
05.28.2024
In Search of Domestic Kintsugi
by Edwin Heathcote
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
05.13.2024
The Perils of the Landscapes We Make
by Karrie Jacobs
10
PERSPECTIVE
05.06.2024
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
by Jarrett Fuller
9
PERSPECTIVE
04.29.2024
Why Can’t I Just Go Home?
by Eva Hagberg
9
PEOPLE
04.22.2024
Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving?
by George Kafka
9
ROUNDTABLE
04.08.2024
Spaces Where the Body Is a Vital Force
by Tiffany Jow
9
BOOK REVIEW
04.01.2024
Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture
by Mimi Zeiger
9
PERSPECTIVE
03.25.2024
Are You Sitting in a Non-Place?
by Mzwakhe Ndlovu
9
ROUNDTABLE
03.11.2024
At Home, Connecting in Place
by Marianela D’Aprile
9
PEOPLE
03.04.2024
VALIE EXPORT’s Tactical Urbanism
by Alissa Walker
8
PERSPECTIVE
02.26.2024
What the “Whole Earth Catalog” Taught Me About Building Utopias
by Anjulie Rao
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.19.2024
How a Run-Down District in London Became a Model for Neighborhood Revitalization
by Ellen Peirson
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.12.2024
In Brooklyn, Housing That Defies the Status Quo
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
8
PERSPECTIVE
02.05.2024
That “Net-Zero” Home Is Probably Living a Lie
by Fred A. Bernstein
8
PERSPECTIVE
01.22.2024
The Virtue of Corporate Architecture Firms
by Kate Wagner
8
PERSPECTIVE
01.16.2024
How Infrastructure Shapes Us
by Deb Chachra
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
01.08.2024
The Defiance of Desire Lines
by Jim Stephenson
7
PEOPLE
12.18.2023
This House Is Related to You and to Your Nonhuman Relatives
by Sebastián López Cardozo
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
12.11.2023
What’s the Point of the Plus Pool?
by Ian Volner
7
BOOK REVIEW
12.04.2023
The Extraordinary Link Between Aerobics and Architecture
by Jarrett Fuller
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
11.27.2023
Architecture That Promotes Healing and Fortifies Us for Action
by Kathryn O’Rourke
7
PEOPLE
11.06.2023
How to Design for Experience
by Diana Budds
7
PEOPLE
10.30.2023
The Meaty Objects at Marta
by Jonathan Griffin
6
OBJECTS
10.23.2023
How Oliver Grabes Led Braun Back to Its Roots
by Marianela D’Aprile
6
URBANISM
10.16.2023
Can Adaptive Reuse Fuel Equitable Revitalization?
by Clayton Page Aldern
6
PERSPECTIVE
10.09.2023
What’s the Point of a Tiny Home?
by Mimi Zeiger
6
OBJECTS
10.02.2023
A Book Where Torn-Paper Blobs Convey Big Ideas
by Julie Lasky
6
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
09.24.2023
The Architecture of Doing Nothing
by Edwin Heathcote
6
BOOK REVIEW
09.18.2023
What the “Liebes Look” Says About Dorothy Liebes
by Debika Ray
6
PEOPLE
09.11.2023
Roy McMakin’s Overpowering Simplicity
by Eva Hagberg
6
OBJECTS
09.05.2023
Minimalism’s Specific Objecthood, Interpreted by Designers of Today
by Glenn Adamson
5
ROUNDTABLE
08.28.2023
How Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake Navigate Transition
by Siobhan Burke
5
OBJECTS
08.21.2023
The Future-Proofing Work of Design-Brand Archivists
by Adrian Madlener
5
URBANISM
08.14.2023
Can a Church Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis?
by Alex Bozikovic
5
PEOPLE
08.07.2023
In Search of Healing, Helen Cammock Confronts the Past
by Jesse Dorris
5
URBANISM
07.31.2023
What Dead Malls, Office Parks, and Big-Box Stores Can Do for Housing
by Ian Volner
5
PERSPECTIVE
07.24.2023
A Righteous Way to Solve “Wicked” Problems
by Susan Yelavich
5
OBJECTS
07.17.2023
Making a Mess, with a Higher Purpose
by Andrew Russeth
5
ROUNDTABLE
07.10.2023
How to Emerge from a Starchitect’s Shadow
by Cynthia Rosenfeld
4
PEOPLE
06.26.2023
There Is No One-Size-Fits-All in Architecture
by Marianela D’Aprile
4
PEOPLE
06.19.2023
How Time Shapes Amin Taha’s Unconventionally Handsome Buildings
by George Kafka
4
PEOPLE
06.12.2023
Seeing and Being Seen in JEB’s Radical Archive of Lesbian Photography
by Svetlana Kitto
4
PERSPECTIVE
06.05.2023
In Built Environments, Planting Where It Matters Most
by Karrie Jacobs
3
PERSPECTIVE
05.30.2023
On the Home Front, a Latine Aesthetic’s Ordinary Exuberance
by Anjulie Rao
3
PERSPECTIVE
05.21.2023
For a Selfie (and Enlightenment), Make a Pilgrimage to Bridge No. 3
by Alexandra Lange
3
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
05.08.2023
The Building Materials of the Future Might Be Growing in Your Backyard
by Marianna Janowicz
3
BOOK REVIEW
05.01.2023
Moving Beyond the “Fetishisation of the Forest”
by Edwin Heathcote
2
ROUNDTABLE
04.24.2023
Is Craft Still Synonymous with the Hand?
by Tiffany Jow
2
PEOPLE
04.17.2023
A Historian Debunks Myths About Lacemaking, On LaceTok and IRL
by Julie Lasky
2
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
04.10.2023
How AI Helps Architects Design, and Refine, Their Buildings
by Ian Volner
2
PEOPLE
04.03.2023
Merging Computer and Loom, a Septuagenarian Artist Weaves Her View of the World
by Francesca Perry
1
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
03.27.2023
Words That Impede Architecture, According to Reinier de Graaf
by Osman Can Yerebakan
1
PEOPLE
03.20.2023
Painting With Plaster, Monica Curiel Finds a Release
by Andrew Russeth
1
PERSPECTIVE
03.13.2023
Rules and Roles in Life, Love, and Architecture
by Eva Hagberg
1
Roundtable
03.06.2023
A Design Movement That Pushes Beyond Architecture’s Limitations
by Tiffany Jow
0
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.07.2023
To Improve the Future of Public Housing, This Architecture Firm Looks to the Past
by Ian Volner
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
The Radical Potential of “Prime Objects”
by Glenn Adamson
0
PEOPLE
02.20.2023
Xiyadie’s Queer Cosmos
by Xin Wang
0
PEOPLE
02.13.2023
How Michael J. Love’s Subversive Tap Dancing Steps Forward
by Jesse Dorris
0
SHOW AND TELL
02.07.2023
Finding Healing and Transformation Through Good Black Art
by Folasade Ologundudu
0
BOOK REVIEW
02.13.2023
How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft
by Francesca Perry
0
ROUNDTABLE
02.27.2023
Making Use of End Users’ Indispensable Wisdom
by Tiffany Jow
0
PEOPLE
02.07.2023
The New Lessons Architect Steven Harris Learns from Driving Old Porsches
by Jonathan Schultz
0
PERSPECTIVE
02.07.2023
The Day Architecture Stopped
by Kate Wagner
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
The Overlooked Potential of Everyday Objects
by Adrian Madlener
0
ROUNDTABLE
02.07.2023
A Conversation About Generalists, Velocity, and the Source of Innovation
by Tiffany Jow
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
Using a Fungi-Infused Paste, Blast Studio Turns Trash Into Treasure
by Natalia Rachlin
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
BOOK REVIEW
11.25.2024
A Mind-Body Experience of Architecture, Delivered in a Photo

Hélène Binet’s images show how buildings are about so much more than looks.

Close-up black and white shot by Hélène Binet of an angel statue
Detail of an angel statue, by members of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s workshop, on Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome (2018). (Photo: Hélène Binet)


On the last page of Hélène Binet (Lund Humphries), a book of the photographer’s work released this past spring, an image, shot in Binet’s signature black-and-white format, depicts an installation by the late architect Zaha Hadid. The caption tells us that the photograph was made in 2000 at the Académie de France, located at Rome’s Villa Medici, and that the taut lines stretching across the frame are red twine.

In the foreground, a stone statue leans backward, away from its shadow, into the diffuse light of what might be an early afternoon sun, its eyes shrouded by a thicket of thread. The eyes are—or rather, would be—our point of access into the statue. In looking at them we would likely understand the sculpture as something like us. We would surmise something from the way the eyelids sat, whether the eyes were closed or open, and which way they pointed. We would connect.

In denying us that access, Binet declares her authority: She, not the content, shapes the image, as well as how we enter into it. And she introduces the element of abstraction—not totalizing, but powerful—leaving us to build the rest of the scene in our minds.

Black and white detail shot of the structure and angels of Gottfried Böhm’s Parish Church of St. Gertrude in Düsseldorf, Germany
Gottfried Böhm’s Parish Church of St. Gertrude in Düsseldorf, Germany (2020). (Photo: Hélène Binet)


Over the past three decades, Binet has become celebrated for her distinctive photographs of the built environment, as Marco Iuliano and Martino Stierli—the University of Liverpool School of Architecture’s master’s program director and the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of architecture and design, respectively—discuss in the essays that open the book. Binet employs a large-format camera and photosensitive film that she develops in her London darkroom: an analog method she started using in the early 1980s and has continued to embrace even as photography becomes increasingly digitized. She has photographed in-progress and historic structures, as well as well-known works by architects such as Le Corbusier and Peter Zumthor.

But Binet does not deal in typical portraits of buildings. She’s instead guided by, according to Stierli, a “phenomenological understanding of architecture.” That understanding—expressed formally by fragmentary photographs, often assembled into sequences that show material detail—has produced a body of work that captures the feeling of architecture, in addition to its appearance. Binet’s framing and arrangements invite viewers to imagine the obscured physical and sensorial aspects of a building: the smells, the textures, the temperatures, and the sounds around and underfoot.

Stierli locates this quality of Binet’s work across a tripartite “taxonomy of architectural photography,” which stems from the photographer’s own conception of her practice. The first branch consists of “commissions by contemporary architects with the objective of faithfully documenting their work,” the second of photos commissioned by architects interested in “Binet’s self-guided interpretation,” and the third of subjects she selects, “guided by her own interests and priorities.” “What all of these approaches have in common,” Stierli writes, “is the understanding that architecture cannot be reduced to a (photographic) image.”

It’s easiest to witness that conviction in work belonging to the third category, which includes studies made in the early 1980s of Sperlonga, Italy, the town of whitewashed stone where Binet lived with her family after they arrived in the 1960s from her native Switzerland; images of Hadrian’s villa shot in 2019, in which the sky recedes from foreground to background through an oval-shaped opening; and color shots, from 2018, of a garden’s walls in Suzhou, China, so textured yet one-dimensional that they might be mistaken for a Gerhard Richter canvas.

In these cases, it would have been impossible for the architect to be involved in the creation of the image—he is long dead—which grants Binet the freedom to make it as she sees fit. What’s interesting to glean from the book’s photographs—which are divided into the categories “traces,” “passage of light,” “at play,” “narratives,” “sequence,” and “abstraction”—is how the approach she developed within that freedom conditioned the work in the first two categories of Stierli’s taxonomy.

Black and white photo looking into the window of Atelier Peter Zumthor, in Switzerland
Atelier Peter Zumthor, in Switzerland (2008). (Photo: Hélène Binet)


Commissioned “documentary” photographs of Daniel Libeskind’s House Without Walls (1986) and Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station (1991) pull the viewer inward into an unfamiliar landscape. They omit context; they are almost all form. A triptych of Zumthor’s thermal baths in Vals (2006), created in Binet’s “symbiotic association” with the architect, suggests that architecture might be primarily composed of ephemeral planes of light and air, and less so of the physical elements chosen and placed by a designer.

Elsewhere, a series made at Gottfried Böhm’s St. Gertrude and St. Matthaüs parish church (2020)—the book does not specify whether these were made for a commission—distills the concrete buildings into planes that improbably twist and fold into themselves. Surely the artistic impulse behind these images comes from the same independence of vision that led Binet to make a photograph of Dimitris Pikionis’s paths at the Acropolis, 21 years after the architect’s death, which reads like an aerial shot of a tract of farmland.

Both Iuliano and Stierli stress the importance of Binet’s partiality to “incomplete” images like these. The distance that abstraction creates elicits a physical and psychic appreciation of her images, which double as reminders of architecture’s ability to condition our lives. Without Binet’s impulse toward abstraction, they suggest, there would not be enough room in her photographs for viewers to fill in those sensorial gaps. That impulse is a kind of generosity, and it is rooted in the photographer’s ability to move toward light and shadow, like that statue, not just with her eyes but with her whole body. The camera follows.