Bauprojekt — Photo production
Architectural photography: documenting a construction project from the site up. Construction documentation of a renovation at shell stage. The house was…
Construction documentation of a renovation at shell stage. The house was photographed at the moment when everything is still visible: the exposed roof structure with dark beams above freshly plastered white, a brick spiral staircase without a balustrade, brick walls that will later disappear, the courtyard between the new terraced houses with wheelbarrows on half-laid paving.
A building site has a value that only appears later. What looks self-evident today is no longer accessible once the work is finished: the brick core of the spiral stair gets plastered, the beams disappear behind plasterboard, and nobody can later show how the house is built. So these pictures are not marketing material but evidence — for the client, the architect, and anyone who wants to know in ten years what lies behind the wall.
That determines the handling of tidiness. Nothing that belongs to the work is cleared away. The wheelbarrows stand in the middle of the courtyard, the tools lie where they lie, the half-laid paving stays half laid. A tidied building site looks like a finished house with parts missing; a used one looks like work.
Photographically a shell is a contrast problem. Window openings with no curtain or shading are several stops brighter than the interior, and against the light a reveal becomes a white surface. So the work is done at a time of day when no direct sun falls into the openings, and the exposure follows the brightest window.
And the courtyard frame stands centered and symmetrical between the two rows of houses. In a terrace development the symmetry is the plan, and an oblique standpoint would have turned a piece of planning into a street.
- Discipline
- Architektur
