Woodscapes | Erieta Attali on Kengo Kuma

Woodscapes | Erieta Attali on Kengo Kuma

Erieta Attali’s photographic tasks develop over lengthy dedicated years and thru many, many  photos. But for this, her second exhibition on the Byzantine Museum, she has distilled the profound  dialogue she entertains with structure right into a collection of fifteen pictures. These are photos of  layered perceptions that seize the very essence of her strategy to structure and pictures as  complementary experiences of shifting opticality.

Not like industrial pictures produced on deadline to doc a not too long ago accomplished constructing captured as a designed object, Attali’s artwork is born of a sustained relationship with the whole physique of labor of a single designer trying at all times to seize the very essence of the atmospheres that recur from work to work. Of the handful of relationships that Attali has honed in nicely over 1 / 4 century as a photographer, none has been extra reciprocal than that with the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. For the melding of designed house and setting is the target of each architect and photographer.

In his combos of the engineering feat of big planes of glass with modern  interpretations of conventional Japanese picket structure, Kengo crafts areas that fluctuate visually  and experientially within the altering valences of pure settings. His works have an nearly preternatural  resonance with Attali’s photographic follow. By way of the glass lenses of her analog cameras she seeks  to seize the interpenetration of discovered and artifical environments, merging laborious and mirrored  surfaces into layered photos that document ambiance because the very substance of the artwork of Kuma’s  structure.  

It’s no shock that Attali remembers her first encounter with Kuma’s work on the flip of the  millennium as a strong second of elective affinity. Satirically sufficient she had first seen Kuma’s work  by way of the medium of one other photographer’s picture, a picture of the architect’s seminal early work  the Water/Glass Home in Atami, Japan. In that constructing vacillating transparency and opacity turned the  veritable constructing blocks of structure whilst recording them reworked Attali’s photographic  sensibility. The encounter with the constructing at first hand on a visit to Japan in 2001 was a strong  second of elective affinity. Captivated by the sense that in Kuma’s work she had discovered the trendy  architectural equal of the connection between setting and constructing, panorama and structure,  she had been exploring in years of pictures of archaeological websites, Attali skilled Kuma’s work  as a turning level, focusing her lens on the insertion of the brand new into historic settings. As she recounts in  a revealing interview with historian/critic Ariel Genandt, the encounter was transformative: “What  fascinated me within the Water/Glass Home was that the constructing is skilled like atmospheric  situations: when inside it, one feels a part of the panorama…. My encounter with the home … helped me  crystalize a specific photographic notion the place structure and panorama are steady.”  

It is among the nice myths of avant-garde glass and metal structure that tumbler disappears  permitting a complete transparency by which the attention occupies the inside lengthy earlier than the physique would possibly comply with.  Already as one in every of Kuma’s heroes, the German avant garde pioneer Mies van der Rohe realized in radical  unrealized designs for all glass skyscrapers in Twenties Berlin, glass adjustments frequently from close to complete  transparency to just about black opacity, with each nuance of reflectivity and translucency in between.  Kuma’s structure has developed in making these very vacillations into the veritable constructing blocks of  an structure by which the crafting of ambiance, the staging of sunshine results, the merging with nature  as elementary as the selection of supplies and the answer of engineering points. However it’s exactly the  qualities shared by Kuma’s and Attali’s palettes that render these pictures all of the extra advanced, as  Attali patiently builds by way of her lens the very experiences that Kuma levels in building of  ephemeral atmospheres by way of engineered glass and timber.

Exhibition Textual content: Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of artwork historical past within the Division of Artwork Historical past and Archaeology at Columbia College, NYC.
Exhibition Design: Tasos Roidis, Architect, Assistant Professor, TUM, Munich.

This occasion was submitted by an ArchDaily person. If you would like to submit an occasion, please use our “Submit a Occasion” kind. The views expressed in bulletins submitted by ArchDaily customers don’t essentially replicate the views of ArchDaily.