architecture

Between the 1950s and 1980s, large-scale residential districts were built in and around Paris, France, to provide affordable housing for a booming population. Known as "grands ensembles," these sprawling complexes were sometimes poorly planned and constructed, causing some to have many empty units as residents found other places to live. Others, however, remain populated and are bustling with life.

In both cases, there are senior citizens who call the housing projects home. For his project Souvenir d'un Futur, photographer Laurent Kronental documented these strangely beautiful buildings and the seniors who live in them.

Back in 2002, photographer Christopher Herwig embarked on a long-distance bike ride from London, England, to St. Petersburg, Russia -- a journey that spanned over 1,500 miles. The trip was also a photo ride, as Herwig challenged himself to capture one good photo per hour. As he biked through former Soviet countries, Herwig began noticing how unique many of the bus stops were.

12 years later, those bus stops are now the focus of a new photo project and book by Herwig that's titled Soviet Bus Stops.

Over the past several years, Chicago-based journalist Victoria Lautman has traveled through India numerous times, visiting over 120 ancient stepwells that were once used to access water during dry months. Lautman has been shooting photos to document the beautiful architecture of the sites, creating records of the structures as they're slowly being lost to decay.

This photograph may look like some kind of computer-generated artist rendering of a futuristic space, but it's actually a high-key architectural photograph of the beautiful public library of the city of Stuttgart, Germany. Called the Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart, the library's new building features a simple cube-like design and a minimalist white interior, and it opened its doors in 2011.

Gilles Alonso is a 43-year-old professional architectural photographer based in Lyon, France. For his recent project "Symétrie du Spectacle" ("Symmetry Show"), Alonso visited a large number of grand theaters and photographed the hall from center stage. The images capture the beautiful symmetry and grandeur of these spaces.

Here's something super random that caught our attention: the new stadium for the Atlanta Falcons football team features an innovative roof design that seems to be inspired by the world of photography: it opens and closes like an 8-blade camera lens aperture.

Then & Now style photo series are anything but uncommon, but what if the "then" you want to compare to "now" happened before the invention of photography? You would think that would be a deal-breaker, but one computer graphics manager and gaming enthusiast found a way around this issue.

For his 'Then & Now' series, Damien Hypolite printed out screenshots from the game Assassin's Creed Unity -- which is based during the French Revolution -- and then went around holding them up against modern-day Paris.

When Geneva-based photographer Alex Teuscher found himself in New York City for 10 days this last April, he tried to capture some of the most iconic, tourist-packed locations on the globe from a new angle. It's a testament to his skill as a photographer that he succeeded to such a great extent.

The resulting shots have been compiled into a series he's calling "New York City: Above as Below," and consist of a mix of street (below) and architectural (above) photography that's best described as 'moody.'

Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji is a 23-year-old physics student at Mazandaran University, and yet, you've probably seen his photography floating around the Internet as of late.

That's because, when he's not studying, Ganji is capturing truly stunning photographs of the colorful, architecturally gorgeous interiors of historical Mosques throughout the Middle East.

Every so often, something comes across our desks that makes us do a bit of a double-take. This was one of those moments.

What you see above is a building shaped like a compact camera. What is the building used for? That's where it gets interesting. It's not a camera store or an electronics repair shop, it's a public restroom... seriously.

In a world dominated by too many photos and too little photography, one of the pieces of advice we stumble across fairly often from masters of this craft is to simply "slow down." Andy Romanoff is one such master, and his project "Seeing the PDC" -- for which he spent 6 months photographing the Pacific Design Center in LA -- is a testament to slowing down and really seeing what it is you're trying to capture.

Susan Dobson is best known for her work on suburban culture, architecture, and landscape. Her photographs have been exhibited across Canada, as well as in the United States, United Kingdom, Belgium, China, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. Her work was included in the Canadian Biennial titled Builders at the National Gallery of Canada in 2012, and she was a contributing artist to the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. Dobson is Associate Professor at the University of Guelph.

Susan Dobson's series "Sense of an Ending" gives us look at architecture, decay and a literal sense of ending -- reminding us that eventually everything around us will become rubble. Through the use of composite imagery, Dobson crafts scenes frozen in melancholy.

As the overcast skies in each piece forebode cold and rain, and as the architectural styles have begun to weather and collapse, these images, while fiction, portray the inevitable truth of not just homes and buildings, but perhaps cities and civilizations as well.

Every architecture 101 class in college would do well to start off the semester with the above time-lapse by Luke Shepard. Over the course of three months he travelled to 36 cities in 21 countries to capture some of Europe's most beautiful architecture on camera. This time-lapse, titled Nightvision, is the result.

We recently introduced you to some gorgeous wide-angle photos of the interior of La Sagrada Família that were taken by photographer Clement Celma. These photos revealed Celma's love of gorgeous architecture, but they're far from his only expression of it.

Another of his photo series, called Mes Petite Planètes, literally translated "My Little Planets," takes a more interactive and panoramic approach, exploring beautiful architecture from all angles.

A couple of weeks ago, we shared some great wide-angle captures by photographer Clement Celma of architect Antoni Gaudi's famous La Sagrada Família. An architectural marvel, the photos showed how the basilica is as stunning inside as it is outside.

Swiss photographer Cyril Bays' photos of La Sagrada give us another straight-up look at the incredible design of the basilica, only Bays' photos make a different point: La Sagrada Família is as beautiful in black and white as it is in color.

Take a look at photographer Jared Lim's portfolio, and many of his photographs might look to you like they're the product of liberal Photoshop Clones Stamp usage. They feature repeating shapes, colors, and patterns found in various cities' urban environments.

Photographer Clement Celma has an entire section of his site dedicated to photographing the architecture of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí. And when it comes to the architecture of Gaudí, nothing is quite as stunning as the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família.

For his series of photos entitled Gaudí Architecture, Celma went to La Sagrada Família with his camera and snapped some breathtaking wide-angle photos of the architecture inside.

Relics of the Future is a short documentary that follows Toronto-based fine art photographer Toni Hafkenscheid as he explores the world of once-futuristic architecture through his tilt-shift lens. In the 1960's, these buildings and monuments were considered "visions of the future;" now they stand, as one interviewee put it, "on that fence between futuristic and nostalgic."

It's always interesting when a photographer manages to show the artistic or beautiful side of something that you otherwise might pay zero attention to. Beat up baseballs, diverse seed specimens, and even the view of Hong Kong looking straight up have all made for interesting photo series we've shared in the past.

Japanese photographer Miha Tamura's website serves that same function, only her subject is escalators.

When photographer Callum Cooper moved from Melbourne, Australia to London, England, one of the things that caught his eye was the uniformity (or "conformity") seen in the city's residential areas. Along a street, multiple buildings would have exactly the same architecture, and if it weren't for the minor differences in the facades, some of them can hardly be distinguished from one another.

Cooper then came up with the idea of exploring this phenomenon using photographs -- photos that would become a "structuralist film."

With a population of over 7 million people packed into an area of 426 square miles, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world. As with other places where development cannot expand horizontally, apartment buildings tend to get taller and taller in order to provide living space for all the inhabitants.

German photographer Michael Wolf decided to capture this population density through a series of photographs studying the architecture of these high rises. The project is titled "Architecture of Density."

Portland, Oregon-based photographer and visual artist Jim Kazanjian is like the M. C. Escher of architectural photography. His art pieces appear to be photos of some of the strangest looking buildings found in the weirdest locations, but the reason the images are so dreamlike is because they came from Kazanjian's mind rather than the real world.

Reno, Nevada-based photographer Art Domagala was recently involved with an interesting photo shoot in which size and scale played a bit part. He was tasked with photographing bridge inspectors working on the Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge, officially known as the Mike O'Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.

Standing 840 feet (260 meters) above the Colorado River, the $114 million bridge is the second-highest in the United States. Domagala's photographs capture the sheer size by showing how small the workers are in comparison.

French photographer Fabrice Fouillet is interested in churches built after World War II. Specifically, he's fascinated with how many of the buildings created in the 50s, 60s, and 70s deviated from architectural traditions built up over the centuries, and instead took on fresh new looks and radically different styles. Fouillet has traveled across Europe and the world in search of these churches, which were looked down upon when they were built but praised for their looks now. His project is titled Corpus Christi.

Look around on the web, and you'll find plenty of photographs of Google's colorful offices in Mountain View (AKA the Googleplex) and around the world. Finding images shot from inside the company's tightly-guarded data centers is much harder, since only a handful of employees are allowed to roam the spaces where the "web lives." However, Google recently invited photographer Connie Zhou inside a number of its high-tech data centers. Gorgeous photographs resulted -- images that show incredible scale, mind-numbing repetition, and quirky colors.

Cameras these days are smart enough to recognize the faces found inside photographs and label them with names. What if the same kind of recognition could be done for the locations of photographs? What if, instead of using satellite geodata, the camera could simply recognize where it is by the contents of the photographs?

That's what research being done at Carnegie Mellon University and INRIA/Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris may one day lead to. A group of researchers have created a computer program that can identify the distinctive architectural elements of major cities by processing street-level photos.

Here’s a great behind the scenes video with architectural photographer Mike Butler that’ll …

In addition to being an internationally successful musician, Moby is also an avid …

Remember those beautiful macro photos that showed the inside of musical instruments as giant rooms? Sao Paolo, Brazil-based photographer Valentino Fialdini did something similar, except instead of musical instruments he used small chambers created out of LEGO blocks. With some clever lighting and camera trickery, Fialdini captured the tiny rooms and corridors as to look like giant architectural spaces.

Here’s a brief video in which Los Angeles-based photographer Mike Kelley shares his …

Falling Apart is a series by Japanese photographer Yuya Takeda that consists of synthetic photographs of apartment buildings. It's reminiscent of Andreas Gursky's sweeping architectural photographs.