Nestled away in some of Europe's most culture-rich cities are libraries that have stood the test of time. They are filled from floor to ceiling with books of all sorts, but the architecture of these buildings often speaks volumes about the time periods they were built in.
For the past few years, Chicago-based photographer Angie McMonigal has been working on a project titled Urban Quilt. Her goal is to capture her city's buildings as a patchwork of colors, textures, and materials.
Belin-based Julian Schulze is clearly a master of minimalism, a feat made all the more eye-catching and impressive when you consider the cultural clutter of our times. If you've been looking for minimalist inspiration, look no further.
Photographer Robert Götzfried's latest project captures a musical instrument that is unmatched in both its intricate design and its colossal size: the pipe organ.
While researching locations for a series on Russian Palace Architecture, photographer David Burdeny discovered beauty in an unexpected place: the metro. Russia's Stalin-era metro stations stunned Burdeny, leaving him no choice but to photograph them for his 2014-2015 series RUSSIA: A Bright Future.
If you drive around in industrial areas, you may have noticed massive cooling towers across the landscape, the tall, open-topped, cylindrical concrete towers that are used for cooling water or condensing steam for industrial uses.
Russian photographer Ekaterina Busygina has published a beautiful set of photos from her travels to the province of Guangdong, China. It's a look at how ultra-modern cities are rising from an ancient province, as seen through the eyes of an architectural photographer.
Sebastian Weiss is an architectural photographer based in Hamburg, Germany. His passion is finding beautiful shapes, patterns, and colors in the architecture of buildings found across Europe.
Castello di Sammezzano (Non Plus Ultra) has to be the most beautiful castle in Italy. Often called abandoned, it's not actually so; every once in a while it is opened to the public for a guided tour and volunteers take care of the place. At the moment it is being auctioned to the highest bidder.
Once this was the most glorious building of Romania but since 1990 it’s been abandoned and slowly but surely falling apart. The building is now listed as a historic monument by the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs of Romania.
For his project titled "Always Look Up," Hong Kong-based photographer Andy Yeung visited particular tall buildings around the world and pointed his camera straight up at the sky.
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.