architecture

Photog Goes in Search of the Architecture that Was Once the “Vision of the Future”

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."

One Photographer’s Mission to Show Off the World’s Most Interesting Escalators

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.

A Visual Journey That Shows the Cookie-Cutter Facades of Homes in London

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."

Eye-Popping Photographs of Hong Kong High-Rise Apartment Buildings

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."

Fantastic Imaginary Buildings Created by Splicing Together Found Photos

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.

Bridge Inspectors Being Dwarfed by the Second Highest Bridge in the US

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.

Photographs of Post-War Churches and Their Non-Traditional Designs

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.

Google Lets Photographer Into Secretive Data Centers, Beautiful Photos Ensue

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.

Location Recognition for Photographs by Looking at Architecture

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.

LEGO Rooms Photographed to Look like Full-Sized Spaces

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.

Epic Gursky-esque Photos of Apartments

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.