Visual Tectonics: Observing the World Through an Architect’s Lens

Photography is an invaluable tool in the understanding and appreciation of our built and natural environments. Former Foster + Partners architect Michael Elkan has been capturing both structures and landscapes with his camera throughout his career. In this special feature for +Plus, he walks us through a selection of his landscapes; images that draw on and reflect his training and perspective as an architect and which, at the same time, seek to highlight the astounding beauty and increasing fragility of our natural world.

Much has been written about the design rationale of the IBM Pilot Headquarters, a seminal project in the studio’s oeuvre. On first seeing that horizontal ribbon of frameless glass reflecting the surrounding landscape, I was stunned by its essential minimalism.

My student snapshots of the practice’s work had a didactic intent. I hoped to record the buildings’ architectural qualities: conceptual transparency and systems legibility. The images of IBM expose these ideas through a focus on the glass façade and its material contradiction: it is at once reflective and transparent, here multiplying the treescape while also revealing the structural and interior systems.

Visually communicating architectural ideas through photography is essential to the process of design, construction and completion.

While working at Foster Associates, I noticed that visually communicating architectural ideas through photography was essential throughout the process of design, construction and completion. This was evident in the office’s comprehensive and systematically curated 35mm slide library, which was in constant use.

I also realised that a camera can be a time machine. The photos I took of the IBM headquarters and the Fred Olsen buildings captured unrepeatable moments. I would now be hard-pressed to identify the site of the Fred Olsen terminal in the former Millwall Docks – the building was sadly demolished in the early 1980s. The legacy we have consists primarily of photographs, together with our collective memory, informed by drawings, articles and interviews.

Architects can learn much from observing the forces at play in their environments – from weather and climate to flora and fauna – and their effects on the natural tectonic structures within them. In Arizona, tectonic processes forming the landscape operate on varying timescales, ranging from millions of years to mere days; the building and erosion of mountain ranges, the carving of canyons and the daily reconfiguration of wind-blown sand dunes. As an architect attuned to the time-related processes of design, construction and entropy in building systems, I found myself as interested in these grand American landscapes, and the natural processes working through time to form and change them, as I was the architectural and urban projects I’d set out to document.

Geological formations are often described in architectural terms: slabs, walls, towers, bridges, arches, spires and buttresses.

It's unsurprising, therefore, that geological formations are often described in architectural terms: slabs, walls, towers, bridges, arches, spires and buttresses. And architects often look to nature for inspiration. Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at JFK, New York (1962) – captured on a rainy dawn just before flying back to London – adopts the form of an eagle landing at high speed, frozen in time with its talons and wings outspread. I later realised I’d composed this image from the same viewpoint as iconic black and white photographs of the newly opened terminal, shot by Ezra Stoller or Balthazar Korab, an architect and photographer embedded in Saarinen’s studio.

Korab described himself as ‘an architect with a passion for nature’s lessons and man’s interventions,’ and so it is unsurprising that, decades apart, we were drawn to capturing angles of the TWA Terminal that appear especially organic and geological. When viewed alongside my photograph of a desert slot canyon in Arizona, for example, these parallels with natural forms are particularly evident. There is an organic quality to the concrete forms; they resonate not only with the visceral quality of a bird of prey in flight but also with some of the tectonic phenomena that slowly shape the seemingly immovable structures I saw in the desert.

Saarinen, it seems, was also aware of the power that the monumental had alongside the more fleeting symbolism of the formal flight metaphor: ‘To some people it looked like a bird in flight,’ he explained, ‘but this was really coincidental … the last thing we ever thought about.’ Instead, he appears more concerned with its potential to resonate across the centuries. Reacting to the emergence of the monumental concrete forms during construction, Saarinen wrote to his wife: ‘I think it would make a beautiful ruin, like the Baths of Caracalla.’

An understanding of the natural processes that form a landscape helps shape the visual narrative in my environmental imagery.

My approach to photographing landscapes is similar to that of capturing buildings. When constructing a visual narrative as an architectural photographer, after first listening to the architect discuss the conceptual ideas underpinning the project, I spend time with the building, contemplating its overall form and structure, materiality and environmental context. My aim is to convey to the viewer something of the sensory experience of being present within the building. I look for details that speak of the coordination of systems, components and materials; this is the intimate scale at which we physically interact with buildings.

Similarly, an understanding of the natural processes that form a landscape helps shape the visual narrative in my environmental imagery. In the wilderness, I aim to impart to the viewer a visceral sense of being there. As well as communicating scale and space, this includes capturing elements and processes that demonstrate the physical forces at work in these environments, whether wind, water, ice, light or human intervention.

As an architect, I am naturally drawn to the tectonic forms of giant icebergs, and they have become a frequent subject of my photography. My images play with scale and depth of field in an attempt to translate their massive size and slow but unrelenting movement into a static and two-dimensional photograph. The images of the icebergs off the coast in Nordbugt speak of the constantly changing equilibrium between the iceberg’s mass and the weight of water it displaces, along with the mystery of the invisible 90 per cent below the surface. The floating debris in the image of the isolated tabula iceberg in Scoresbysund is evidence that it is actively shedding its ice and changing form as the waterline undercuts its cliff edges.

Photography is able to make a startling record of the profusion of massive icebergs in the fjord, evidence of accelerating glacial flow off the land into the ocean, which is contributing to a rise in sea levels. At the Bartlett in the early 1970s, we were already becoming aware of emissions-driven climate change and the dangers of environmental degradation. It became clear that the architectural profession had a responsibility and opportunity to help mitigate the impending crisis. I was particularly influenced by the ideas of the Scottish landscape architect Ian McHarg in Design with Nature (1969), and by the inventor, theorist and polymath Richard Buckminster Fuller – known as Bucky – and his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969). It was inspiring, then, to see Norman Foster collaborating with Bucky and hear him describe how concerns for environmental stewardship were informing his conceptual thinking and underpinning the work of Foster Associates. At the time, the Gomera Regional Planning Study of 1975 presented a self-sustaining masterplan for the declining island (part of the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain) that raised issues of sustainability long before the ‘green’ agenda was being addressed worldwide.

Like all photography, iceberg images capture unique moments in time. But, while affording us this opportunity to record singular and unrepeatable moments in an iceberg’s lifecycle, the static representations also offer – like the rings of a tree – a legible depiction of the iceberg’s history.

During the expedition, on-board glaciologists described the iceberg formation process, explaining how they are constantly changing shape and orientation in the water as sections break away. Each time, the centre of mass shifts and the iceberg rotates, sometimes capsizing. These movements leave a unique record on each iceberg showing where the water line had previously melted the ice. Seen in two dimensions, these imprints become clearly visible as lines and strata etched into the ice’s surface, sculpting its form.

In Greenland, the kinetic and changing nature of two worlds – the natural and the manmade – are colliding with potentially tragic consequences.

The shifting nature of icebergs in response to environmental forces has echoes in our built environment, also. We have become accustomed to seeing static photos of architecture in print or online. Photographs of well-known buildings – like Korab or Stoller’s – have become embedded in our iconography. However, buildings are never static. They are continually changing in response to how they are used and subject to changes in their environment. Every time we visit a familiar building, it is a new experience. We are sometimes disorientated by how a well-known building has changed since it was first photographed and published.

Before departing Greenland, our expedition was hosted by the most northern Inuit community on the east coast, overlooking the Kangertittivaq fjord. Here, the kinetic and changing nature of two worlds – the natural and the manmade – are colliding with potentially tragic consequences. Like Gomera in the 1970s, the area is at risk of real decline, the natural evolution of the place and its architecture has been overcome by an acceleration of ecological change. Local hunters have made a living here from whale, seal and polar bear hunting for generations. However, this traditional cultural economy is now under threat as rising temperatures make winter sea-ice less reliable for dog-sled travel and hinder the seasonal migration of polar bears. Melting permafrost is also causing buildings in the village to subside and become unusable.

The work of influential Canadian photographer, Edward Burtynsky, has shown that environmental photography can be beautiful while at the same time present a troubling hidden reality.

While I was initially attracted to the polar regions by the seductive beauty and architectural grandeur of these remote landscapes, today images of the glaciers, icebergs and communities that live with and among them, embody a serious message that cannot be ignored. Nature photography in the polar regions is now more than an aesthetic indulgence or a record of human adventure, it is an essential conduit for a troubling narrative and conveys an urgent warning.

The vast majority of the Antarctic continent is untouched by human activity, aside from a few scattered polar research stations. Despite their compositional similarities, the photographs I took of giant icebergs off the West Antarctic Peninsula and the rusty remains of an old whale oil refinery on Deception Island illustrate the stark contrasts to be found when industrial activity collides with pristine wilderness. Even the penguins seem disorientated.

Many icebergs populating the ocean off the Antarctic Peninsula originate as glacial seracs, calved from broad glaciers as they tumble down steep, rocky terrain into the sea. As in it did with the capture of structures since demolished, such as the Fred Olsen buildings in the Millwall Docks, the camera can act as a visual time machine for our natural world. Across time, photographs can record imperceptible environmental changes; the gradual flow and shrinking of glaciers over a long period.

One evening on our return voyage summed up the multi-sensory drama that only Antarctica can deliver. The helmsman on the bridge was steering the ship across the strait between two islands, open to the wild Southern Ocean. There we encountered an expanse of pack ice resembling giant paving slabs rolling in the ocean swell. Gaps between the hunks of ice opened and slammed shut with each passing wave. Disoriented seals and penguins slithered and scampered from floe to floe. In the middle distance, the massive remnant of a tabular berg, bathed in golden storm light, slowly rocked as the ocean swells slammed into it, throwing up sprays of sea water.