Atmosphere & obsession

What is the atmosphere of an office? How can that be determined and put into words in a way that is intersubjectively meaningful? Often it can’t. But pictures help.This becomes especially true when the site of meaning is completely foreign to the observer. Any pretense of verbalised knowledge vanishes upon hearing an incomprehensible language registered as sound, style and patterns. Message not received, just observed. I try to photograph with a similar spirit in mind. The job is to be attentive, not interpretive or discursive. Being there, and trying not to miss things is enough.

Atmosphere supplanted ideology for me when my thesis supervisor made me aware of the writings of Gerhot Böhme, Juhani Pallasmaa and of course Peter Zumthor. Scenography and architecture provide a space of encounter which is directed and purposeful without being read like a text - for all the deconstructionists and deconstructivists have tried! So much for the work of these designers who create spaces that evoke feelings and focus attention. But what about their place of work?

Is there anything of a designer's work in their workplace? This question has motivated me to photograph 335 studios in 26 cities in Asia, Europe and the Americas. It is bordering on an obsession and has something of the compulsive quality of the collector for this is no end in sight. But I am no closer to answering that question, beyond the word ‘sometimes’.

In the case of these studios, however, I would say it was closer to ‘most of the time,’ if not in fact always. The experience of photographing these studios has not only given me a second wind to continue this project which, though compulsive, is also hard work. It has renewed my faith in architecture. For there is nothing more dejecting than an architect’s studio which is really an office: rows and rows of computers where people could be tasked with anything. The atmosphere of the office is oddly liminal - the event horizon at the edge of the black hole of deadlines sucking away light and hope forever. Studios should be filled with models and drawings and renders and photographs, shouldn’t they? One hopes to see eager earnest groups of people problem-solving with techniques as old as civilisation as well as cutting-edge. Much of that was what I encountered in Japan, but this set of studios went one step further. For places like Atelier Tenjinyama were more of a duck than a decorated shed. They screamed not only their purpose but what Sontag called an erotics of art. You could feel the preferences of the architect. We are reminded that taste is a sense not a convention. The same is true for the ad hoc, open-ended collaborative artisanal investigations of coop Kitakagaya, Kengo Sato, and in different ways all of the participants in this project.

As images take up more and more of our time and imagination, it is tempting to argue against them. Words come as a relief in a world of constant snapping and recording. Why mediate experience? But I still think the midcentury architectural photographer Eric de Maré was right when he said that photography is an excellent way to appreciate architecture because doing it focuses your attention both in the instant and repeatedly over the course of a career. Hence sharing photography is an opportunity to share that focus, itself becoming an intersubjective experience.