I like taking photos of architecture almost exclusively in black and white. To me, architecture is about the interplay of different shapes and surfaces and materials that create a structure’s texture or skin. While certainly color can be a part of this interplay, I like how only a gray scale tends to highlight the surfaces and lines that otherwise might be obfuscated by color. The absence of color forces you to focus on a structure’s surfaces and shapes in their rawest forms. You are not distracted by a purple door or red canopies or a yellow coat of paint or the salmon colored stone facade.
I love how a collection of buildings in the right light transforms into a compelling landscape.
Buildings are indispensable parts of our everyday lives. They are almost always in our lines of sight. So we can be excused for taking their designs for granted. But we are a remarkably creative species when it comes to our structures. A creativity not just evidenced by opera houses or really tall buildings or really long bridges or really compelling monuments, but in the everyday buildings we enter, exit or pass by everyday. (I would probably exclude most urban renewal projects from the sixties and early seventies that destroyed compelling architecture and replaced it with disposable, depressing and bland government mandated buildings. Other tragic examples abound, of course. New York City’s Pennsylvania Station comes to mind.)
If I hadn’t sucked at math and truly hated it, I might have pursued architecture.
