Architect x Architects

Introduction

As a student of architecture, architects themselves have always fascinated me. Each one has a signature: a way of detailing, a material palette, a geometry you can spot from across the street. This experiment asks what happens when two of those signatures collide. Every pair here is two people who never worked together — often two who never could have — and the brief given to both is the same house: remote, off grid, no road and no power line, standing in a landscape that is taking it back.

Each is one photograph rather than a set of details. An earlier run made six tight crops per pair and they read as renders of a wall; a single establishing shot has to show the whole building, which is the only way to see whether the two signatures actually met.

Two rounds, forty-eight houses. The first reaches back to the moderns and the regionalists — Ando, Barragán, Bawa, Doshi, Bo Bardi, Fathy; the second pairs the Pritzker generation and the starchitects, where the signatures are louder and the collisions are harder to resolve.

Prompt

"Magnificent architectural photograph of an entire remote off-grid house that fuses [Architect A] — as in [Building A] — with [Architect B], as in [Building B]. Wide establishing landscape shot showing the full house, roofline to ground foundation, nothing cropped or cut off. [A's signature], interleaved with [B's signature], so that no single element reads as belonging to only one architect; the two halves meet across [the divide]. The house stands on [the site], completely self-sufficient — solar, rainwater, no road, no power line, no neighbouring building. [Vegetation] grow hard against the walls and reclaim the base of the house. First light, low raking sun, long shadows. Camera at eye level, house centered, wide-angle lens, corrected straight verticals. Architectural photography, tack sharp focus, natural light only, photoreal, physically based materials."

TADAO ANDO X LUIS BARRAGAN

1 / 48