Book Preview: Urban Geometry celebrates the abstract beauty of contemporary architecture
Are you familiar with ‘blobitecture’? It’s a term that describes a shift in contemporary architecture towards organic, curvy and sometimes bulbous forms, epitomised by buildings like Zaha Hadid’s Galaxy SOHO in Beijing. That, and other Hadid designs, feature in Andrés Gallardo Albajar’s new book, Urban Geometry (Hoxton Mini Press), a visual journey through some of the world’s most blobby blobitecture, and more.
Assembled over seven years, Andrés’s images are of 21st-century architecture from 20 countries and were captured through a process of walking around, getting lost and exploring. As such, the line-up includes random apartment blocks by unknown architects alongside blockbuster buildings by ‘starchitects’ you’ll recognise. Or, at least you would do if it weren’t for Andrés’s signature treatment of his subjects, one that hones in on details of line, colour, form and shape, rendering the buildings in their abstract beauty.
And it’s not just blobs. There are sharp lines, geometric arrangements and angular silhouettes in the form of COBE’s Frederiksvej Kindergarten and BIG + JDS’s VM houses in Copenhagen, as well as unidentified structures from Milan to Seoul, Taipei to Hamburg. Taken together, the images capture the breadth and scope of modern architecture, where technology and progressive building techniques have made the previously unthinkable now possible.
In her introduction, Rachel Segal Hamilton quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: ‘Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music,’ explaining that: ‘[T]he shots in Urban Geometry seem to rise and fall in their own symphonic flow. Their sometimes minimalist composition reminds us of the shared mathematical roots of both architecture and music. There are some truly spectacular individual examples of architecture celebrated here, but more than that, the series calls on us, wherever we are, to tune into the buildings and urban planning that we might not otherwise notice but nonetheless create the spatial soundtrack to our everyday lives.’
Photography by Andrés Gallardo Albajar, courtesy of Hoxton Mini Press
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