The Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication is presenting at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris from April 4 to August 26, 2012, the exhibition Flow. When movement shapes our towns.

Four of my Toledo La Granja escalator photographs will be published in the exhibition catalog  and included in various interactive tactile screens along an exhibition route that offers the visitor to follow the development and transformation over the centuries of the urban pattern and the buildings that comprise it as the direct result of people’s movements through the environment.

The photographs will also be displayed on large format panels placed during the first two months of the exhibition at the entry gates of Paris Est and Austerlitz train stations.

You can learn more about the exhibition here.

The Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Alonso, Balaguer y Arquitectos Asociados Barcelona Las Arenas renovation project has been awarded with one of the Civic Trust 2012 Awards in their international projects section.

The awards encourage excellence in architectural design and the contribution to the transformation of the built environment to projects developed in Great Britain or by British firms worldwide. The Civic Trust Awards are the largest recognition scheme in the field of architecture in Europe and were first established in 1959.

As one of the credited firms in the development of Las Arenas project by their authors, the awards organization acknowledges my contribution to the project and confers me the right to display its seal of quality in my corporate communications this year.

Las Arenas photographs are one of my most widely diffused and recognized commissions that I have photographed to this day and some of the project images are individually some of my most published ones in blogs, newspapers, magazines, books and catalogs of architecture.

Knowing that the effort and the will with which these photographs were created are rewarded with so much gratitude from both the authors of the project and by the organizations that internationally distinguish them proves to be very exciting and extremely encouraging today.

I have added some new links to three content management platforms on architecture that I have been following for some time now: Afasia, HIC and Subtilitas. These are three blog pages that give a quite important role to the photographic image as a support for debate and discussion on a wide range of architectural projects all over the world.

The photographs in the three platforms are very carefully edited and selected with the aim to interpret and not merely documenting the projects depicted and, from this precise starting point, to propose a necessary exchange of ideas with the visitors who read the posts.

The force with which the three platforms spread the photographs they show and their discussion contents on the internet and how its communicative power is multiplied through new Google searches and references in RSS, Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin reaffirm the indispensable evidence to establish a firm presence on the internet as the essential basis of the visibility of the work of any architectural photographer.

A mere catalog of photographs on the internet is far from being enough to present an architectural photographer’s work today: new and interesting contents, a fluid exchange of ideas and a resolute differentiation are now vital.

I feel very happy to increasingly see my photographs published in many magazines digital editions that are now showing their contents through reading applications for iPad, tablets and smartphones.

The two last I have found are two Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Alonso, Balaguer y Arquitectos Asociados Barcelona Las Arenas renovation project photographs -one of them in a beautifully saturated double page- appearing in an article by Jeff L. Brown for the January 2012 Civil Engineering issue, the journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

I do find it very gratifying to see that my images work so well in such reader interactive applications, quite interesting and fast growing apps -so fast that one of these applications actually advertises itself as “the world’s largest newsstand” … – and knowing that a reference magazine for a highly specialized professional field such as American engineering is giving that much relevance to my photographs.

All Barcelona Las Arenas photographs were made in order to serve both the project editorial communication as well as the two architectural firms that created and developed the project corporate communication.

Las Arenas renovation has been shortlisted among the finalists for the 2012 Civic Trust Awards to be awarded next March 2nd in Edinburgh. Much of the project presentation is based on my photographs and I very much hope that both the project and my photos can gain the recognition of such an important British professional organization.

Diagonal Zero Zero tower powerfully strucks me because of the elegant way the building faces its surrounding urban landscape and the way her skin purely white crosses the blue saturated sky in all its glory.

My photographs of this project interpret it according to the idea of representing the kind presence of a fascinating white sculpture that extraordinarily rises above the city that decidedly deserves to be contemplated with great tranquility and attention.

It is because of the combination of this strong and yet beautifully suggestive presence of Diagonal Zero Zero that I have decided to use a photograph of this project -the only photograph in wich the tower faces the clouds of a clearing storm- as the background of my greeting card for 2012.

Let me please wish you all the best for next year 2012. I do hope to see you here again very soon: Happy New Year.

I do not think to be mistaken if I say that I learned the technique and developed my vision to be an architectural photographer by carrying a large format camera and shooting black and white film.

Of all the films I remember using, I specially remember Kodak Tmax 100 sheet film and the incredibly fabulous Polaroid Type 55 film … It’s been a long time since then and I do surely know now that I did not express myself through black and white images again because I was not able to find a professional application where to fit them and because no digital process could persaude me of evoking the strong presence of the properly exposed and processed silver emulsion.

It was not until I began using Nik Software Silver Efex Pro 2 when I finally discovered that I could feel comfortable again exploring new black and white frames and capturing the energy of the organic simplicity of the picture elements that I constantly seek.

The Berga, Barcelona, Vilà House photographs for architect Agustí Costa gave me the opportunity to add a new meaning to my assignment color images by learning from his comments about how he was inspired by Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in generating his own project.

I had recently seen Julius Shulman’s Kaufmann House photographs for Richard Neutra and I thought It was the time for me to propose some Vilà House black and white pictures just to experiment and see what happened.

And I could not be happier with the results. Working in black and white has nothing to do with nostalgia: it is pure simplicity and power condensed.

Barcelona Open House has included among the projects that will be visited in its 2011 edition the two 34 Carme and 66 Sant Pere més Alt streets rehabilitation projects that I have photographed for his authors, architects Agustí Costa and Josep Llobet.

Both projects are interventions that raise from a particularly uninhibited dialogue with the preexisting dwellings to propose new and imaginative solutions in domestic space.

Carme and Sant Pere més Alt projects can be visited on October 22 and 23: you can read more details on the organization website.

Barcelona Open House is part of Open House World Wide and is one of the cities like London, New York, Chicago, Rome and Helsinki promoting through this initiative architecture as a cultural value to learn in a social and interactive way to improve  debate and exchange of points of view and the collective identity of the inhabitants of the cities.

I have recently added some new pieces to my photo equipment that I think they will decisively transform my workflow to make it much more productive and efficient. There are two that I specially think they are now essential and among the most profitable investments an architectural photographer can ever make.

They are Sun Seeker and Light Trac, two small smartphone apps that provide with complete accuracy the position, height and path of the sun in a particular location for any time and day of the year.

These applications have comprehensive tables with sunrise and sunset times, sun’s maximum elevation and even also the length of the shadows cast by sunlight. Most of the information is displayed on satellite photographs -and in the case of Sun Seeker also in a 3D view- on wich small arrows precisely mark the phases of the sun path throughout the day.

Of course, a long experience as a photographer and a patient observation of the sun in a location will let you know by using a compass how the project you are going to photograph will look illuminated by sunlight -for one thing is certain, and that is that the sun always rises in the east and invariably sets in the west-.

But I think it’s fair to say that not always an architectural photographer succeeds in how accurate he needs his predictions to be and that any help that simplifies and improves his process of making creative decisions on the photographic representation of the project in a more efficient way is quite a good and necessary help.