I have just realized that it’s twenty years now that I am an architectural photographer.

The truth is that there are still many projects to shoot in the next twenty or thirty years and that I can’t now imagine how these projects will look like or how will I photograph them and, even less, imagine the new cameras and techniques that I will use to represent them.

For one thing I am sure and that is that photographing architecture will always continue being a fun and interesting job only if I strive to keep my eyes alert, attentive and, above all, curious.

Just like every day for twenty years now.

The office of Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners has commissioned me to take some photographs of his conversion project of former Barcelona Las Arenas bullring into an entertainment and leisure complex.

The space has been projected to become a new landmark and a monumental entrance to the city that has as main feature a dome that crowns the building as a new public square suspended in the air that is supported by the powerful orange brick mass enhanced and carefully preserved from the old historic building.

My pictures had to represent as essential requirements by the project architects in London both the decided presence of the building in its urban setting and the new and prominent floating square over the city.

Being obvious that any point of view from street level interpreted the ideas that I had to represent with very little resolution and that they could even get dissolved, it became necessary to locate some vantage points in Plaza de España and Tarragona street from where to work and graphically inscribe the large bullring oval dome on the dense and ordered urban fabric of the Barcelona Eixample limits.

Similarly, it was also vital for the graphic treatment of the images the choice of a more vivid contrast and saturation in my photographs in order to highlight the particular use of color in Las Arenas project as is characteristic and distinctive in the work of Richard Rogers.

You can see more Las Arenas photographs in the Specials section in the Gallery of the site.

The sun not always shines on an infinite blue sky with the clean precise clarity that a naive architectural photographer would dream to control.

While it is true that it is always fair weather in architectural photography, so is that this statement is not completely accurate because it can happen sometimes that a huge variety of clouds of different shapes, sizes and many diverse densities will wander around the sky to the point of completely hiding sunlight.

It depends on the diffuse quality of light from the overcast sky and the way it illuminates the frame to creatively use it to highlight the elements that the image is depicting.

In the case of the photograph of the new structures of the old Barcelona Las Arenas bullring I shot for the office of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners in London, I took advantage of several cloudy days to raise a number of images in wich any dense shadows would subtract to the flat colors of the new elements of the bullring the saturation and brightness that I needed to represent them.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to shooting on an overcast day is controlling the possibly too heavy proportion of clouds in the frame.

Although, with a little patience, the sun always rises in the sky.

The new Barcelona Telefónica headquarters building designed by architect Enric Massip is a 110 meters tall tower rising from the very beginning of Diagonal Avenue as a delicate curtain wall supported by a light white steel mesh growing from the pavement to complete and decidedly dominate the surrounding urban landscape.

The presence of Diagonal Zero Zero tower in Barcelona Fòrum area and the visual power of its white sunlit color determine the choice of very specific hours in which to photograph it to carefully control the shadows projected by neighboring buildings and to select, above all, a contrast ratio to preserve the detailed drawing of the white façades silhouetted against the dense blue sky.

Sunlight is clean and exact and always lights up the frame with precise direction and contrast: in architectural photography is always the sun who says the last word.

The representation of an elevation view has meant since architectural photography exists a way to truthfully document the exact proportions of a building and accurately capture the detail of its parts.

Under this approach, elevation shots appear as frames in which the vanishing point of the image is placed in the center of the photographed structure and a flat lighting is used to reduce the depth of the shadows with the intention of recovering the linearity and two-dimensionality of an architectural drawing.

While it is true that an elevation shot can successfully document the information reflected in a drawing, when in the process of photographically interpreting a project I use elevations to focus attention on some elements that I want to highlight in my frame to graphically simplify its appearance -no matter if they are lines, shapes, colors or textures-, and to abstract them.

Probably it ends up that framing an elevation shot becomes very intuitive because the elements in the image are harmoniously arranged into the camera viewfinder very quickly and naturally. That’s why I know that if it takes me so much longer than usual to create a frame … something is not working and I will finish rejecting that picture.

It took me very little time to solve the elevations in the photographs of Josep Llobet projects that you can see here.

The office building at 31 Europa Square at L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, designed by architects Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta is a recycled steel low height block with a visible structure unfolded like a powerful ribs curtain that firmly supports the building and smoothly allows light and air to penetrate it.

I planned the building exterior photographs to first communicate its kind presence on its site, then capturing the apparently tense dialogue between the project and the rest of the buildings in Europa Square and, surely and above all, to catch the complex richness of color and texture of the steel structure.

I decided to use the last afternoon lights of the setting winter sun and the diffuse light after sunset to communicate the ideas I had in mind: using this light I managed to simplify the building volumetry -I ran the obvious risk of making it too dense …- lightening its presence on my frames eliminating any deep shadows or violent highlights, and expanding the color range of the metal in both the steel skin of the project and the huge glass facades of the neighboring buildings. … Read more …

The first thing that called my attention when looking at Barcelona Rosselló Street Emma Room Mate Hotel by architects Yolanda Nadal and Luís Moneo were the many white lit pieces distributed on its façade rectangular surface and how these pieces were dissolved by the surrounding urban landscape.

The hotel façade is intentionally lightweight because of the pieces apparent motion as seen from Enric Granados Street on the left side of the building and compact when looking at the very same lit rectangles as seen coming from the right from Balmes Street.

I was specially concerned in preserving the subtle connection between the white texture inside the lit pieces in the night façade and the detail in the huge black area in wich the white rectangles are rhythmically arranged: although exposure and contrast were difficult to control, losing detail in both blacks and whites would have meant a quite unpleasant look in my photographs far from what I saw and felt when I first noticed the hotel delicate urban presence.