Three Niches: Looking at three niches on the side of the Musei Capitolini in Rome. I love that they were empty, only showing off the "apostrophe" shadows.
Beware of Dog: Yeah, let's hope the rest of the fence is one of those invisible ones.
Utilikilts: The Utilikilts store in Seattle, Washington.
Yucca and Oleander: Looking down one of the "newer" residential streets back to the tailings pile, one of the largest in the world, near the now-closed Kaiser steel mine at Eagle Mountain, California.
Costa Mesa Door: One of my favorite "architectural" moments. At the mall in Costa Mesa, California, not only is the vegetation militantly manicured, the doors are painted in fine Orange County/Disney fashion to match the walls.
Cal Earth and Suburb: An interesting juxtaposition of Nader Khalili's earth architecture and suburban boxes. I wasn't expecting his desert sensitive development to be surrounded by sprawl.
Gehry EMP Tram Side: Looking at the tram side of the Experience Music Project by Frank Gehry. This building was interesting in that there was a "tectonic authenticity" between inside and outside. Many Gehry buildings are resplendently voluptuous on the outside, but return to an orthogonal rigor inside. This one was also nice and curvy on the inside. This set of curves interacting with light is my favorite Gehry moment yet. They just seem to billow in the light!
Silo: In the East Central Illinois Prairie. The corn just keeps going. This silo was pretty neat inside, but has been torn down, making way for more corn.
Kunming Eucalyptus Ground: After years of picking out leaves from every corner imaginable, I've grown fond of Eucalyptus leaves and their amazing capacity to wrap around nearly everything. Also, their colors are beautiful; my favorite is the deep red.
St Peter's Chairs: Chairs filled the piazza at St. Peter's, empty seats as far as the eye could see.
Christmas on 3rd Street: I'd been dying to photograph this house off of 3rd Street, in Santa Monica, and then I stumbled on it. I screech over two lanes, turn and park, and the minute I get out of the car two girls are screeching their car, looking at my camera and pointing. They park, get out, start up a conversation about just having to take a photo. We have a photo party, and one of the residents comes out wearing a hat a la "David" in this photo, looking surprised that we're so jazzed about shooting this house.
Prada Marfa: My favorite moment at the minimalist mecca in West Texas was actually this shoe, fused to a fencepost.
Judd Void and Shadow: A patio next to a gallery at the Chinati Foundation, in Marfa, Texas.
Santa Monica Ceiling: A view of the ceiling at the Santa Monica/Vermont Station on the Red Line in Los Angeles. There is a great public art program, with art at each stop. This one, by Robert Millar, is my personal favorite.
Getty Solid and Diaphanous Symmetry: An afternoon moment at the Getty Center, in Los Angeles. The light hitting the concrete columns made them seem to disappear, while the screens appeared to be solid.
Venice Ukiyo-e: Looking at a facade in Venice Beach, California.
Seoul Layers: This was an amazing scene, along a street in Seoul. That's a whole lot of materials happening.
Gelateria: A family picks out flavors of gelato in Venezia.
Storm King: A view walking through the Storm King Art Center.
798 Facade: At the 798 art gallery in Beijing, China.
Daejeon Bonsai: This building in Daejeon, Korea, was much taller than the sheds surrounding it. Quite the collision of geometries, and hey, let's throw in a massive bonsai! The geometry of the facade's horizontal lines confuse as to whether they mark a full story or a half. They're uncomfortable in either scenario. All of this drama actually makes this an interesting building.
Square Silo: A silo near St. Joseph's, Illinois, an excellent example of the platonic forms of the Midwestern Vernacular.
Christmas on 3rd Street, Santa Monica
Portland Flight: Looking down a walkway at the Portland Japanese Garden.
Newberry Springs Irrigation: An end to the irrigation wheel across from the Groundwater Recharge Site in Newberry Springs, California.
Newberry Springs Depth Measurement: The measuring stick at the Newberry Springs, California, recharge area.
Bodie Rolling Stone: Looking at one of the facades at Bodie a ghost town in the Sierra Nevada, in California. The wood is still so preserved. The colors are amazing, and this is best viewed as large as you can get it.
Bodie Handles: Handles on some of the mining machinery up at Bodie, a ghost town in California. These handles and levers reminded me of people marching. Like figures from constructivist art, in a communist propaganda film.
Dia Beacon: What a job by the architects of the Dia Beacon. The windows and glass have a pattern of "blur" and "clear" that simultaneously allows you to see the colors of the landscape, in the blur, and then to make out the detail, in the clear.
A detail of the wall of the California Endowment Building in downtown Los Angeles
Meier Steps: Steps at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, designed by Richard Meier.
“Combined total impact”: this is a phrase Richard Neutra used to describe his thinking about architecture. Neutra thought hard about how his buildings affected users, about the sensations his designs aroused. You can sense this in Julius Shulman’s photographs of Neutra’s buildings – and in fact Neutra scripted the exact moments he wanted the photographs to capture. For example, at the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, he dictated the exact location and time for what became one of the most iconic photographs of the mid-century era. The shot occurred right after sunset — a sublime view of the house with the San Jacinto Mountains as backdrop to the elegant modern design. The house is perfectly lit, and a woman lounges gracefully by the pool, looking away from the camera, toward the mountains. For Neutra, these moments clarified the harmony that could occur among form, light, texture, climate and color, with buildings and landscapes attuned to the rhythms of nature.
These moments clarified the harmony that could occur among form, light, texture, climate and color.
As a designer trained in both architecture and landscape architecture — and as former director of Neutra’s VDL House in Los Angeles — I strive to achieve this kind of “combined total impact,” and I use photography to explore the factors that create harmonious interactions of buildings and landscapes and nature. In this sense, my photographs have no center; they don’t represent objects in a field, but rather a continuum of sensory inputs that construct an atmosphere, a feeling, a place. Photography is a strong medium, even a resistant one: its comparatively precise record of information challenges the abstractions we designers create when we draw (manually or digitally).
I use different cameras: Canon Rebel cameras, both digital and film, and the Canon 5D Digital SLR. If it’s just point-and-shoot, I’ve used Pentax Optio S, Nikon CoolPix, Casio Exilim and Panasonic Lumix cameras. Whatever the equipment, photography allows me to tell stories about places that are rich with information. I have been inspired by the works of Edward Hopper, David Plowden, Henry Plummer and also by numerous contacts on my Flickr photostream, where I engage in discussion almost daily.
Comments are closed. If you would like to share your thoughts about this article, or anything else on Places Journal, visit our Facebook page or send us a message on Twitter.