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Transforming Modern Architecture
| Article
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19279 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
1,204 Words |
| Author
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Larry R. Thall
Larry R. Thall is a photography writer for the Chicago
Tribune and former managing editor of Photomethods magazine |
Mass was out, volume was in. Freed from the shackles of historical reference, Europe's architectural visionaries of the early to midtwentieth century declared the plane to be the basic geometric component of modern architecture. Through the use of planes, volume could be expressed. Furthermore, color--most often primary pigments--could define a plane. The architect would contain the stark boldness of primary colors by surrounding them with broad expanses of white, gray, and black.
Nevertheless, no notions of color conceived by the Gropius people, or their Post-Modernist successors, could adequately prepare the contemporary viewer for his first encounter with the architectural series of photographs of Barbara Kasten. The palettes even of Bauhaus School favorites Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky pale when compared to the explosion of bright, saturated hues radiating from Kasten's jumbo thirty-by-forty-inch and fifty-by-sixty-inch Ciba-chrome prints.
Kasten has photographed buildings designed by some of world's most celebrated architects, including Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki, Philip Johnson, Cesar Pelli, and Kevin Roche. Last year, however, she also shot the works of anonymous North American "architects"--the Pueblo cliff dwellings, located in New Mexico.
Dazzling Colors
Typically, photographers choose to capture the cliff dwellings on film when the sun is low in the sky and the rock and earth are bathed in a wash of dazzling oranges and reds. Kasten, however, remaining consistent to her modus operandi, waited until nighttime to work, when she created mystical environments of blue, purple, and gold.
Recently, Kasten held an informal discussion at a Chicago gallery exhibiting her images. She said she preferred imposing her own color scheme on the cliff dwellings, rather than taking advantage of what nature had to offer, because she didn't want her pictures to look as though they were taken by Eliot Porter, the late, well-known nature photographer.
No viewer is apt to confuse Kasten's photographs of modern structures with images shot by Hedrich-Blessing, Ezra Stoller, or any other commercial architectural photographer. Her images not only transform the buildings before her lens but the traditional definition of architectural photography as well.
Kasten,
...
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