The Barbican Exhibition, Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age, brings together eighteen exceptional photographers from the 1930s to the present day who have changed the way we view architecture and perceive the world around us.
We were invited to design a new series of prints for their exhibition, a dream job really as it celebrates the work of some our favourite photographers including Andreas Gursky and Lucien Herve, and the architecture of mid-century pioneers like Charles and Ray Eames and Le Corbusier.
We wanted to create something that was instantly architectural and strongly geometric, but that also reflected the photographers’ styles without getting overly constrained or limited by the existing photographs.
Over time a couple of common themes emerged from the photographs in the exhibition like the use of shadow and light to create strong pattern,
a strict geometric composition
and, as we collected reference images, a consistent colour palette of concrete, terracotta pinks and blue skies.
The three large scale, four colour screen prints we produced celebrate the relationships between architect and photographer: Luis Barragan and Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aldo Rossi and Luigi Ghirri, and Pierre Koenig and Julius Shulman.
