Photographer and architect Yiorgis Yerolymbos spent a decade documenting with his camera Renzo Piano’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, Greece. Being a privileged spectator of a landscape in transition, he photographed it day and night, in winter and summer, during the cold and heat waves, alone and among crowds of workers. Of all the images that have been captured, one stands out: the ground-plan group photographs of the construction of the Cultural Center, images that were created during the aerial orbits from the site’s tower cranes.
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These photographs are records of an ever-changing environment, they document and interpret the evolving phases of the construction site, following the vocabulary of architecture, yet recorded in the language of photography in an effort to be consistent both with the world, which is the basis of science, and with itself, which is the basis of art.
Borrowing their name “Orthographs” from Leon Battista Alberti’s description of the ground plan during Renaissance, this body of work attempts to record the ephemeral intermediate stages of the construction of architecture and the human effort behind it before they slowly fade from memory.
- Title:
- Orthographs
- Authors:
- Yiorgis Yerolymbos
- Pages:
- 64 colours + 119 b/w
- Cover:
- hardcover
- Publication date:
- August 2017
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- ISBN:
- 9780300226812