#ArchinectMeets is a series of interviews with members of the architecture community that use Instagram as a creative medium. With the series, we ask some of Instagram’s architectural photographers, producers and curators about their relationship to the social media platform and how it has affected their practice.
Social media has undeniably affected the way we perceive, interpret and share opinions about architecture today. While we use our own account, @Archinect, as a site for image curation and news content, we wanted to ask fellow Instagram users how they navigated the platform.
We spoke to Kris Provoost, the photographer behind @krisprovoost. As a Belgian based in China, Provoost demonstrates an undying passion for his new home base as he uniquely documents it for his social media. And his background as an architect undoubtedly aided in his ability to photograph buildings as their designers might have envisioned (or wished they had).
What is your relationship to architecture?
I’m an architect and photographer/videographer of architecture. It’s pretty much an omnipresent factor in my life. I have always been fascinated by architecture and cities and this pretty much led me to start my career on the other side of the world from where I grew up. For my entire professional career I have been living in China, first Beijing later Shanghai, so the massive city with an overflow of iconic architecture is a constant in my daily life.
How did @krisprovoost begin?
It started with documenting, or, rather, just snapping my immediate surroundings. In the past 3-4 years, it has evolved into a way of expanding my reach and share my work.
Nowadays I’m curating myself a lot more than I used to do. I also try to have different ‘phases’ in sharing my work. A few months a year (when I’m working on a new series of ‘Beautified China’) I’d like to go for a more artsy kind of feeling, with purely stylized images that are part of a larger story.
Beautified China is a project I have been working on for the past 8 years, since moving to China, where I document iconic architecture around China and create series of artworks where architecture loses the sense of architecture. Taken out of the context, focusing on the object instead of its function. Purifying patterns, proportions, and colors, the photographs are part of a story I’d like to tell about the current state of architecture in China. Then I have a phase where I’m focusing more on architecture in its context and where I’m also starting out with aerial photography.
View this post on InstagramShiny panels with creases. Sejima's Hokusai Museum in Tokyo. #sejima #hokusaimuseum #tokyo
A post shared by Kris Provoost (@krisprovoost) on
But in the long run my Instagram gallery is pretty much an overview of the buildings and cities that keep me occupied and interest me. I hope it bring both my qualities as a photographer and architectural designer into 1 medium.
Has Instagram affected your views towards architecture or the way you take photographs?
It has definitely enhanced my understanding of different trends and solutions of architecture around the world. But it definitely didn’t affect my designing or photographing of architecture.
While I’m active in posting on Instagram, I prefer not to spend too much time on it scrolling through. I’d like to keep my ideas around photographing purely my ideas and not being too influenced by what others are doing. Although I have a few favorite accounts that I follow closely, but they are there more to keep me motivated to create interesting work. And it allows me to know whats going on with different building in cities that fascinate me.
What qualities of architecture have you hoped to express through the photos you post?
The importance of composition, proportions and detailing: three elements that define my work, both in photography but even more in designing the actual buildings. It is what differentiates a good building with a bad building (besides how the function inside works of course)
Do you mostly work in a specific region? What is your travel schedule like?
I’m based in Shanghai, so most of my photography happens either in China or its neighbours.
There are an incredible amount of very interesting cities in China that are developing at a rapid pace and each one of them has a large amount of captivating architecture.
While I have been to a large amount of different cities, I always find it fascinating to go repeatedly to the same cities because with each visit there is seemingly a new district popping out of the ground. Some of my other focus cities are Hong Kong and Singapore, 2 places where there is always something fascinating to find no matter how many times I go there.
Is there a photograph you have posted that you are particularly fond of?
Yes, this one:
View this post on InstagramThose curves sure make for some interesting compositions. #olescheeren
A post shared by Kris Provoost (@krisprovoost) on
It shows the scale of buildings in Asia, which I seemingly can never get enough of. Second of all, because of the dynamics and the framing. It’s a residential skyscraper that due to its façade makes a dynamics move upwards, also because of its geometry it fits perfectly into a rectangular frame without having to cut the building in its extents. And the 3rd reasons and perhaps the most important one for me, is that I worked on this building for 2,5 years from competition stage till it was handed over to the local architect. To finally see, and capture the towers in a series of photographs, was perhaps maybe even a bit emotional. Going from staring at that computer screen through way too many allnighters to it finally seeing in reality was something remarkable.
View this post on InstagramZHA’s latest. #macau #shotoniphone #zahahadidarchitects @zahahadidarchitects
A post shared by Kris Provoost (@krisprovoost) on
What are your favorite profiles to follow?
@laurianghinitoiu – because it documents his architecture journeys crisscrossing the world. We all know his photography work for some of the top architects, but his Instagram is a great add-on to see the project in a more context bound setting. You can tell from his Instagram profile that he is a photographer that truly wants to understand the context of the subjects he is photographing.
@marcorama – a passionate instagrammer that lets me stay up to date on what is going on in my home region – the Benelux. He also finds the beauty in structures that for other seems ordinary.
@tomhegen.de – although not architecture related at all, but his aerial photography work is absolutely stunning. It is a good escape from always being surrounded by the metropolitan world.
View this post on InstagramInner hive. University building that must spark creativity. #heatherwickstudio in Singapore
A post shared by Kris Provoost (@krisprovoost) on
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