Archinect - Features

#ArchinectMeets @shesthearchitect

2019-01-11T13:40:00-05:00

#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 Sophie Chanson, the curator of @shesthearchitect. Put simply, the Instagram page celebrates the works and lives of women architects with exemplary photographs of their finest work. After realizing how difficult it was to name female architects off the top of her head, Chanson began to check the margins of architecture history to pull out rarely-seen treasures.

#ArchinectMeets @hannespeer

2018-12-28T12:00:00-05:00

We spoke to Hannes Peer, the photographer, architect and curator behind @hannespeer. With an eye for "imperfections, nostalgic utopia, and future archeology," Peer captures architectural oddities of the 20th century with aplomb.

#ArchinectMeets @mmmosarchitects

2018-12-18T12:00:00-05:00

We spoke to MOS Architects about their Instagram, @mmmosarchitects. For the New York firm, Instagram is less a tool for self-promotion than a way of killing time in between important moments. Their Instagram, to put it simply, allows them to reveal glimpses into their lives, both in the office and outside of it, as earnestly as an architecture firm can.

#ArchinectMeets @lucborho

2018-12-11T12:00:00-05:00

We spoke to Luc Borho (@lucborho), a photographer and art director. Borho has added an ethereal spin to the badlands of SpaceX and the brutalism of his native Paris through his carefully lit photography. His work shows the lives buildings make possible after their construction, in ways their architects or planners might not have imagined.

#ArchinectMeets @nemestudio

2018-12-07T10:25:00-05:00

We spoke to Neyran Turan, an architect and partner at Nemestudio. Through their instagram page, @nemestudio, they get to explore their chosen themes of accumulation and digital waste taken up in their studio through a platform born of those traits.

#ArchinectMeets @modarchitecture

2018-12-04T12:00:00-05:00

We spoke to Darren Bradley, the photographer behind @modarchitecture. Bradley began his career as a history major and soon developed a following for his clear and stunning photographs of modern architecture from around the world. When he began collaborating with Sam Lubell in the production and photography of Phaidon's Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guides: East Coast USA and West Coast USA, Bra...

#ArchinectMeets @zhestkov

2018-11-27T11:59:00-05:00

We spoke to Maxim Zhestkov, the media artist and director behind @zhestkov. Trained in architecture and digital technology, Zhestkov launched a studio/workshop where he with his friends and colleagues developing new forms of moving images and producing motion content for brands and companies all over the world. His videos exist on Instagram to bridge the divide between architecture and the latest in dig...

#ArchinectMeets @chatelp

2018-11-20T12:00:00-05:00

We spoke to Pierre Chatel, the photographer behind @chatelp. A computer scientist by trade, Chatel recently took up architectural photography full time. His work can best be described as 'cool abstraction' thanks to a rare abilities to both discover rare moments in well-known buildings throughout Europe as well as to find the beauty in objects as mundane as storage containers.

#ArchinectMeets @krisprovoost

2018-11-09T10:00:00-05:00

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).

#ArchinectMeets @daniellaondesign

2018-11-06T09:00:00-05:00

We spoke to Daniella Ohad, Ph.D, the curator of @daniellaondesign. As a design historian that regularly lectures on the subject, Ohad uses Instagram to advocate for the significance of design history through its most stunning precedents and their most seductive photographs.

#ArchinectMeets @newagecocaine

2018-11-02T11:00:00-04:00

We spoke to Kate Sennert, curator of @newagecocaine. The photographs she finds across her path are from that magical era roughly between 1975 and 1985, which some have described as the 'late-modernist' period. Some of the modernist tenants stayed intact in this era, such as those of expediency and experimentation with new materials, while others had been gleefully rejected, such as modesty and the sacre...

#ArchinectMeets @l_o00o_l

2018-10-30T13:56:00-04:00

Social media has undeniably affected the way we perceive, interpret and share opinions about architecture today. Using 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 as well as their thoughts on social media's impact on architecture.

We spoke with @l_o00o_l, a photographer based in Munich. Given their anonymity, a biographical introduction is hardly in order. Rather, what should be emphasized is their ability to capture the surreal, the disjunctive and the unsettling in the built environment so as to stand out among the typically florescent images in one's Instagram feed.

...

#ArchinectMeets @adamnathanielfurman

2018-10-26T15:28:00-04:00

We spoke to Adam Nathaniel Furman, the creator of the eponymous @adamanathanielfurman account. As an advocate of postmodern architecture, Furman's Instagram account has served many purposes towards this passion: photos, memes, illustrations, screenshots and petitions to save postmodern structures at the brink of demolition are all featured on the page with equal significance. The sentiments of the accou...

#ArchinectMeets @shitgardens

2018-10-23T11:23:00-04:00

We spoke to the curators of @shitgardens, a curated selection of the worst landscaping the internet has to offer. A viable theory suggests that there is more to learn about humanity from the deplorable than the exemplary, either because it is in much greater numbers or it reveals basic human desires with less inhibition. As subscribers to this belief system, especially as it applies to our relationship ...

#ArchinectMeets @stoptheroc

2018-10-19T11:00:00-04:00

We spoke to Roc Isern, the photographer behind @stoptheroc and @barcelonafacades. With unmistakable pride for his Spanish hometown, Isern uniquely captures the spirit of Barcelonan architecture for a wide audience. Though perhaps no other architect's work has been photographed as much as Antonio Gaudi's, for instance, Isern deftly communicates elements of his work never before captured on camera.

#ArchinectMeets @the_architecture_photographer

2018-10-12T11:00:00-04:00

We spoke to Paul Eis (@the_architecture_photographer), an architecture student and photographer based in Linz, Austria. His consistently colorful Instagram portfolio is a clever response to the monotonous social housing blocks in East Berlin; where they were uniformly grey, Eis made them multiply colorful. Where they were crumbling, ruinous and apparently indifferent to watching eyes, Eis meticulously transfo...

#ArchinectMeets @casualtimetravel

2018-10-09T12:00:00-04:00

We spoke to Sinziana Velicescu, the photographer behind @casualtimetravel. Sun-bleached stucco and anonymous warehouses reveal the Los Angeles periphery as an undoubtable influence on Velicescu's photography, which perhaps lends it a unique presence on the image-based platform: though the fabled city is often represented in Hollywood blockbusters as a glittering Edenic backdrop, @casualtimetravel presen...

#ArchinectMeets @joaocarlostalves

2018-10-05T11:00:00-04:00

We spoke with Joāo Carlos Alves, the curator of @joaocarlostalves. An architect born in Portugal and currently living and working in Geneva, Switzerland, he produces imaginative architectural renderings specifically for Instagram in his spare time. Sharing his detailed imagery to the platform several times a month, Alves relishes the freedom i...

#ArchinectMeets @collpol19

2018-10-02T11:00:00-04:00

We spoke with Collin Pollard (@collpol19), a photographer and image producer based in the San Francisco based area. Though Pollard has only been posting his work online for a year, its bold coloring and rugged yet minimal surfaces have quickly gained him a following.

#ArchinectMeets @__benthomas

2018-09-27T13:58:00-04:00

We spoke with Ben Thomas (@__benthomas), a photographer and based in Australia. His career has taken him all over the world, including a trip to Dubai for the New Yorker. Through his work, he hopes to provide a way for people to consider the relationships that they form with their surroundings and how those surroundings might affect them in tu...

#ArchinectMeets @sssscavvvv

2018-09-25T10:00:00-04:00

We spoke to Ryan Scavnicky, the meme extraordinaire behind @sssscavvvv. Marshall Mcluhan's maxim, "the medium is the message," is nowhere more tested than with his class-bending Instagram posts, where a cryptic essay on Object Oriented Ontology can be interrogated by a forcefully skewed image under Clip Art text. Between his Instagram and his teaching fellowship at the School of Architecture at Talies...

#ArchinectMeets @terriblefloorplans

2018-09-21T11:12:00-04:00

We spoke with the curator of @terriblefloorplans, a careful collection of careless things, a repository of odd architectural content published daily on Instagram. With only 41 floor plans posted at the time of this writing, the anonymous curator has quickly gained a following among those users of Instagram seeking alternatives to the rational ...

#ArchinectMeets @lerichti

2018-09-18T14:38:00-04:00

We spoke to Philipp Heer (@lerichti), a freelancer photographer whose work primarily focuses on contemporary architecture in Switzerland and the neighboring European countries. His website states that his complete work can be found on Instagram, a profile he has kept active for nearly four years.

#ArchinectMeets @archiveofaffinities

2018-09-13T10:29:00-04:00

We begin the series with Andrew Kovacs (@archiveofaffinities), a professor of architecture at UCLA and owner of the blog Archive of Affinities. Kovacs has treated this blog - divided between Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr - as his own personal strategy for "making architecture from architecture" against a field of notoriously uncompromising budgets, clients and deadlines. History often lays bare architecture t...