“I have… seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion I watched c-beams glitter in the dark, near the Tannhäuser Gate All those… moments… will be lost in time, like… tears… in… rain.”
Roy Batty, Nexus-6 Los Angeles, Nov 2019
039
Jon Tugores’ Barcelona lifts our gaze to a new vantage point over our city, revealing a new territorial scale that has never been shown before.
entire territory responds to a single project, understood as a local entity, connected internally and to the world through flows of material and information.
Jon Tugores – architect, photographer and pilot – has managed to reinvent urban aerial photography through his determination to capture multiple moments over a period of several years from the same position in the cockpit of an airplane or a helicopter. The images bring the geographic scale and the urban scale face to face, emerging from an atmospheric mist, as the sunlight filters through. Jon Tugores has the ability to connect the passion and beauty of a territorial aerial image with the direct compression of a humanized landscape.
A territory built as an urban habitat, where everything is inhabited, including the sky, where urban and rural environments are part of a consistent, rational, planned whole.
When Jon takes pictures, he is also drawing. His images of Barcelona are images of a capital city. At this scale, when it is represented in plan, we see the large-scale transport infrastructures and the large natural parks – it is the scale of a territorial map, where it is very hard to discern urbanity and humanity. But Jon Tugores’ photographs, which often represent this scale, can create a precise ethereal image, where the city seems to have grown up as a natural process in the territory, with landmarks, profiles, silhouettes, and structures that match nature. And through these images we see humanity, order, abstraction, and life. With the beauty of his images, with his intent in capturing sunrises and the feeling of heat, Tugores shows us that the single global image provided by Google Earth may represent a technical feat, but it can’t communicate a place’s soul. For the first time we can see all of Catalonia in one image, with the Eixample and the Pyrenees. Barcelona, capital of Catalonia, as photographed by Tugores, is the image of the new Catalonia to come, where the
His photographs remind us of part of our history, and we realize that the visions of 17th century marine artists who represented, as part of the same profile, the church towers in central Barcelona, the Collserola mountain range, and the outline of Montserrat is a possible image – a real, neighboring landscape. These images connect the capital and the soul of Catalonia, built as a series of layers separated by water vapor, flattened by the view through a telephoto lens. Tugores has also photographed the port and the Zona Franca as they have never been seen before. As a quintessential productive territory, which serves as a logistical Delta, located between the airport and the city, it defines a hub that connect us to the world. Jon Tugores has invented a new art of aerial photography. He has shown us real landscapes, colors and transparencies, which we had only seen before in Eastern paintings. And with them he has taught us to look at the world anew from a different point of view, from above and looking straight ahead, with a perspective which, when transferred onto paper or into pixels, leads to a shift in our collective imagination.
Vicente Guallart
Barcelona in our sights! Getting into the air is a real pleasure. Leaving behind our everyday habitat on the ground. Feeling weightless, supported by a exoskeleton that carries us into the atmosphere. Gliding or circling if we can between the two infinite planes of sky and earth, which melt together at an unreachable horizon. From up in the sky, our gaze is the only mediation of understanding and action. Understanding the multidimensional space we came from and the infinite space we’re flying through. Action to begin new reconnaissance of both spaces: the earth, made plane and map; the sky, always indeterminate and unattainable. This dialectic between the finite plane and the infinite celestial dome is the setting for Tugores’s understanding, comprehension and his action as a choreographic observer. He observes through travel and approach. He choreographs the space and time of the cities as he moves away from or draws closer to them. It doesn’t matter which. There, time is a fine excuse for stopping and, with one “click”, making a recording the stretches beyond the visual sphere, a Braille reading of urban events, an artistic look at the atmosphere that surrounds them.
photographs. In fact, the bird’s eye view provides a simultaneity of experiences, of geographic totality, along with the details of the stereoscopic views of natural spaces and anthropized spaces. In effect, the magic box of the images contained in this collection offers us images we have never seen before, which will stimulate our enjoyment in sensory terms (the beauty of the images), aesthetic terms (the interpretation of the events), artistic terms (the visual quality of the compositions), but also in philosophical terms (the questions: Barcelona, where are you going?). The photographs introduce us to a multiplied gaze onto the real Barcelona, exploded and extended over the territory. Looking through the photographer’s viewfinder, we see the genuine character of Barcelona’s territory in the plane outlined between Collserola and the sea, the two rivers and the singular geologic pre-eminence of Montjuic; and the enlarged space of the greater metropolitan area. Now, taking on the role of observers, we travel across the celestial dome and our gaze is micro, meso, macro, but above all kaleidoscopic. We’re holding Barcelona in our sights!
“A sight such as this is received only once in a lifetime”1 we might say, as though we were observers in person at the moment when Tugores captured the 1. Gerster, Georg: “A Land with No Equal” in Paradise Lost: Persia from Above, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 2008.
Carles Llop
Jon Tugores. BARCELONA
COPYRIGHT
PUBLISHED BY
© Images by Jon Tugores © Book by Actar Publishers © Texts by the authors
Actar Publishers With the collaboration of Ajuntament de Barcelona TEXTS BY
Vicente Guallart Carles Llop COPY-EDITING
Angela K. Bunning GRAPHIC DESIGN
Ramon Prat Homs DISTRIBUTED BY
Actar Publishers 440 Park Avenue South, 17th Floor New York, NY 10016 T +1 212 966 2207 F +1 212 966 2214 salesnewyork@actar-d.com Barcelona Roca i Batlle 2-4 08023 Barcelona T +34 933 282 183 salesbarcelona@actar-d.com eurosales@actar-d.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopyng, recording, or otherwise, without prior written consent of the publishers, except in the context of reviews. ISBN 978-1-940291-80-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017946399 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA.
Jon Tugores is an Architect, University Professor, Pilot, and Photographer. Terrassa | Barcelona w: jon.tugores.com e: info@jontugores.com ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the ENERGY: Vicente Guallart, Carles Llop, Willy Müller, Ramon Prat, Ricardo Devesa. For the INSPIRATION: Martin Price, William Garnett, Adriel Heisey, Eduard Kirtley, Linda Copeland. For the SUPPORT: Jordi Bernadó, Cristian Casanelles, Mo Segura, Toni Tugores, Actar´s team & the team at my studio (JT+A). And especially to the late Jorn Utzon.
Jon Tugores BARCELONA