From the editors
A LACK OF EXPOSURE Words Alessandro Rognoni
Philippe Ruault’s sterile visuals for Lacaton&Vassal are an alternative to a world of inebriating architectural images.
I recently watched a film called “Rendez-Vous in Paris”, shot in 1996 by Eric Rohmer, where a painter guides a Swedish tourist around Paris. “I like the lack of colours here” the painter tells her as they walk down an alleyway. Then, pointing at a painted door frame: “That grey is too blue, it’s not a Paris grey”. When asked why he says: “I don't know.” Later, I found myself inexperienced in thinking of cities in terms of colour. I also realised how difficult it is to relate to the two in immediate ways, not being able to assign a definite colour even to the places of my childhood. While this is not the case of most architecture, which we remember by specific colours, I realised that I shared the same uncertainty when thinking about the buildings of the 2021 Pritzker winners Lacaton&Vassal. In particular, this was the case of those images of their buildings which I came across to through the years. As I later found out, these were taken by their trusted photographer Philippe Ruault. Writing on Lacaton&Vassal’s work in terms of photography will probably sound irrelevant, considering the hugely significant agenda that they have brought forward in the past decades. Nevertheless, the moment a practice wins the Pritzker Price is also one in which images of contemporary architecture migrate from magazines to newspapers, reaching a wider “uninterested” public (the prize is regarded as the “Nobel of architecture”).
In such context, images come to play a role more significant than what one might think. This year however, the photographs met by ordinary newspaper readers and social media were strangely unfashionable. Ruault’s images are in fact different from most of his fellow photographers in the industry. They lack post-production, appear stale, and somehow bi-dimensional. They seem impassive to the architecture they portray, but despite all, they are effective in mysterious ways. Lastly, they all show up in the same, inexplicable light blue. Ruault’s light blue is the kind that appears almost grey. Other times it is the way we see grey. It epitomizes an atmosphere similar to the Paris of Rohmer’s film, escaping from a realm in which colour is intentional, yet not falling into the fashion of the monochrome (also the product of intent). More importantly, in our own environment, this light-blue somehow represents a lack of control over colour itself. It is what we only perceive the sky to look like, and exemplifies the illusion of reflection and refractions, elements of space that are outside our jurisdiction as designers. Most of all, it represents an unedited version of our reality, a lack of manipulation of the images of our everyday life, something that instead keeps happening all around us at a concerning scale. From Instagram to Marvel films, from commercial rendering to Dezeen, we are bombarded by manipulated images to such a degree that we somehow remain unsatisfied with the flatness of our real environment.
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