Architecture

Architecture has always held a deep and profound interest for me; I was fortunate to spend my formative years on Valentia Island off the south west coast of Kerry, where, they were many well proportioned buildings mostly by English architects which even as a child, I visually absorbed the facades of houses as some form of perfection and beauty without obviously being able to rationalize why. On my first overseas trip to Rome at the impressionable age of thirteen, I remember quiet well being totally overwhelmed by the visual impact of its physical enormity and the embodied essence of the ruins in the roman forum.

I returned some years later as a photographer with that same feeling of intensity and began to document through the eye of the lens, fragments of architecture that for me at least embodied the essence of the building, the ruin or the statue. I also began a more formal enquiry into the relationship that we as humans share with our environment in so far as being in a constant dialogue either consciously or unconsciously with our surroundings and the consequent effects architecture has on our overall well being.

In this catalogue of visual statements I would like to explore the connection of architecture as a form of communication and photography as a means of illustration, or as Le Corbusier averred that “I exist in life only if I can see…everything is in the visual, one needs to see clearly in order to understand’. As part of my research on architecture.

If we can see architecture as a form of communication from the body of the architect directly to the body of the person who views it, much like any form of art, whereby an intimate dialogue happens between the viewer and the creator even though it may have been constructed many centuries ago or more recently, one can begin to formulate ways of seeing that may enhance or enrich our visual perception.

The ruin for me is one of the most beautiful poetic visual statements that we have of time, when a building begins on the road to the ruin, it speaks so slowly of its own gentle decay recording the very time-ness of time, the continuous struggle of the human spirit to create and rise above the ground, and wrap that what it constructs in the decoration of its beliefs, dreams and aspirations, yet the ruin always fulfilling its own obligation to the passing of time slowly peeling itself and stripping itself of the human spirit that created it and unwrapping itself to the nakedness of itself.