Drawing Parallels by Quintin Lake In the Architecture section of Tate Modern Bookshop, next to the turbine hall. Go grab a copy! or get it online here
Drawing Parallels by Quintin Lake in the Architecture section at Tate Modern Bookshop
Archives for category: Publications / Tearsheets
Commission by Calum Sutton PR for Modern Weekly Magazine Cover Feature.
British Conceptual Artist, Damien Hirst photographed in his Chalford Studio, near Stroud, Gloucestershire
SEE MORE IMAGES from this portrait photoshoot of Damien Hirst in his Studio here
Damien Hirst portrait with his artwork "St Elmos Fire". Photo © Quintin Lake
Damien Hirst Portrait with his artwork "St Elmos Fire". Photo © Quintin Lake
Damien Hirst Portrait strangling his artwork "St Elmos Fire". Photo © Quintin Lake
Damien Hirst Portrait with his artwork "Greetings from the Gutter/ Avoiding the Inevitable". Photo © Quintin Lake
Damien Hirst Portrait with his artwork "Greetings from the Gutter/ Avoiding the Inevitable". Photo © Quintin Lake
SEE MORE IMAGES from this portrait photoshoot of Damien Hirst in his Studio here
Photography © Quintin Lake, 2010
Artworks © Damien Hirst. All rights reserved, DACS 2010
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This photoshoot was commissioned by Francis Lincoln Publisher for the upcoming book “Jim Stirling and the Red Trilogy: Three Radical Buildings” edited by Alan Berman. View the entire photoshoot here.
Charles Jencks describes the project in the chapter ‘James Sirling or Function made Manifest’ in the book ‘The modern movements in Architecture’ thus:
“Yet it was not until their next scheme, the leicester Engineering Building, that they [Stirling & Gowan] developed their idiom in complete maturity. Instead of drawing in perspective they switched to a bird’s eye view which could analyse and dissect the whole project showing the underlying anatomy. This method of drawing really is a method of designing for it allows the architect to work out the space, structure, geometry, function and detail altogether and without distortion.”
BUY PRINTS/LICENSE more images of Leicester University Engineering Building here
Axonometric style, Aerial view of Leicester University, Engineering Building
The cantilevered lecture theatre, Leicester University, Engineering Building, Designed by James Stirling & James Gowan Architects, Completed 1959
The water tower sits atop glazed seminar rooms which runs at 45 degrees to the workshops
BUY PRINTS/LICENSE more images of Leicester University Engineering Building here
Photography © Quintin Lake, 2010
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An article on the book Drawing Parallels: Architecture Observed in EOS Magazine January-March 2010 focusing on technique and equipment selection from the Canon EOS system best suited for Architectural Photography.
Drawing Parallels
Architect and photographer Quintin Lake uses visual comparisons drawn from his extensive travels to produce a book of pairings of photographs that force us to re-examine the world around us and challenge our understanding of what constitutes architecture. Quintin currently uses an EOS 5D but he took other digital images in the book using an EOS 10D and 1Ds, and earlier analogue images using an EOS 1000,600 and EOS 1.
‘My photographs are from my travels to over 60 countries,” explains Quintin. “so technical difficulties were mos!ly climatic: humidity, heat and cold, and for the remoter locations, being a long time away from electricity. To deal with long periods away from mains power, such as Lesotho or Peru I carried half a dozen spare batteries which I found easier than using solar, which requires being in one location for an extended period.
“The wider angle and tilt-and-shift lenses offered by Canon are superior to anything offered by the competition, and these lenses are particularly important for photographing architecture. I also like the colour rendering and feel of the digital file. which just look ‘right’. The camera’s ergonomic design makes sense and using the EOS system has become second nature to me.
“I have two styles of photographing architecture: an urban safari and a more static Study. When I arrive at a new city or place I’ll walk around for hours on an urban safari to get a feel for a place and see the things of interest, which may not be in a guide-book. Therefore lightweight high quality lenses are the most important to me. The EF 24·105mm f4L is my most used lens for this kind of long urban walk. I often also carry an EF 100-400m f4.5-5.6L as I like to pick out a graphic composition from the facade of a building, often from quite a distance. I also normally carry an EF 50mm /1.4 for very low light conditions. For a more static study of a building when I’ll spend a day or more there and won’t be walking around all day with the equipment, I’ll use a TS-E 24mm f3.5L and an EF 16·35mm f2,8L with a tripod.
Drawing Parallels, Architecture observed, Papadakis Publisher, £25 Order a copy from Amazon here
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Each month Architectural Photo Library View Pictures turn the spotlight on one of their photographers, giving them an opportunity to tell you a little more about themselves and their work. My turn was in the View Jan 2010 issue #26
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My photograph of the cast iron interior of Abbey Mills Pumping Station Interior was chosen for the cover of recently published book “Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers” by Dr Paul Dobraszczyk published by Spire books.
Into the belly of the beast is a rare pleasure within books on subterranean London and Victorian architecture in that is combines real academic meat, in an easily readable manner, with extensive and sumptuous illustrations. Thus the book can be equally enjoyed as a visual feast or read as a continuous narrative. Paul Dobraszczyk shows us the unexpected fact that the methods of describing and drawing these vast underground spaces at the time of their inception were not the disinterested studies we might expect, but hint at wider aspirations of the Victorian age which he further illuminates in his description of their most noticeable architectural expression, the great pumping stations. An essential addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in London or Victorian architecture and engineering.
The cover photograph shows Interior of the old Abbey Mills Pumping Station (Station A) showing wrought iron metalwork and modern vertical motors that replaced the original steam beam engine.Located in Abbey Lane, London E15, the building is a sewerage pumping station, designed by engineer Joseph Bazalgette, Edmund Cooper, and architect Charles Driver, it was built between 1865 and 1868 after an outbreak of cholera in 1853 and “The Great Stink” of 1858. It was designed in a cruciform plan, with an elaborate Byzantine style, described as The Cathedral of Sewage. The pumps raise the sewage in the London sewerage system between the two Low Level Sewers and the Northern Outfall Sewer, which was built in the 1860s to carry the increasing amount of sewage produced in London away from the centre of the city.
View, buy prints and licence rights managed images of Abbey Mills Pumping Station
Buy “Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers” from Amazon UK here
Architecture and Interiors Photography © Quintin Lake, 2010
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“When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.”
Hugh Newell Jacobsen
The greatest architectural gestures of our civilisation, the very epitome and physical embodiment of that civilisation, the apparently random and chaotic surge of something intended and planned, the phenomenal paradox of achievement and disaster, the home of ultimate construction and destruction, the Twenty-First century city, is outpacing any attempt to define its nature the very second an image is formed of it. How to represent, how to see, how to know, this most mercurial of forms, that constantly defies notions of what is attainable? As a photographer, the emerging conurbations, the fresh unimagined megalopolises demand a perspective. This is a quest for scope. These horizons, where the patterns and grids of vast populations are assembled out of seeming chaos, are a bright optimistic contribution, a means of attempting to see a future that is happening right now.
Constant sky
left: Downtown São Paulo seen from the top of the Edificio Italiano.With a population of eleven million residents São Paulo is the most populous city in the Southern hemisphere. São Paulo, Brazil, 2008
right: Cuzco seen from Christo Blanco. The city has a population of 350,000 and is located at an altitude of 3,300m. Peru, 2008
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Slicing cities
left: Highway in downtown São Paulo. Brazil, 2008
right: A man ascending an arch of Lupu Bridge over the Huangpu River. Shanghai, China, 2007
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Extract from my architectural photography book: Drawing Parallels, Architecture Observed
Text & Photography © Quintin Lake, 2010
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“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”
Walter Benjamin
A place is not a conglomeration of functional structures. Where we live, visit or observe, and the images we form and receive of it, gains its real nature from the feelings identified with it. An empty brutalist cityscape and an abandoned school gym, can speak of a more tragic dimension to our lives that is somehow inscribed in the very essence of a place. The way that vanished cultures persist in traces of their legacy, that nature reclaims vast human endeavours, that modern cruelty and power leave an aura or a sense of their very character in an ambience, is something that the photographer can capture. There are deeper, almost intangible remnants, some hauntingly sad, some joyful, that emerge as visual shocks or surprises, to be seen in the frozen image of a photograph. The chilling catastrophe of an abandoned city bereft of humanity clashes, paradoxically, with the defiant optimism of resurgent nature.
Reclamation
left: A doorway in Ta Prohm to a temple built in the late 12th and early 13th centuries as a monastery and university. The door is surrounded by silk cotton tree roots encased by strangler figs roots, which develop their own underground root
system. They then grow quickly, often strangling the host tree, which in time dies and rots away. The strangler fig continues to exist as a hollow tubular lattice that provides shelter for many forest animals. Siem Reap, Cambodia, 2003
right: A silver birch tree growing through the floor on the terrace of the Hotel Polissia 21 years after the Chernobyl disaster. Pripiat, Ukraine, 2007
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Palimpsest
left: Lightswitch in a bedroom of the Hotel Polissia 21 years after the Chernobyl disaster. Pripiat, Ukraine, 2007
right: Billboard with posters removed at Green Park Underground Station. London, UK, 2009
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Extract from my architectural photography book, Drawing Parallels, Architecture Observed
Text & Photography © Quintin Lake, 2009
Geometry & Silence 