Burkard Meyer Architects, BBB Martinsberg, Baden, Switzerland,
©Erieta Attali

Written by Luxi H.

For every form of art, despite the diversity of themes it engages with, there seems to be a predetermined, unescapable motif ordained by the history and origin of this form. It is hard for an architectural work to remain completely silent in the discussion surrounding the human-made construct and the environment it is situated in. And for photography, temporal presence and spatial immediacy have also weaved themselves into the images. Like every mythology of familial bond, the motif, whose translation in Chinese has a more salient maternal connotation, equally blesses and curses the particular form.

Architecture | environment, civilization | nature, we can roughly map out the thematic dualities architecture photographers like Erieta Attali work with, and these themes are formed into a duality only in the sense that they provide the initial momentum to break away from a universal monotone. These dualities are meant to viewed tilted, askance, and they are significantly complicated into dialectics in flux throughout Attali’s architectural photography.

Kengo Kuma & Associates, Albert Kahn Museum, Paris
©Erieta Attali

If architecture is the primary interpretation on the man-made construct and nature, then architecture photography is an interpretation of the primary interpretation, in which camera also compounds its own narrative to the extant discussion. Like the way a literary critic works with writer, they agree with, interpret, challenge, undermine, rebel against what are in the literary works, or even uncover what are not already told to find the hidden scheme. And, still like the way we interpret a literary critic, the entrance towards the oeuvre of an architecture photographer is to look at what architectures and landscapes she chooses to build her interpretation on.

Tadao Ando, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Dallas, USA
©Erieta Attali

Like a prophecy, the title of Attali’s first photographic monograph has predicted the focal point of her visual research for many years to come. The Periphery | Antiquity of Light – Attali’s first collection of architecture photography is about the architectures on the edge of the world. From the Indian Ocean to the Icelandic permafrost, from the relics of ancient Greek sites to the necropolis being excavated, her research extends to the geographical edge of extreme terrain, unusual landscapes, and the frequently unvisited place in time. Along the geographical and temporal fault line Attali’s photographs sense the pulse of an unusual light, feels how architecture and environment have sedimented themselves in the periphery, and this makes her investigation on architecture against-central, against-present.

Max Nunez, Private House in the Pacific, Chile
©Erieta Attali

Architecture Aged

The two ways to be away from the central field have made Attali’s architectural photographic practice iconoclastic from the first place. It has challenged two long taken-for-granted presumptions in architecture: that the discussion of an architecture occurs at its most finished stage, and that there’s a defined, unambiguous interior and exterior for an architecture which defines what is an architectural work and what is its environment. These two assumptions have delineated on the spatial and temporal spectrum a clear-cut existence which we have named architecture, but Attali’s photographs have challenged the definiteness.

In The Periphery | Antiquity of Light, many architectures reside in a state that’s comparable to people’s late age. Worn, old, tired, not in a structural entirety, and what have collapsed are more than that remains. Attali’s eyes fall on the aged body of these architectures. She traces their wrinkle, their stiff torso and unfunctional limbs. She traces, as against the becoming of an architecture–the constructing process, the unbecoming of what has physically been here. The constructed structure, the design and intention are diminishing. An architecture is captured return to the materials it was made of, the composite elements. In this sense, it is also a de-action, a reverse process for architecture.

Auer & Weber Architects, ESO Paranal, Atacama Desert, Chile
©Erieta Attali

Back to the motif of architecture and nature, in this context, we can better feel how Attali’s focus is away from the traditional centrale. Her narrative is not about how architecture gradually emerges out of its environment, nor about the effect of its emergence. For this particular series, her narrative is about the unbecoming, the disappearance of the architecture, and in this unbecoming, the aged architecture serves as the opening stage curtain, through which the environment re-emerges. Attali has installed a masterful twisting: the architecture has become the factual environment, out of which the uncovered environment—the new agent, new architecture here—emerges.

Kengo Kuma & Associates, Coeda House Cafe in Atami, Japan
©Erieta Attali

The Dialectics in Flux

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor W. Adorno has pointed out a singular fundamental paradox innate in Enlightenment which makes historical event repeat what it was set out to deny. Having observed Enlightenment as an intellectual movement to salvage the narrative of existence out of myths, Adorno then unfolds the core paradox “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”

The historical salience of the thesis is out of the immediate purview, but very preciously it has reminded us the flux of dialectics which complicates the duality relationship of concern here. Apart and after ancient relics, Attali has created a series of visual narrative that deliberately confounds the interior and exterior of an architecture, which consequently blurs the duality of architecture and the environment it permeates.

Barclay Crousse , La Escondida House,
©Erieta Attali

During this creative period, the reflective surface of glass and mirror has been Attali’s favorite scene to gaze. Direct light, scattering light, reflective light, light that transverses through the glass, lights of infinitely different origins all accidentally encounter on the same plain surface. The facula-like tree in the cortile, the wood floor in this room, the glass-and-wood dining table in the next room, the surrounding windowpane and Japanese-garden-like ceiling, merge on the glass surface, resembling a still pond that brings the sky, the passing fish, and the stone all to the water. The external boundary of the architecture is transformed into a poetically receptive plane, where the interior and exterior meet and merge, resulting in an imagery complex that looks unexpected, surrealist and fluid.

Kengo Kuma & Associates, Glass House in New Canaan, USA
©Erieta Attali

Rick Joy Architects, Adobe House, AZ, USA
©Erieta Attali

Also belonging to the same series are Attali’s photographs on the cut-out architectural structure: the metal structure of Solferino Bridge, the Yusuhara wooden bridge in Japan. In Attali’s visual language, architecture’s function is no longer demarcating the boundary, nor circumscribing an interior space for residency or communal purposes. Situated at the middle of the fluctuating dialectics, architecture’s function is to provide an equally in flux field where the encounter, the shift, the twist and the exchange between the inner and outer space, between itself and what’s left—the defined environment—is constantly being enacted.

Marc Mimram, Bridge in Rabat, Maroc
©Erieta Attali

Architecture photography is an ambiguous genre. Its comparative position to the traditionally defined categories, such like still-life, portrait, and landscape, remains unsettled. It can be one, be both, be all, be a combination, or be none. Every architecture photographer, through their practice, is trying to locate architecture photography on this coordinate system, and, by positioning their architectural photography, they also suggest their individual reading of architecture. Attali’s visual narrative gives a temporal depth to architectures; it indicates that beyond this temporal section, architecture is enduringly undergoing an exchange with the surrounding environment: its element returns to the environment, and itself becomes the environment of environment. Architecture is a living metabolism, and in this view, Attali makes portraits for architectures.