Bildbauten – Philipp Schaerer

Bildbauten – Philipp Schaerer
Reto Geiser (Editor)
Standpunkte, April 2016



Hardcover | 8-1/2 x 11 inches | 96 pages | 32 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-3952457702 | $40.00

Publisher Description:

Philipp Schaerer's works are the outcome of a skillful amalgamation of photographic knowledge, compositional skills, digital craftsmanship, and the specificities of architectural practice. His imaged architectures do not correspond with actual buildings but instead both challenge the role of the photograph as documentary evidence and, equally, critique how architecture is consumed today. When first released in 2010 in German and French, this book was the only comprehensive presentation of Philipp Schaerer's work available. And while the perpetual development of information technology and digital photography is continuously rebalancing the relationship between architecture and its visual representation, the architect's synthetic images continue to occupy a relevant position within this debate. The Bildbauten series, assembled here in its original twenty-four plates and extended by eight additional new works, speaks a powerful visual language that transcends the barriers of any written text.

dDAB Commentary:

Not knowing the background of Philipp Schaerer's Bildbauten series, my first thought on flipping through his architectural imagery assembled in this book was "Where are these buildings?" Yet finding things just a little bit off — windows that look out of place, a consistent lack of context, and oddly monolithic surfaces — that thought shifted to "Wait, are these buildings?" With their straightforward profiles and often peaked rooflines, it was easy for my brain to see these images and jump to the documentation of industrial structures by Bernd and Hilla Becher and then assume Schaerer had managed somehow to find odd leftover sides of warehouses, sheds, bunkers, and the like. But too much of the subject matter in Bildbauten defies logic, particularly if considered as parts of highly logical industrial vernacular buildings. The source of the confusion, I think, arises from how skilled Schaerer is at manipulating photographic and digital imagery. A large roof covered in vegetation, for example, does not exhibit any of the repetition that normally comes with the mapping of materials to 3D digital models or the stamping of an image area in Photoshop — it just looks so real.

So after looking at the images, I flipped to the back of the book for some insight in the accompanying texts: by editor Reto Geiser, now MoMA curator Martino Stierli, curator Nathalie Herschdorfer, and Swiss professor Philip Ursprung. Herschdorfer made some assertions that rang truest to me: "[A]rchitectural photography has trained our 'eye'," "we realize that the images surrounding us can and do 'lie'," and "the images — and the artist [Schaerer] — challenge the legitimacy and credibility of architectural photography." Put another way, Schaerer's understanding of what we expect from architectural photography (he is an architect, after all, and worked for Herzog & de Meuron a decade and a half ago) enabled him to frame his images in a way that made them look to us, even with our skepticism of images, like real buildings, in turn leading us to question the "real" photos of buildings we encounter online and in publications. That's just one of many interpretations of Schaerer's intriguing images — images that hold enough aesthetic appeal to be appreciated without intellectual justification.

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Artist Bio:

Philipp Schaerer visual artist and architect, 1994 - 2000 study of architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Architect and knowledge manager at Herzog & de Meuron (2000-06), taught the postgraduate course for CAAD headed by Prof. Ludger Hovestadt at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETHZ). Since 2010, Philipp Schaerer has been teaching at various Swiss universities and, as of 2014, is visiting professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the EPFL in the discipline Art and Architecture.

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