In Spirit of Place ( teNeues , $75), a new book from French photographer Aurélien Villette, ruined buildings from across Europe pose enchanting questions about how we see architecture. On the one hand, Villette’s photos capture decay, with paint and wall coverings peeling back like diseased flesh, roofs caved in, shoes and typewriters and books covered with shards of glass and plaster. But on the other, the bones of the buildings shine through in the crisp, expansive images, in beautiful Art Nouveau windows, crumbling arches, and half-gone stairways.
We see endurance in the face of dilapidation, as well as the fossils of a craftsmanship that will never return. Because Villette provides no captions for the images, the various chapels, cultural palaces, homes, and industrial spaces are instantly elevated to the metaphorical, a vantage point further encouraged by his conceptual section titles, including “Dogma” and “Verticality.”
This break in convention was a risk, but the absence of context for each setting frees the viewer to look at it with fresh eyes, to let the tension between its past and present reverberate long after the book has been put on the shelf.
Click here to see Villette’s photographs of ruined buildings.
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