Experimental Architecture Photography at London’s Barbican Centre

The Barbican is irrefutably one of London’s most significant architectural destinations, so it seems particularly apt that the latest exhibition to be showcased within the confines of its Brutalist walls is "Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age," a collection of more than 250 images by 18 leading photographers, past and present.

Beginning with Berenice Abbott’s "Changing New York (1935–1939)" series that captured the city’s transition into a sky-high, vertical metropolis and ending with Iwan Baan's exploration of Torre David—an incomplete but occupied tower in Caracas, Venezuela, that tells a very different story about today’s built environment—curators Alona Pardo and Elias Redstone explore architectural and photographic history while documenting the realities, both beautiful and at times devastating, of the ever-changing world around us.

From Julius Shulman’s glossy, stylized shots of California’s Case Study Houses and Lucien Hervé’s striking coverage of Le Corbusier’s Indian utopia, Chandigarh, to images by contemporary photographers—Hélène Binet, Andreas Gursky, Nadav Kander, Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, and Thomas Struth, among others—many of the works on display are being shown in the U.K. for the first time.

"I feel very honored to be included in this collection, mainly because it is moving away from what people perhaps initially think of as architecture photography: a commissioned work that in the end has to ‘sell’ a product, in this case a building," says Iwan Baan. "Instead, what Alona and Elias have managed to do really honors the artist and his or her interpretation of the built environment."

Through January 11, 2015, at the Barbican, London; barbicanrg.uk

Click to see a selection of photographs on view at the Barbican.

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