Architect x Architects

Forty-eight houses, each designed by two architects who never met.

As a student of architecture, architects themselves have always fascinated me. Each one has a signature: a way of detailing, a material palette, a geometry you can spot from across the street. This experiment asks what happens when two of those signatures collide. Every pair here is two people who never worked together — often two who never could have — and the brief given to both is the same house: remote, off grid, no road and no power line, standing in a landscape that is taking it back.

Each is one photograph rather than a set of details. An earlier run made six tight crops per pair and they read as renders of a wall; a single establishing shot has to show the whole building, which is the only way to see whether the two signatures actually met.

Two rounds, forty-eight houses. The first reaches back to the moderns and the regionalists — Ando, Barragán, Bawa, Doshi, Bo Bardi, Fathy; the second pairs the Pritzker generation and the starchitects, where the signatures are louder and the collisions are harder to resolve.

Architects in this study: Tadao Ando, Luis Barragán, Frei Otto, Lina Bo Bardi, Geoffrey Bawa, Sverre Fehn, John Lautner, Hassan Fathy, Glenn Murcutt, Rudolf Schindler, Jørn Utzon, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Oscar Niemeyer, Álvaro Siza, B. V. Doshi, Jean Prouvé, Buckminster Fuller, Pierre Koenig, Eileen Gray, Marcel Breuer, Toyo Ito, Ricardo Bofill, Charlotte Perriand, Wang Shu, Louis Kahn, Sigurd Lewerentz, Hans Scharoun, Rogelio Salmona, Adolf Loos, Eladio Dieste, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Kazuo Shinohara, Erich Mendelsohn, Félix Candela, Julia Morgan, Paolo Soleri, Konstantin Melnikov, Bruce Goff, Yasmeen Lari, Anna Heringer, Arata Isozaki, Ralph Erskine, I. M. Pei, Enric Miralles, Kenzo Tange, Gottfried Böhm, Marina Tabassum, Laurie Baker, Zaha Hadid, Peter Zumthor, Rem Koolhaas, Kengo Kuma, Norman Foster, David Chipperfield, Jean Nouvel, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, Shigeru Ban, Frank Gehry, Francis Kéré, Jacques Herzog, Thom Mayne, Steven Holl, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Kazuyo Sejima, Smiljan Radić, Lacaton & Vassal, Sou Fujimoto, Rafael Moneo, Grafton Architects, RCR Arquitectes, Bjarke Ingels, Mies van der Rohe, Alejandro Aravena, Moshe Safdie, Junya Ishigami, Richard Meier, Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, Fumihiko Maki, James Stirling, Daniel Libeskind, Philip Johnson, Winy Maas, Hans Hollein, Peter Eisenman, Christian de Portzamparc, Bernard Tschumi, Kisho Kurokawa, Bijoy Jain, Kevin Roche, Tatiana Bilbao, Gordon Bunshaft, Lina Ghotmeh, Riken Yamamoto, Jeanne Gang.

Prompt

"Magnificent architectural photograph of an entire remote off-grid house that fuses [Architect A] — as in [Building A] — with [Architect B], as in [Building B]. Wide establishing landscape shot showing the full house, roofline to ground foundation, nothing cropped or cut off. [A's signature], interleaved with [B's signature], so that no single element reads as belonging to only one architect; the two halves meet across [the divide]. The house stands on [the site], completely self-sufficient — solar, rainwater, no road, no power line, no neighbouring building. [Vegetation] grow hard against the walls and reclaim the base of the house. First light, low raking sun, long shadows. Camera at eye level, house centered, wide-angle lens, corrected straight verticals. Architectural photography, tack sharp focus, natural light only, photoreal, physically based materials."

TADAO ANDO X LUIS BARRAGAN

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