Giovanni Battista Balestra, Elide Brunati, Ettore Contro, Lidor Gilad, BECHER’S ANATOMY, 2016

Photography and architecture often meet. The architect frequently delegates the function of documentation and promotion of his work to photography. For some time, moreover, photography and photomontage have been utilized by architects in the planning phase, as notebooks in which to jot down ideas for composition or construction.

The interpretation of the relationship between architecture and photography proposed by Lidor Gilad and Giovanni Battista Balestra, teachers of the course of Digital Representation held at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture in 2013/14 and in 2014/15, is a different and innovative one.

The teachers have seen in the photographs of Bernd & Hilla Becher – especially the series on gas tanks, water towers and winding towers – something that goes beyond representation and have therefore proposed an alternative approach to photography to their students: no longer a point of arrival, but the beginning of a process of analysis, deconstruction and reconstruction on the basis of architectural rules aimed at finding and realizing a new subject.