AR Reading List 060: Hélène Binet

‘The photographs are not paeans to architecture; rather, they are works of art with their own specific attributes’ wrote Mark Pimlott on the work of Hélène Binet in AR March 2019. The work of Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Zumthor and many others has been viewed by the world through Binet's lens. Her manipulation of light and shadow, often captured in black and white, creates images of depth and fascination that transcend the objects they represent and become objects in their own right. Working exclusively with film, Binet's work celebrates the limits of the medium and the lack of post-production editing. The play on light and space in her photographs captures the depth of a building – material and emotional – and evokes a sense of space beyond the built fabric of the architecture. This Reading List brings together works from Binet's prolific career that have featured in the AR. Light Lines: The Architectural Photographs of Hélène Binet is now open at the Royal Academy, displaying over 90 of Binet's photographs from the past 30 years until 23 January 2022.

Hélène Binet was the winner of the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize in 2019. The W Awards 2022 are now open for entry. Put forward talented architects or nominate yourself for the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture – open to practice leaders from all over the world under the age of 45, and the MJ Long Prize for Excellence in Practice, awarded to UK-based architects working in practice. Click here to submit your entry today

How Hélène Binet’s photographs changed the way we look at architecture, AR March 2019, Mark Pimlott
‘Her intense attention, which is later shared by the viewer, moves towards the idea of the architect. The photographs convey telling aspects of the pictured subject and their, perhaps unconsciously embodied, ideas’

Hélène Binet: ‘I am interested in making you dream about the place’, AR March 2019, AR editors
‘There’s a sense of impossibility to photograph space, or to communicate what a space is. I am interested in making you dream about the place. It’s like reading a description in a book: you make your own image and that’s for me the big achievement’

Revisit: Hedmark Museum in Hamar, Norway by Sverre Fehn, AR July/August 2021, Jørgen Tandberg
‘Each material communicates a separate formal and constructive language, establishing as strong a presence to the visitor as that of the old barn walls and the ancient ruins of the manor’

Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku is a shock to the system, AR November 2013, Peter Cook
‘The world at large is intrigued by the Zaha Hadid phenomenon: the architectural world jealous of the succession of mouth-watering commissions and of the (let’s admit it, guys) high success rate’

In Korea’s shadows: light and shade in traditional Korean architecture, AR September 2021, Byoung-Soo Cho and Sueminn Sage Cho
‘As a child, I would fall asleep to the nightly theatrics of shadows cast across the window-paper in my bedroom. The shadows, dramatic in their boldness, would slowly flow around the entirety of the room’

Musical theatre: Nevill Holt Opera House, UK by Witherford Watson Mann, AR December 2019/January 2020, Manon Mollard
‘Douglas fir planks recede from vision and contrast with the planed and stained surfaces of the balcony and proscenium – but when the lights dim, these elements dissolve in darkness’

New and old are bound together at Caruso St John’s Newport Street Gallery, AR September 2016, Ellis Woodman
‘Heavily glazed at ground level, it develops into a wide cliff of unrelieved brickwork before terminating in a Bart Simpson haircut of spikily attenuated rooflights’