Mark Durden & João Leal

Hubert Damisch has argued that photography and film revealed to us that “architecture cannot be considered only as an art of space: room has to be made in its practice as well as its concepts, for time and movement.” Photography and cinematography are thus seen to disrupt Hegel’s polarised distinction between the arts of space (architecture, sculpture and painting) and the arts of time (music and poetry). For Hegel, architecture was the most incomplete art because, as Damisch notes, “it is unable to adequately express the spiritual through the use of materials concerned mostly with obeying the laws of gravity”, while music “is thought to be the ‘romantic’ art par excellence, because it deals with a material as insubstantial as sound.” Introducing Friedrich Schelling’s famous metaphor that architecture is nothing “but frozen music”, Damisch wonders whether we are then to define music as “defrosted architecture” and goes on to link this notion to the ways in which film and photography can reveal the relations between architecture and “the fabric of time, its texture, and by the same token, its relation to space.”

Damisch was writing in response to Jaqueline Salmon’s black and white photographs of Robert Mallet-Stevens’ Villa Noailles at Hyères. We have adapted his idea of ‘defrosted architecture’, for our photographs made in response to the formal qualities of Álvaro Siza’s and Eduardo Souto de Moura’s International Sculptural Museum (MIEC) and their rehabilitation of the Municipal Museum Abade Pedrosa (MMAP) in Santo Tirso, Portugal. Our series of photographs deliberately uses colour inversion as a strategy to further accent the remarkably inventive, playful formal qualities inherent in their architecture. Colour inversion draws out intrinsic elements of photography, pulls it away from the real. But at the same time also helps make visible new elements of the architecture it responds to. Brings us closer to the sensory qualities of its material forms.