120 LIGHT + TECH


Left Zaha Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station, one of Binet’s most celebrated images


Below Powerful details from the Ponte sul Basento in Potenza, Italy


of Art in Rome, the Glasgow Riverside Museum of Transport and the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati. The exhibition culminates with


‘powerful and simple images of Binet’s observations of the essential elements of architecture: walls that catch shadows and act as a foil for nature, and ground planes that show the use of architecture across time’. These include Binet’s famous images of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s Thermal Baths at Vals, hung alongside landscaping and pathways at the Acropolis designed by Dimitris Pikionis in the 1950s. Her recent work includes a set of Five Churches in Cologne by Gottfried Böhm, commissioned to celebrate the architect’s centenary, and an iconic yet rarely seen private house, Can Lis, by Jørn Utzon. Most of the buildings represented date


from the 20th and 21st centuries, but there are three historic projects: as well as the


18th-century Jantar Mantar Observatory, there are Nicholas Hawksmoor’s 18th- century London churches, and the romantic Lingering Garden of Suzhou in China, parts of which date back to the 16th century. While she exploits the yin and yang


relationship between light and shadow, Binet has concluded that the human impulse is clearly towards the light. ‘When I did an essay on shadow in architecture, around 2005, I was trying to go into buildings to only look at shadow and I was really noticing that our body wants to see the light – you have to do something that is not natural, you have to strain yourself to look at the dark, it’s against our energy,’ she told Lighting magazine. ‘When you try to see and frame the shadows and see them as independent of the light it needs a lot of concentration. We always think this is a light next to the shadow, we never think this is a shadow next to the light.’


‘Light Lines: The Architectural Photographs of Hélène Binet’ can be seen at the Jillian and Arthur M Sackler Wing of Galleries at the Royal Academy, London until 23 January 2022.


ALL IMAGES: HÉLÈNE BINET


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