B&W Europe Photos

I still haven't finished posting my photos from Europe on here but here's a few of the B&W 120 film photos made with my Mamiya 645.

A note on my film: The borders of the negatives are shown because my particular view of photography requires that I show what I saw when I took the photo. Hence, the images are not cropped. I rarely if ever dodge and burn. The only adjustments I make are to brightness and contrast - especially since my film of choice is the newer Kodak TMY-2 whereas this is Kodak's older 400TX, so a lot of my film turned out grainy and overdeveloped - I was being willfully dense when I developed it. C'est la vie.

The following three photos are of the Sony Center in Berlin and were hand held at night...

The Cathedral in Cologne.

The lead covering on Renzo Piano's Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome.

Richard Meier's Jubilee Church in (the ghetto of) Rome.

Pantheon in Rome - excellent.

Random Rome. Plants grow everywhere and here some vines had turned into a shade for this small gas station. It reminds me of those bridges that people grow in Asia.

Pompidou Center in Paris by Piano and Rogers. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter's Tietgen Dormitory in Copenhagen. This was one of if not my favorite contemporary building I've ever visited. The concept/program actually works to form a community.

BIG's (Bjarke Ingles Group) 8 House in Copenhagen.

Big's Mountain Dwelling in Copenhagen.

Cologne - Day 25 - 2010-6-25

A department store by Renzo Piano.

This is a suspended glass staircase designed by James Carpenter inside of Deutsche Post.

Murphy/Jahn's Deutsche Post building.

Bonn & Cologne - Day 23 & 24 - 2010-6-23,24

The Kölner Dom (Cologne Catherdral). It's massive. Oh yeah, it took 632 years to build and is 157.3 m high (515').

Beyer Headquarters by Helmut Jahn. Werner Sobek is more or less always his structural engineer.

This mechanical room uses waste heat (they say waste steam but... well I work with steam, there's rarely [with the exception of nuclear] such thing as waste steam) to heat and cool the building. It's so efficient that the building isn't required to have any photovoltaics or other zero emissions energy production as is usually required by German building codes.

Serious double facade.

Japanese garden.

Inside the Dom. 97m tall - so about 315'.

28cm x 21cm sketch on newsprint with india ink. This is BIG's Figure 8 building that's still under construction. All I did was draw that day... finals.

Berlin - Day 21 - 2010-6-21

The Sony Center by Murphy/Jahn. Structural engineering by Werner Sobek. Cost - 1 billion DM.

Hung glass facade with vertical tension cables and horizontal structural glass.

This building complex has multiple structural tricks. This one forms horizontal beams with tensioned steel cables to add rigidity to this glass facade. It's extremely materially efficient.

Good view of Mitte.

Jahn keeps his offices here too... so we took a little tour.

The same automated louvered aluminum blinds seen in Neues Kranzler Eck/DIFA.

Murphy/Jahn's library.

Hung glass facade held up by massive steel truss work, suspended by steel cables, and held down by huge springs attached to a massive buried concrete beam.

Glass bottom pond over an angled glass ceiling with terraced garden... must have been a bet over a couple beers.

The kingpin. This pin is the only compressive member of this canopy that translates the tensional force of the white teflon/fiberglass sheathing and steel cables into a positively sloped roof. Imagine standing on a trampoline and holding a sheet over your head - in this case you are the kingpin - that's basically how this building works.

One last note. Why is the kingpin tilted? Imagine the canopy as a cone. If you were to cut out a section perpendicular to the base the cut edge would form a circle as it does at the top. The courtyard is actually an ellipse so the "cut" was made at an angle... clever. Also, the canopy is only fixed to the surrounding buildings at two points, the rest are sliding plates. This allows for expansion and contraction.

Terracotta clad Renzo Piano buildings. It forms a whole complex replete with indoor "canyons" and outside water parks. The terracotta slowly recedes as it nears the edge.