MÁS SOBRE JENS WILLEBRAND

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ARQUITECTURA - JENS WILLEBRAND

MÁS SOBRE ESTE PROYECTO

The Perfomance of Architecture
Essay of Andreas Ruby in Annual of Light and Architecture

Jens Willebrand is an architectural photographer whose entire body of work exhibits a restrained form of trademark.
Rather than a striking style which guarantees recognition in the manner of a label, it is a particular approach to the
visible world that gives his images their unmistakable tone. An important role is played by the choice of the light with
which Willebrand sounds out surfaces and spaces. Discreetly avoiding what is widely regarded as the ideal image
featuring the radiant building against a clear sky, Willebrand almost never photographs in direct sunlight, and tends to
favor slightly overcast conditions. The light conditions he most prefers are those produced by a cloudless sky shortly
before sunrise: that intermediate time that is no longer night but not yet day. The view from the street of the
Felix-Nussbaum-Museum by Daniel Libeskind was shot in this light on a summer�s day shortly before five o�clock in the
morning. However, it is only the blurred car lights, along with the reddish shimmer behind the trees at the left-hand
edge of the picture, that actually convey a sense of the time of day. The rest of the sky is filled with a timeless
brightness, which bathes the concrete structure in a gentle light rich in contours. This allows the smooth surfaces of
the building to manifest themselves in their own time, undisturbed by the aggressive play of shadows cast by the nearby
trees a few hours later. By contrast, the photograph of the Water Pavilion by Nox was taken shortly before nightfall.
The sun has long since set, with the result that one can only make out the silhouette of the building with its cladding
of thin high-grade steel strips. A few reflections of light roam across its volume, culminating in the last illuminated
group of clouds on the left-hand edge of the picture. As a result, the building assumes the appearance not of an
isolated techno-monad amidst the no-man�s-land of the Osterschelde-Damm thoroughfare, but rather of the earthly
continuation of the dramatically overcast sky over the Zeeland coast. Landscape, light and architecture merge in the
atmospheric portrait of a remarkable moment. The courtyard view of Joachim and Margot Sch�rmanns residential development
on Gross St. Martin in Cologne, on the other hand, reveals the photographers rare ability to uncover the spatial
qualities of a structure which initially seems fairly inconspicuous. Although the buildings take up the greater part of
the picture, they do not play the main role in the composition. They appear rather to frame something which is not
actually visible: the space between their walls. It is this inversion which draws the eye to the touching intimacy of
the courtyard and the imperceptible movement of its landscaped surface, the playful charm of which counteracts the
severity of the block. An eloquent example of Willebrands remarkable ability to visualize spatial relationships is the
photograph of the UFA cinema center by Coop Himmelblau in Dresden. Instead of isolating the building as an icon, the
picture frames the spatial communication of the architecture with its context. Reflected in the corrugated facade of the
Kino-Kristall cinema, the apparently endless residential segment is drawn into the spatial dynamics of the glass
structure projecting into the space and projected into its transparent foyer to breathtaking effect, before fusing with
the sky, which the deconstructivistic glass roof interweaves from above. Seen in this way, the square framed by the two
buildings no longer appears as an over-sized empty space but marks the magnetic field of their attraction and repulsion.
These four examples illustrate a conception of architectural photography which could not be further removed from the
false modesty of the documentary objectivity which many still regard as ultimate goal of the profession. The
relationship between Jens Willebrands photography and its architectural objects is closer to that between a musical
interpretation and the composition:
the image performs the architecture.