Photo: Derek Kettela for Elle France, 2010

This week’s edition of Guess the Buidling features model Erin Heatherton on a striking sculptural terrace. Golden sunlight  bounces off playful chimneys, creating a dynamic backdrop for this contemporary fashion shoot. Built by a modern master with a penchant for ornament and allegory, this project is a mainstay of academic and popular discussion. Have you seen the warm-toned masonry and arabesque motifs before? If you think you know the project, tell us in in the comments section below!

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Here at Architizer, we love spotlighting young talent. Up-and-coming designers bring fresh perspectives and apply new technology to their work, invigorating already innovative disciplines. Today we’re highlighting the work of photographer Daniella Zalcman, whose stunning New York + London series of superimposed photos takes Instagram images to a new level.

Navigating between travel and art photography, Zalcman documented her major transnational relocation to London from New York with this set of overlapping photographs of both cities. Her meticulous compositions produce synergy and dissonance in the same frame, heightening their visual contrast and strong atmospheric presence. Click through to see more!

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Barrow Cabins, a photo series by Seattle-based photographer Eirik Johnson, depicts homebuilt Alaskan hunting cabins during the seasonal extremes far above the Arctic Circle. Johnson got the idea for the series of diptychs while on assignment photographing a decommissioned US Navy base outside of Barrow, Alaska.

Hugging the US’s northernmost point, Barrow is so far north that the sun never fully sets during the summer—which gave Johnson ample sunlight in the evenings to explore the seasonal hunting camps on the outskirts of town. Built by the native Iñupiat people, the hunting cabins are vernacular shelters built of cast-off and found materials, used for only part of the year. While photographing the cabins, Johnson “felt the work was missing something” and decided to “return to the camp during the extreme counterpoint of the Arctic winter solstice, when the sun never completely rises and the sea ice has moved in to blanket the cabins.” The result: immaculate, paired images of vernacular structures amid the Arctic’s climactic extremes. Click through to see the photos!

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At the epicenter of the world’s largest urban area, Tokyo is synonymous with density—an overflux of people, spaces, and ideas. Upending the general take of Tokyo as an urban over-stimulant, photographer Gabriel de la Chapelle has captured a novel, arresting view of the city as desolate landscape in his series, Tokyo End. His images are achingly captivating, showing empty stretches of urban infrastructure. Upon closer inspection, the empty “highways” are in fact canals with road striping superimposed. With not a soul in view, these impossibly beautiful images offer an intimate (if inaccessible) window onto the city. Click through to see them all.

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Eglise St. Martin. Donges, France

French photographer Fabrice Fouillet, known for his soaring photographs of postwar churches across Europe and the USA, was just announced as a winner of the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards in the Architecture category. His series “Corpus Christi” highlights the architectural aesthetic of new places of worship in the 1950s-60s and their hymn to minimalism. Devoid of traditional embellishment and decoration, Fouillet’s churches stand as sculptural testaments to the power of new forms and materials that emerged after World War II. Click through for more!

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National Museum in Brasilia; Photo: Iwan Baan

It’s a law of architectural photography that buildings never (or nearly never) be portrayed in the rain. Why? Because for the most part, wet buildings look about as sad as wet dogs; their features, so finely rendered by daylight and contrasted against blue skies, become muddled, flattened under a fresh layer of rainfall. Still, it’s a shame — after all, not many of us will be able to experience all these buildings IRL, forcing us to make do with highly-idealized photography that captures structures only at their best. (Thus, “eye candy.”)

But we want more! Take a look at these 7 pieces of architecture, all caught in the middle of a rainstorm, and see how different they looks when splashed with a bit of H2O. Continue.

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There are photographers who posses the “soul” of an architect, as Le Corbusier once put it, and then there are architects who posses the incisive eye of a photographer. The latter formulation was perhaps best embodied by Balthazar Korab, the architect-turned-documenter of buildings who died yesterday. The Michigan chapter of the AIA announced the passing of the Detroit-based photographer, who was born in Budapest in 1926. The Hungarian native received his architectural training in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and despite his tutelage there, would find work in the offices of modernists like Le Corbusier himself. In 1955, Korab was hired by Eero Saarinen as the architect’s in-house photographer and in whose employment, he would capture some of his most stunning images, including those of TWA Terminal and the Miller House. Continue.

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D’ville 001 (2012)

Do you often find yourself in buildings that, well, make too much sense? The Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin has long been tantalizing us with his digital composites of fanciful houses with multiplying roofs, illogical cantilevers, castles consisting only of walls, and geometric prisons of stone with no visible way in or out. Often set in romantic landscapes loaded with old-world texture, Dujardin’s impossible architecture is at once pastoral and panic-inducing, like a fairy-tale world designed by a slightly malicious Escher.

On February 7, San Francisco’s Highlight Gallery will kick off its solo exhibition of Dujardin’s photos. Here’s a preview of the works in the show, which will be open through March 29. Check them out!

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Building: The Ma: Andalucia’s Museum of Memory
Architect: Alberto Campo Baeza
Location: Granada, Spain

Why We Liked This:

Metaphors and architecture can be, well, heavy-handed. Most of the time, the combination produces bad results consisting of overly literal formal devices that are to buildings what “get it” is to a terrible joke. Still, sometimes it works; such is the case with Alberto Campo Baeza’s Museum of Memory, a heroically (neo-)modernist gesture plunked down along the perimeter of picturesque Granada. The vertical concrete slab, perforated with small square windows, looms over a low-lying podium structure pierced by a central circular void. This “courtyard” contains an intertwined set of spiraling ramps. Yes, memory equals time which is manifested as spiral of matter and events. We get it. But move beyond that, and you’ll find a stunning architectural space. The visual drama fostered therein is a dynamic foil to the platonic purity of the architecture. See more of this project in the Architizer database here.

Think you’ve got a better project? Submit it for an Architizer A+ Award!

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images © FG+SG

Yesterday, we told you about some crazy Russian teen photographers who venture up the sides of towers and giant buildings to capture eye-boggling images. Today, we bring you a safer, much tamer alternative to get that bird’s eye view. Design duo FG + SG‘s ”The Missing Dimension” is a project-cum-service provided for clients that will send a drone camera into the air to capture aerial photographs of their projects. The service allows homeowners, businesses, and architects without recourse to a helicopter or airplane to get unique, stunning airborne shots of their buildings. Read more.

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