Crowned (elements)
Ever more elaborate facades and tech-enabled structures are keenly worn like jewellery by our cities. In these photographs an intense play with colour, form and surface tease out the beauty, complexity and delirium of the high impact urban era that we're living through. The photographs look at what architecture can be in its boldest sense – large cultural constructs of economy, politics, imagination and myth. It represents the large systems that act on us and is therefore a constant fascination to me, a constant puzzle to grapple with and try to get a hold on. Having photographed in the regions at the forefront of urban growth over many years, I have seen cities scrambling for attention-grabbing architecture to put themselves on the map. Once limited to a few leading world cities, spectacle architecture has jumped and accelerated all around the world. Crowned is a large, ongoing project that follows this development from the long-time global cities of New York and London, through to the new skylines of the Middle East and the re-modelled cities of China.