– David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff

This interview is excerpted from the catalogue of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, which was on show at the Hayward Gallery, London, 11 October 2023 – 07 January 2024, and is touring to UCCA Beijing and MCA Australia. Copies of the catalogue can be purchased here.

Ralph Rugoff: Hiroshi Sugimoto has described his Architecture series—a group of photographs he began in 1997, portraying iconic modernist buildings by, among others, William Van Alen (Chrysler Building), Minoru Yamasaki (World Trade Center) and Mies van der Rohe (Seagram Building)—as an attempt on his part to conjure the initial inspiration as it first emerged in the mind of the architect. So this is a kind of ideal form that’s still slightly indistinct—that’s why he has said he felt the photographs should be blurred and out of focus. Does that connect at all with your own experience of imagining the first glimmer of what a building might be like?

David Chipperfield: That’s interesting, although I’m not sure that’s how most architects develop their idea of a building. Perhaps this is true in a more Beaux-Arts Neoclassical tradition, but less so, I think, in a contemporary approach where design grows out of a more complex and iterative process. Even in the case of the Guggenheim in New York, I suspect Frank Lloyd Wright started with the idea of the circle and the ramp and the idea of the museum, and then from there the design of the exterior would have evolved. I don’t think it started with the exterior form.

Hiroshi is brilliant in the way he chooses his subject, whether that’s a sea, a cinema or a waxwork. He chooses a subject which he then works out—or he has already pre-worked out—what to do with it. I think it’s a very strategic process based on his craft and understanding of the potential of photography.

Hiroshi has a great eye, impeccable taste and a deep understanding of architecture. I’m sure that once he was interested in the idea of architecture as a photographic subject, he tried to imagine how he could abstract buildings and go to their essence rather than their detailed reality. In a way they are idealisations, they are an adulation or a celebration of the essential qualities.

RR: The blur reduces the buildings to platonic architectural forms. No details. Just light and shade delineating these very simple shapes.

DC: Yes—which is a very strong idea. As an architect, you do want to understand what lies at the core of the building. If the wind blows hard, what’s left? With architecture you’re always looking for the fundamental things. It’s more about the bones than the skin, you’re looking for the archaic and the permanent. Even though our current concerns about sustainability and environment make us question our ideas of the permanence, architects tend to aspire to design structures that will last forever. And through his work, I think Hiroshi wants to embody some of those sensibilities of timelessness. He is looking for things that are innate, almost animistic. Perhaps this goes back to the issue of precision, the atmosphere becomes more important than the detail.

RR: Sugimoto has said that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography. He said he began erosion-testing architecture for durability, which is a very interesting idea – that you need a basic, compelling form in order for it to endure.

DC: There is an amusing consideration about which buildings would make good ruins. Ruination is a real test of good architecture—think of John Soane commissioning Joseph Michael Gandy, his favourite artist, to draw the Bank of England as a ruin before it was even built. There is that idea of permanence and timelessness, and if you then blur it, you’re blurring context and you’re abstracting it, so Hiroshi’s erosion concept is similar to the ruin test. In most of Hiroshi’s work he avoids contextual detail. You can’t imagine him showing a street with a car in it, for instance. For Hiroshi, it was a question of how to take something, remove its context and to reveal its essential and abstract qualities.

RR: Perhaps this is why some of the buildings are shot at rather odd angles—to make sure no background details are visible. Of course, architecture is something he’d photographed before, though interiors only, in his Theaters pictures, many of them featuring rather baroque interiors, and then later he made photographs of theatres in ruins.

DC: And those were so precise. In the cinema works, the whole idea is that the photographic exposure corresponds with the length of the film that’s playing on the screen. While this gives them precision and detail they are still abstracted, there are no people sitting in the cinema for instance. Whereas the blurring of the Architecture series, which at first seems to go against the grain or the precision of his other work, is also about playing with exposure, this time to abstract the object.

RR: Is there also an element of critique in these blurred pictures? Not only in the way that they make icons of modernism resemble ghostly or ancient relics, but also in how they visually erase the details of these buildings, as if they were superfluous or disposable.

DC: He’s not completely wrong to say that there’s something more fundamental about the buildings than is sometimes achieved in their realisations. How many buildings do you like as an idea, and then when it gets built, the reality doesn’t live up to the idea? Especially with contemporary buildings, the reality gets quite weak as they’re not always built in the way that you imagine they should be.

RR: Sugimoto figured out how inanimate objects could look more alive through photography in his pictures depicting dioramas and wax figures. Somehow, he seems to have reversed that with the buildings.

DC: It’s true. There are different traditions of architectural photography. Obviously architecture is always a subject of documentation and plays a strong role in the history of photography.

You can think of many wonderful examples of photographers using the city as their subject or background. There is another tradition of architectural photography that is more related to the profession that needs its subject recorded. Architects of the modern movement like Le Corbusier were very aware of the potential of the image of their work as conveyed through photography. Many of the great architectural photographers were adept in finding the architect’s idea of the building. The great architectural photographers like Ezra Stoller were emphasising the compositional qualities of the buildings that were their subjects. Nowadays architects tend to want to convey some sort of reality—the architect will want to show buildings in relation to the way people inhabit them. There are still some photographers—like Hélène Binet and Candida Höfer—who tend to work in a more abstract fashion. Höfer photographed the Neues Museum in Berlin when it was just completed, and when I asked her whether she would photograph it again when all the objects were installed, she said she didn’t want to, because she preferred it without them.

I think it’s very interesting how Hiroshi has become interested in architecture and sculpture. He blurs the boundaries between being a photographer, being an artist, being an architect. He does these things on his own terms, extreme and uncompromising. When he designed his own apartment in Tokyo he insisted that the craftsmen kept redoing the plasterwork until he was happy. He also decided that the apartment needed no artificial light because there was enough light coming from the overly lit city outside. Not many clients would allow an architect to do that! I think it’s based on a deep belief Hiroshi has that things have intrinsic qualities, and he wants to find what those qualities are. So, I suppose, as a photographer, he’s an extractor of quality, and with the architectural portraits, he seems to be controlling architecture in a way that you can’t do as an architect.

RR: In a way, his architectural pictures are comparable to his Conceptual Forms photos—which use light and shadow to shroud the abstract forms of plaster models that represent mathematical equations. It’s not that different from the way he’s abstracted these iconic buildings. Do these images make you think at all differently about the legacy of those modernist buildings, and maybe how they might be regarded by people in the future?

DC: In a way he’s making them more iconic. Personally, I am concerned by the idea that all buildings need to have an iconic presence. It’s fine if it’s the Guggenheim Museum, or a cathedral—but now, every client wants an icon. It is part of marketing and sales, the commodification of architecture. I believe that it is also a consequence of the absence of urban planning—because we don’t build nice cities anymore, attention is transferred towards the individual efforts. Thankfully, we’re starting to realise that we need to backpedal a bit and think more about how we plan cities, and that buildings should be less iconic in isolation but rather contribute to a wider whole. So, in a strange way, the iconisation of icons, which is what Sugimoto’s doing, is less appealing to me as an idea now than it was when he first made them. On the other hand, I think there is something enduringly beautiful about what he’s done to the texture of these buildings.

RR: We’re also at a moment where a lot of these buildings are showing their age.

DC: Certainly by abstracting them you get rid of any signs of age, as well as any signs of context. If you’re looking for the essential qualities in something, you’re trying to look at it as something that isn’t defined by time. It’s sort of abstract. It’s the same thing Hiroshi did with the sea, eradicating all the things which you normally recognise the sea by—he gets rid of the shore, he gets rid of waves, he gets rid of anything that’s superfluous. All that remains is this idea of deep investigation, of trying to marvel at the sea in its general rather than particular condition.

He is obviously avoiding something that I think architectural photography almost always has, which is a reportage quality. It’s always going to have a sort of socioeconomic element, in a way, a sense of documentation. If you take a photograph of a building in a street, it’s very difficult to escape that. Normally that documentation is quite interesting, but that is the issue with architecture: it is very grounded, and I think Hiroshi is trying to unground it through his images of buildings.

RR: Have you been to his Enoura Observatory in Japan?

DC: Yes, a few times.

RR: It’s interesting that Sugimoto is a looker, a recorder of vision, and so the project he builds in Japan is an observatory that is perched on this cliff-side location where the view of sea and sky is paramount.

DC: I think he’s interested in the experience and the three-dimensionality and the physicality, more than the architecture itself. Enoura offers a series of experiences—at each moment you see something else. It’s more like a Japanese garden, in a sense. It’s playful, but it’s also playing with you. One part is about a long view and another is about changing, another is about the horizon. He has made a three-dimensional, experiential, immersive environment.

RR: It’s a very dramatic and precarious location. It must have been difficult to build on.

DC: He’s very good at things like that. I mean, it’s where he comes into his own, working closely and precisely, controlling the physical experience and optimising what one can see and also what one can feel. I’m never sure how interested in the wider issues of architecture Hiroshi is. It has always been important to him but he’s an artist and the Architecture series is ultimately more about photography than architecture. He knows a lot about architecture, and it is clearly on his mind. Through his pictures, he makes these buildings perfect by reducing them to forms he finds acceptable. He’s making them his.