These slides were sent to us by Philippa Lewis in response to Gordon Shrigley’s article on render; photographs to expand on the possibilities of the material, some results purposeful and some incidentally beautiful.
Gillian Darley and Philippa Lewis started Edifice in around 1987 – a stock library source for the built environment. A succinct description of its holdings ran: ‘A Photo Library for exteriors of all possible types of building. Specialist in details illustrating architectural features, period, style, material and ornament.’ Edifice’s USP was that it covered the ordinary, as well as the extra-ordinary: bungalows as well as palaces. Captions were also taken seriously. As was normal at that period the collection consisted of 35mm transparencies stored in hanging files within metal cabinets. A large proportion were images taken by the founders, although it gradually acquired contributions by other photographers to widen its geographic scope.
Since 2014 all the British material has been in the Historic England Archive in Swindon, some of it is online.
Painted hardware store facade, Soho, New York City.Palazzo Dardinelli-Fenzie highly decorated with sgraffito Renaissance ornament, late sixteenth century, Florence.Sgraffito decoration by George Frampton on house for J.D.Sedding, Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, 1882.Incised plasterwork, second half nineteenth century, Barcelona.Campello Querini, Venice.Thirteenth or fourteenth ornamentation, Nasrid Palace, Alhambra, Grenada.Incised plasterwork, Grenada.Eclectic nineteenth century incised plasterwork ornament, Barcelona.Hand painted decoration on house facade, Athens.Weathered wall, Mallorca.Roman wall painting, Herculaneum, Italy.Asilah, Morocco.Render as a convenient surface.Traditional house, Carmona.Peeling layers of colour on render, Lisbon.
Photographs of Morocco and Barcelona by Tom Thistlethwaite, others Philippa Lewis.
Edifice
– Philippa Lewis
These slides were sent to us by Philippa Lewis in response to Gordon Shrigley’s article on render; photographs to expand on the possibilities of the material, some results purposeful and some incidentally beautiful.
Gillian Darley and Philippa Lewis started Edifice in around 1987 – a stock library source for the built environment. A succinct description of its holdings ran: ‘A Photo Library for exteriors of all possible types of building. Specialist in details illustrating architectural features, period, style, material and ornament.’ Edifice’s USP was that it covered the ordinary, as well as the extra-ordinary: bungalows as well as palaces. Captions were also taken seriously. As was normal at that period the collection consisted of 35mm transparencies stored in hanging files within metal cabinets. A large proportion were images taken by the founders, although it gradually acquired contributions by other photographers to widen its geographic scope.
Since 2014 all the British material has been in the Historic England Archive in Swindon, some of it is online.
Photographs of Morocco and Barcelona by Tom Thistlethwaite, others Philippa Lewis.
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Category
commentaries, rants & reflections
Period
c20th c21st
Medium
photograph