VLT Editorial
STRUCTURE
Architectural silhouettes against brutalist backdrops. Defying gravity and convention.
The brutalist buildings of postwar London were not built to be beautiful in any traditional sense. They were built to be serious. To communicate, through raw concrete and bold geometry, a particular idea about what public life could be. They are now mostly considered problems, too austere, too uncompromising, too indifferent to the human scale.
STRUCTURE disagrees with that verdict.
The shoot took three days across four locations in South London and the South Bank. We were looking for sites where the architectural intention was still visible, where the building had not been softened by subsequent renovation or landscaping. The Hayward Gallery. The Trellick Tower. A car park in Elephant and Castle that is somehow still standing.
The garments were chosen for their structural kinship with the buildings. Angular shoulders, rigid panels, the same material discipline, the same refusal of decoration. The relationship between figure and architecture in these images is not contrast. It is family resemblance. Both things were made to last, and both things have.
