“Chronicle records the ongoing relationship between the practice and photographer Tim Soar, who has probably visited more AHMM projects than any other person.”
The relationship between architect and photographer is a bit like a jazz duo—one lays down the structure, the other riffs on it, and somewhere in the middle, something unexpected happens.
Over three decades, this partnership becomes less of an architect/photographer dynamic and more of a creative conspiracy. The theme? To capture the moments of light, to concentrate a narrative, to help reveal a building so that a bigger understanding of form and function is constructed. To encourage a sense of possibility, to release the viewer from cynicism, to spread a bit of joy.
Architecture, for all its talk of permanence, is just another fleeting human idea. It aspires to last forever but mostly spends its time fighting entropy, gravity, and the whims of occupiers and owners. Photography, by contrast, is pure time travel. It compresses, distills, and immortalises—turning lumps of glass and steel into a moment that persists in imagination. Together, architect and photographer don’t just document reality; they conspire to create new ways of seeing it.
Of course, there’s ritual involved. The slow-motion ballet of passing clouds, the sacred silence while waiting for the light to do something interesting, the philosophical debate over whether to embrace or banish the abandoned car, or the stickers left behind by the glazing company (they have to go, obviously). There’s also the endless negotiation between storytelling and abstraction—does this image need people for scale, or should it be a temple to form? Should it be a dream or a documentary? How much looking back, how much looking forward?
The magic trick, of course, is that these images are how architecture gets remembered. Long after the coffee stains appear on the lobby floor and the first retrofit displaces the original, the photographs remain, gleaming and true, a perfect memory. They shape how buildings are discussed, mythologised, re-created and incorporated into universal subconscious..
After 30 years, this collaboration becomes something more than just work—it’s a shared obsession, a fixed point, a friendship built on seeing the world from just the right angle. The architect learns to see through the photographer’s lens; the photographer absorbs the architect’s vision. And together, they keep striving for an ideal: an image that doesn’t just show a building, but one that dances and sings with the essence of the music.
Chronicle, a 30 year history of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris was shortlisted for a D&AD design award.
