There’s a moment, standing behind the lens, when a building gives itself away. Not in a dramatic sweep or self-conscious gesture, but in the quiet insistence of proportion, of light falling exactly where it should. Photographing the American work of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, particularly their recent projects in Oklahoma, I’m struck by an emerging clarity. Not simply in the architecture itself, but in the questions it’s asking.
This isn’t the rationalism of Terragni’s crystalline fascio or Ledoux’s grand geometric idealism. It’s something more contingent, more alert to context; what one might call pragmatic intelligence. The kind of thinking that sees a building not as a monument to permanence, but as an adaptable framework for uncertain futures.
AHMM, for all their British understatement, are quietly leading this shift. Their work on the brand new Citizen building and the development and redevelopment of educational, social, sporting, housing, commercial and civic buildings in the States echoes themes I’ve long traced in modernist photography: the tension between order and looseness, control and change. These are buildings that know they will be reused, rethought, recast and they are better for it.
The old modernist aspiration, to build with rational clarity and structural honesty, has returned, but with different cargo. Today’s architecture is no longer obsessed with totalising form or formal purity. Instead, it is interested in long life, loose fit; in structures that admit their own limitations, and by doing so, stay relevant longer.
When I look through the viewfinder at AHMM’s American projects, I see rationalism reframed: not as a stylistic inheritance, but as an ethic. The façades are ordered, yes, but not doctrinaire. Materials are selected for performance and for reusability. Floorplates allow for multiple futures, not just one determined programme. This isn’t efficiency in the corporate sense,it’s regenerative clarity. An architecture not afraid of change, even after the photographer’s tripod has been packed away.
There’s something profoundly contemporary about this. As the climate emergency forces architecture to reconsider its legacy, we’re seeing a shift away from spectacle and toward systems that can last. Buildings that perform not only thermally, but socially, economically, and adaptively. This new rationalism isn’t about ideology, it’s about usefulness, dignity, and duration.
To photograph these buildings is to be reminded that elegance lies in restraint. That true sustainability is often invisible. And that architecture, at its best, doesn’t shout—it listens, long after the shutter clicks.
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
America Office Works
Photographed September 2014 – May 2025
