Photographing the landscape at Chelsea Barracks means looking for an architecture that does not end at the building line. The more interesting proposition is found in the ecosystem between things. Gustafson Porter + Bowman’s landscape is so considered that it resists being treated as foreground. It has its own spatial intelligence, its own structure, its own architecture.
The camera therefore has to move beyond the conventional hierarchy in which landscape decorates the building. I am more interested in the moments where that hierarchy dissolves altogether.
That experience is difficult to photograph because so much of it exists beyond sight. Landscape works through temperature, scent, moisture, sound and touch. The sweetness of flowering plants, the surface of stone, the presence of water, the movement of grasses in a light wind: these things accumulate into a sense of place long before they become conscious subjects.
This is where abstraction becomes useful, where conditions begin to describe something larger than themselves. They become evidence of the negotiation between the constructed city and those older biological instincts that the city can never entirely suppress.
We surround ourselves with concrete, stone, glass because we require shelter, order, privacy, exchange and value. Architecture inevitably belongs to this material economy. Yet threaded through that reality is another order, older and considerably less interested in our financial arrangements. Trees grow towards light. Water follows gravity. Plants flower, seed and decay. Birds occupy hedges without regard for tenure. The seasons proceed.
There is something essential in that coexistence.
The landscape does not deny the concrete environment; it releases it from some of its severity. The spaces become more generous because they acknowledge that human beings are not merely occupants of buildings or participants in an economy. We are animals with skin, lungs, eyes and memory. We respond instinctively to shade, water, vegetation, smell, texture and the changing quality of light.
For me, photographing Chelsea Barracks is therefore partly about trying to locate that universal condition within an environment shaped by far more mundane corporeal and capital concerns. Landscape offers that contact without pretending that the city has disappeared.
Perhaps the most successful photographs are those in which nature dominates the frame. They recognise a momentary equilibrium: cultivated planting occupying the same visual weight as an elevation; the conditions for life held between water, vegetation and stone. The subject becomes less Chelsea Barracks as an object and more Chelsea Barracks as an inhabited ecology.
