“Materials are a vocabulary. Use them precisely and they’ll say exactly what you mean. Use them poetically and they might say something you didn’t even know you believed.”
I’ve been photographing Amin Taha’s work for the better part of two decades, and if there’s one thing I’ve come to expect, it’s that I’ll be asked to point my lens at something that makes architectural orthodoxy squirm. Photographing Amin’s buildings is never about recording completed form, it’s about documenting process, material, memory, and the deliberate, sometimes mischievous, dismantling of architectural expectations.
Which brings us to 168 Upper Street in Islington. At first glance, might seem like a straightforward piece of restoration. But as with much of Amin’s work (and I say this with the affection of a repeat collaborator) the building is anything but straightforward.
The original structure, a kind of end pavilion to a Palladian-inspired terrace, was obliterated in the Second World War. For seventy years, the site sat empty, until Amin became involved. A lesser architect might have opted for a polite pastiche or a safely contextual infill. Amin, unsurprisingly, chose neither.
Instead, 168 Upper Street is an apparition, a reimagining, or perhaps more accurately, a misremembering of the Victorian original. The design began as an archival and digital investigation, from that research, a ghost was conjured: a phantom imagined and then constructed, faithful in form but fated to be distorted by time, fabrication, and intention.
This new digital model was cast, half a metre thick, serving as structure and interior and exterior finish. It’s one of the most complete examples of architecture, construction, and sculpture being collapsed into a single act.
The texture left behind by the polystyrene formwork is photographic in itself, a ghostly relief that reads like a negative of Victorian ornament. You’ll find the outlines of cornices and pilasters, capitals and pediments, window mouldings that frame nothing in particular. And then a punched opening cuts through a neoclassical detail. It’s both irreverent and strangely reverent. The camera doesn’t lie, but here it gets caught in a lie being lovingly told.
Photographing 168 required a kind of double vision. On one hand, there’s the façade, this strange, soft-lit misremembering, with its coral tone shifting through London’s indecisive daylight. On the other, there’s the interior, where clarity and sharp detail quietly rule. The camera had to hold both ideas in tension: past and present, shadow and structure, memory and manipulation.
Some have called the building postmodern, but that seems too glib. There’s nothing ironic about 168 Upper Street. It doesn’t wink at history; it stares directly at it, tilts its head slightly, and bends things out of shape, just far enough to tell a new story, and tell it poetically.
