ArchitectureLondon & Copenhagen & Brussels · Guest essay
Photographer David Altrath on how he sees the Barbican, Grundtvig's Church and Brussels
A Hamburg photographer's essay on walking before shooting, and finding the less obvious details in famous concrete and brick buildings.
David Altrath, a Hamburg-based architecture and reportage photographer, sometimes spends his first hour in a building without taking a single picture. In a guest essay for designboom, he describes walking around, watching the light and the floors, and working out how one room leads into the next. He usually arrives with an idea of what he wants, and admits it is often wrong.
His interest lies past the famous view. At London's Barbican, endlessly photographed, he finds the concrete is only part of the story: there is the planting, the water, the people and small domestic details that turn an image back into a place. At Grundtvig's Church in Copenhagen, the sheer repetition of brick makes the first impression, but time shifts his attention to the rhythm of the columns and the play of light. At the CBR Building in Brussels, he finds himself reading the relationships between forms rather than the whole.
He is honest about what a photograph loses: sound, temperature, the echo of footsteps in a church, a greenhouse's humidity. Yet the camera, he argues, can isolate something you would miss on foot.
A thoughtful read for anyone who travels to see buildings, and a gentle nudge to slow down and look twice when you get there.
Our summary of a story from designboom, published 13 October 2026. Read the original
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From designboom