Dystopias (2012)
Creating a building is an
optimistic act. It is invested with hopes and ideas about how it’s to be
used, how it can help people and change society.
But buildings are
like people. They get old and increasingly irrelevant. Some, through
ill-managed conception or subsequent neglect, become delinquent. Some
are despised, some abandoned and most eventually get razed to make way
for new lives.
Social realism in photography focuses on people, their
issues, their joys and their tribulations. For me, as an architect,
structures and spaces are poignant indicators which frame urban lives
and act as the stage sets of transition. They’re physical records of
people’s lived experiences, their communities and their societies over
time.
This series of photographs brings together disparate dystopic
environments. Some are from the island of Príncipe in West Africa,
others are of neglected or abandoned modernist structures. They both
represent the decline of utopian dreams.
The arcadian lives of the
wealthy Portuguese colonists in Príncipe ended in 1976 from one day to
the next. They were forced to flee, leaving their villas behind, the
invading jungle becoming the visible agent of change.
In the urban
context, that agent is less tangible. The utopian enthusiasm of the
modernist architectural movement, especially in high-density social
housing projects, has subsequently been seen by many an urbanistic and
social failure. With their hopes never quite realised and with the
reality of poverty, neglect and decay, these structures have mostly come
to represent the social ills and stigmas which beset the poor. The
brutalist forms and depraved landscapes are invaded not by jungle, but
by a sense of anomie.
- Gaelen Pinock, Dystopias (2012)