Angling for Architecture as Art

Photography lovers and architecture lovers alike filled the Virginia Center for Architecture last night for the opening of the new exhibit, "Building Images: Seventy Years of Photography at Hedrich Blessing."

H-B is a Chicago firm that began in 1929 transforming architectural photography from a documentary style to an art form.

Many of the photographs are large scale black and white prints from the period beginning in 1930 and they are spectacular.

The firm, still working today, shot the work of the leading twentieth-century architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and Eliel Saarinen.

Many of the buildings are recognizable, but it's the unusual perspectives and angles that make the photographs so arresting.

At last night's reception, Hedrich Blessing photographer (and the exhibition curator) Nick Merrick talked about how the firm began and went on to change architectural photography forever.

Their intent was not to take a photo, but to think it.

These images are a beautiful marriage of the architect's intent and the photographer's vision.

If you need a push, here it is.

(drum roll)

Don't miss seeing architecture as art.