Load Bearing started in 2015 with a car park at the end of my street and has not stopped since. Universities and civic centres make up most of it — Cumbernauld, Preston, Leuven, Rotterdam, and a long stretch of the Glasgow ring road — photographed on trips of two or three days at a time, usually in February, because bare trees and flat cloud are what these buildings were drawn for. Everything is shot square on or directly up, on a tripod, with the verticals corrected, and nothing is ever lit.
| Running since | 2015 |
|---|---|
| Frames | About 610 |
| Countries | Scotland, England, Belgium, the Netherlands |
| Typical subject | Post-war universities, civic centres, car parks, walkways |
| Method | Tripod, corrected verticals, available light only |
These buildings were an argument about optimism, made in the one material that cannot pretend. Somebody decided that a stair should look like a stair and that the marks of the boards it was poured against should stay where they fell. I photograph them the way they were drawn — straight on, from the ground, in the flat northern light they were designed for — because almost every other picture ever taken of them was taken to prove a point.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Ingrid Vos at the Leuven estates office, who unlocked four stair towers on a Sunday and waited outside each of them; to Callum Ardrossan, who drove the Rotterdam trips and never once asked how much longer; and to the Kelvinhaugh Print Rooms, where all of this was printed and where the first twenty frames were shown before anybody thought it was a project.