House of Wisdom
Commissioned by Delta Lighting Design to photograph House of Wisdom, designed by Foster + Partners for Shurooq in Sharjah. A two storey library and cultural hub: a transparent rectilinear volume under a large floating roof that cantilevers on all four sides, with aluminium screens filtering the low evening sun.
The commission did not begin as one. The building was photographed early, before any brief existed, on the judgement that it would be architecturally significant once complete. The lighting consultants saw that work and commissioned more.
The lighting is the reason the building photographs the way it does, and twilight is the only hour that shows why. Held too early, the sky wins and the interior disappears. Held too late, the glass goes black and the roof loses its edge. The window where the warmth of the interior sits against a cool sky is short, and it does not repeat later in the evening.
The reflecting water at the entrance completed the scene and produced the defining image of the project, the frame that has since been reused across almost every press mention and award listing of the building.
The building layers inside and outside repeatedly, and each transition needs a different exposure strategy to hold detail in a bright exterior and a dimmer interior in the same frame. The aluminium screens make that harder again: they are the point of the elevation, and they are also a grid fine enough to fight the sensor at the wrong distance.
Inside, the stacks run to full height and the light is almost entirely artificial. Those frames were built around the rhythm of the shelving rather than around the room, because the shelving is what the interior actually is.
The images were licensed by several of the project's collaborators and suppliers. Foster + Partners and Delta Lighting Design both licensed the work for their own use, which is the recognition that carries the most weight on a project like this.
The photography won the Architizer A+Awards 2021 as Jury Winner in Architecture + Photography & Video, judged by a panel including Steven Holl, Sou Fujimoto and Iwan Baan, and won at the Architecture MasterPrize the same year. Architizer later built the key art for their Vision Awards on one of these frames.
This was one of the first commissions that brought this practice into the orbit of globally recognised architecture, and Foster + Partners had been on the list of firms worth waiting for.
The building itself went on to win the darc awards 2021 for Structures, High Budget. That award belongs to the lighting designer rather than to the photographer, but the photograph is the image the award listing used.
