- architecture
- the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. The practice of architecture is employed to fulfill both practical and expressive requirements, and thus it serves both utilitarian and aesthetic ends. Although these two ends may be distinguished, they cannot be separated, and the relative weight given to each can vary widely. Because every society—settled or nomadic—has a spatial relationship to the natural world and to other societies, the structures they produce reveal much about their environment (including climate and weather), history, ceremonies, and artistic sensibility, as well as many aspects of daily life. (Encyclopædia Britannica)
Tour Eiffel
Cyanotype (18cm x 21,5cm) - Coffee toned
23 minutes exposure
December 30th, 2013 - 11:40AM
Paper: Fabriano Ruvido
Pacific Heights (San Francisco)
Tour Eiffel - Paris - France
In this coffee-toned cyanotype of the Tour Eiffel, the architecture is suspended in a temporal ambiguity—neither fixed in the past nor anchored to the present. The chemical process itself, already imbued with a sense of historical depth, is further aged by the coffee toning, which casts the image in warm sepia hues evocative of early photographic prints. This patina of time erases the timestamp of the original exposure, allowing the structure to emerge as both ancient and immediate.
Has the Eiffel Tower just risen from the Parisian soil, or has it stood watch for a century? The print refuses to say. Here, the expressive and utilitarian dimensions of architecture converge within the medium: the iron lattice of the tower, designed to symbolize industrial progress, becomes instead a ghostly silhouette, soft-edged and solemn.
The cyanotype lifts the subject out of chronology and into a poetic simultaneity—where a print made on December 30th, 2013, in San Francisco might just as well be a memory from another era, or a vision from tomorrow.
The angle of the shot reinforces this temporal dislocation through its intimacy. Framed from below and at close range, the Eiffel Tower dominates the composition—not as a postcard icon but as a living structure, monumental yet tactile. It occupies nearly the entire surface, asserting its presence with quiet intensity. The sky, though softly mottled and atmospherically rich, is relegated to the margins, its potential for drama subdued. In this way, the image resists spectacle; it grants the subject fullness without banality, reverence without cliché. The tower is not merely seen—it is encountered.
toning
700ml of water
7g of baking soda
roughly 1 hour
4 coffee spoons
4 hours of toning bath
Here’s the starting negative:
