SPACES BUILDINGS MAKE

Philip Henry Delamotte, The Alhambra Court in the Crystal Palace
at Sydenham, 1854

Work in progress, HKPA, Cat Hill, Phase Two, Winter, 1976, 
Middlesex University Archive.

After the closure of the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, the Crystal Palace which had housed the exhibitions was dismantled and transferred to Sydenham in South London. Philip Henry Delamotte a photographer who had made several calotypes of the disassembly at Hyde Park, was commissioned to create a photographic record of its reconstruction on the new site.

The resulting two-volume edition (published as Photographic Views of the progress of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham (London, 1855) of 160 albumen prints represents the first attempt to record a building systematically by photography from the levelling of the site to the opening ceremony.

Taking these photographs as markers, and using the slides and photographs taken during the building of the HKPA Phase Two campus as starting points, the New Well Tempered Building attempts a contemporary recontrustuction of Delamotte’s undertaking and, in so doing, begins to open up some questions about the often unsettled relationships between architectural photographs and their sometimes boisterous subjects.

Between December 2006 and July 2007 (and with the help of a 4×5 field camera) I’ll be reconstructing the site photography undertaken with medium format and 35mm SLR’s during the same period in the winter of 1977/8. I’ll be posting the images on this site…