This book is a sleek addition to Karl Lagerfeld's ongoing photographic exploration of
architecture as seen in such Steidl publications as Factory Constructivism Ein deutsches Haus
and Konkret Abstrakt Gesehen. In Abstract Architecture Lagerfeld presents black-and-white
photographs of buildings by architects such as Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando. In a novel approach
to book-making Lagerfeld transforms his original prints into an elegant wordless story. By
starkly enlarging rotating and cropping images of architectural elements such as windows
structural beams and even unassembled concrete slabs he reduces architecture to a series of
curves lines and planes that are seemingly divorced from the buildings of which they form
part. (The cover image for example a gestural sweep of black across gold is actually a detail
of a woman standing against a façade.) Abstract Architecture undoes our preconceptions of what
architecture is by showing that the built environments in which we work and play are a
starting point for aesthetic discovery. Lagerfeld leaves us with a simple but important lesson:
the harder we look the more we see.
