Nicolas Faure: Landscape A

by Hans Ibelings, Daniel Girardin, Nicolas Faure (Photographer)

Nicolas Faure has been photographing the Swiss landscape since the 1990s, concentrating in particular on the amalgam of traditional and modern scenery that he finds along its highways, where technology, architecture and a certain concept of nature merge. The motorways, which now criss-cross the country, at once divide it into parts and also constitute a whole new territory in themselves. Faure cruises its apparently natural but fundamentally man-made surroundings, eliciting views that characterize a new Switzerland. These "natural surroundings," built amidst concrete, inaccessible to visitors and almost invisible to motorists, are, as he sees it, the epitome of paradox.

144 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2006

About the author

Hans Ibelings is a Dutch architecture critic, writer and exhibition maker. He is chief editor and founder of A10, Magazine for New European Architecture. Alongside he became a specialist in writing architects monographs. In 2004 he wrote a book on contemporary traditional architecture in the Netherlands.

Reviews

[Krissy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was leaving the library with this book, and a couple others about water, when I realized it was overcast outside. It was one of the first overcast days of the fall and I missed summer.

The book has beautiful, bright and washed-out summer colors yet the images are cold and flat.

They remind me of photos I used to take so maybe that's why I don't like them, but the lack of people and so many static compositions made me physically tired.