'Architectural Photography Through Time'

Designing A Book Cover

Our task for the day was to choose a subject from the list and research it and look to define and explore through text and visual means and to eventually design a book cover. I wanted to combine a few of the subjects so I chose Photography, Fine Art and Architecture at first, but after researching Architectural photography I decided to focus only on these two ideas.

Research

I then looked at a few architectural books and noticed how they explored buildings from many different time eras, I then thought it would be interesting to combine history within the book cover, so it could compare and contrast gothic, classics and renaissance style with modern. I thought the book could be laid out as a time line of architectural movements and different photography depending on the design of the building. I looked at gothic building photography from photographers such as Edmond Bacot (pictured below) and I also looked at Edouard Baldus who mostly focuses on station photography. Exploring these old photographers, I was intrigued by the effects of old photography, I was interested in the idea of the photos being in black and white only and with a slight sepia tone, this made the pictures look more aged and I wondered if the book could display modern buildings in this old photographic way to portray a more interesting and historical appearance. 

I then began to look at other works from Eduard Baldus and Louis Adolphe, who, in some of their works, reversed the colour to come out with some interesting results. 

I then experimented, combining the black and white photography with black and white acrylic paint, painted in an angular way to contrast the photography, I then introduced fluorescent orange to create a boldness. Once I had explored the gothic architecture, I looked at more modern works by Le Corbusier, Rietveld and Frank Lloyd Wright. I was especially interested in the works of Le Corbusier and his work 'Villa Savoye' as he has combined man and machine to create a balanced building that allows a car to travel underneath the building, into the garage, therefore man won't have to deal with the outside elements, it was revolutionary. The building is harmonised by the combination of counterbalancing geometric and organic shapes. He has also added pilotis around the outside of the bottom floor to add strength to the building and so nature and the building can become one, as the pilotis blend with the surrounding trees. Pictured below is the Villa Savoye. 

Typography

I then explored many different fonts to choose the right one that would draw attention to itself and also fit with the idea of a combination of eras. I decided to choose 'Hill House' as it reflects the ideals of modern day and other movements, it is also interesting to look at and draws attention to itself. 

This is the font that I chose for the front cover of my book design

The Cover

I wanted to display many pictures of different buildings from different eras, but then I simplified my ideas and came up with one. I decided to combine a traditional english victorian house with a modern, cantilevering domestic house. In photoshop, I divided each house in two, and then joined them together to create one house that reflects two different eras but it appeared to be one house. I then put the picture in black and white so that it would look more realistic and then I added a violet filter to add more colour to the cover. I then imported the photoshopped image into InDesign where I added the text and more background to match the colours of the building. I then created the blurb by researching similar ideas of books' blurbs and came up with quotes about the book. To finish it off, I added a bar code to add to the realism of the back cover. Below is the final result. 

Overall I am quite pleased with the end result, although if I were to do the task again I may have made the cover more complex as it is very simple. I am pleased with the use of colour and I very much enjoyed this task as it was interesting to look at other authors book covers and use this as inspiration for my own work, it was also interesting to explore different photography of different buildings from different eras and to compare these and explore the effects used.