PLACES AND MEMORIES:
Photographs by Roberto Schezen

Roberto Schezen’s photographs speak of architecture with such eloquence as to silence those who would lessen his images with words.—Bill N. Lacy

Eighteen places—from Paestum to the Beagle Channel in Patagonia—are documented through the lens of Schezen’s photographic eye. The images of Casa Malaparte on the rocks of Capri, Aldo Rossi’s Cemetery in Modena or the Gallaratese Housing in Milan; Josef Hoffmann’s Primavesi House or the Villa Karma of Adolf Loos all capture a haunting emptiness that echo other memories. Mayan ruins of Mexico and Guatemala follow photographs of the houses of Newport and the Fagus Factory of Walter Gropius, resounding in a monumental stillness that suspends time and space.

Diana Agrest’s notes on photography and architecture serve as a context for the reading of the work of Roberto Schezen, for his photographs form a discourse on some crucial moments of photographic history. The photographic discourse presented here is a discourse on the (mythical) nature of forms of habitation, and it fits uneasily into a category such as architectural photography. It is more of a text, open, metonymic, and fragmentary—a kind of collection of a heterogenous nature that touches simultaneously on the nature of architecture and on that of photography itself.

Preface by Bill N. Lacy. Introduction by Diana Agrest. Afterword by John Hejduk. Published to coincide with an exhibition in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery.
Designed by Massimo Vignelli.

NY: CO-PUBLISHED WITH RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INC., 1987.
120 PAGES, 11 X 11 1/4
96 ILLUSTRATIONS.
HARDCOVER, 60.00