Haus am Waldsee, Berlin: Ola Kolehmainen – Geometric Light

“When I walk into a building I see space, light and colour”, so explains the Finnish photographer Ola Kolehmainen his relationship to architecture.

How Ola Kolehmainen visualises this triumvirate is currently being presented in the exhibition Geometric Light at the gallery Haus am Waldsee in Berlin.

Hagia Sophia year 537 III, 2014, and Untitled (No. 6), 2005, by Ola Kolehmainen. As seen at Ola Kolehmainen - Geometric Light, Haus am Waldsee Berlin

Born in Helsinki in 1964 Ola Kolehmainen originally studied journalism before completing an MA in photography at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. His passion for architecture photography began during his MA with explorations of the works of Alvar Aalto before in later years he discovered other protagonists of European Modernism, perhaps most notably the buildings of Mies van der Rohe.

Ola Kolehmainen’s photos are however rarely of the building, much more are inspired by the building.

Or put another way, the Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art didn’t title their 2009 Ola Kolehmainen exhibition “A building is not a building” because nothing better occurred to them.

Similarly Geometric Light demonstrates that a building is the way we observe it not the way the architect planned it, that the solid can be intangible.

Much like Konstantin Grcic – Panorama, Ola Kolehmainen – Geometric Light is, in effect, two exhibitions in one. Or perhaps more accurately put, three exhibitions in one. Upstairs, presented on white walls in classic gallery demeanor, photos of the Educational Centre in El Chaparral, Granada by Spanish architect Alejandro Muñoz Miranda. A series of photos Ola Kolehmainen realised, composed, during a 2013 tour of Spain and which give the exhibition its name.

Downstairs, hung amidst a colour scheme specially developed for the exhibition by Berlin architectural bureau Sauerbruch Hutton, impressions of the Hagia Sophia and the Süleymaniye Mosque, works created this year in context of Ola Kolehmainen’s latest project in Istanbul.

Interspersed amongst these newer works are older works, photos which compliment and extend the newer photos and provide a deeper understanding as to the nature of Ola Kolehmainen’s work. Or to paraphrase Ola Kolehmainen, in the course of the exhibition one travels on a journey from contemporary architecture to architecture that is over 1500 years old. A journey undertaken in the company of buildings by Sauerbruch Hutton, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Gehry.

Ola Kolehmainen - Geometric Light, Haus am Waldsee Berlin

As we’ve often noted, most recently in context of the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin exhibition “New Architecture! Modern Architecture in Images and Books”, contemporary architecture photography is, as a general rule, a frightful place, a nightmare world dominated by the staid, post-produced shots that pollute the internet. There are however exceptions, of which Ola Kolehmainen is without question one of the most fascinating.

What makes Ola Kolehmainen’s work so interesting, worth exploring, is not only that his photos are analogue and so when retouched then with the very agreeable limitations of analogue technology, but much more that his view is devoid of the predictable tourist gaze and the easy perspectives that invariably blight architectural photography. Ola Kolehmainen tries to avoid reading too much about the subjects of his photos in advance; although knowledgeable about architecture, architectural theory, architectural history and architects, Kolehmainen approaches each building as an isolated entity, unrelated as it were to the wider world of architecture, and selects those perspectives, and just as importantly, those moments in time, those passages of light, that speak to him, that express the way he understands and perceives a building. The result is not only a body of work more reminiscent of paintings than photographs, but images which disassociate the building from its function, context and environment, those very elements which we are always told are so essential in good architecture, and which in doing so provide a new insight into the id of the construction.

Viewing Geometric Light we found ourselves continually posing the question if we could, justifiably, refer to Ola Kolehmainen as an architecture photographer? Or just as a photographer?

But then what is architecture if not space, light and colour.

And if it is, what does that tell us about all those other architecture photographers…………..

Ola Kolehmainen – Geometric Light can be viewed at the Haus am Waldsee, Argentinische Allee 30, 14163 Berlin until Saturday May 17th.

Full details, including information on opening times, ticket prices and the accompanying fringe programme can be found at www.hausamwaldsee.de