Naoya Hatakeyama: Scales

Continuing our love affair with all things scale distorting and hot off the back of our recent coverage of Naoki Honjo's show at Paul Smith, comes another masterpiece of an exhibition in Montreal. ‘Scales’ is the work of Japanese artist Naoya Hatakeyama, commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and plays with the notions of scale and perceptions of reality through architectural models.

The exhibition is divided into three photographic series: New York/Window of the World, New York/Tobu Square and Tokyo/Mori Building. As well as these three series, Hatakeyama has selected six photographs from the CCA’s archives portraying architectural models from the modernist period when for the first time, photographic representations of models were used to play with perceptions of scale. This new development enabled the photographer to distort the model, transforming it into a two-dimensional illusion of how the building might appear on a far greater scale.

Taking these archived images as a starting point, Hatakeyama photographed existing architectural models of NYC and Tokyo in a similar manner. The first series recalls the modernist aesthetic: photographs in black and white, from a perspective that suggests the photographer is standing amongst the streets of the model. The second series gives the same models a less life scale, realistic portrayal, instead treating them as geometric shapes of different colours, whilst the third series creates the illusion of a real city from a panoramic, aerial perspective.

Click here to see images from the exhibition.

11 October 2007 | Architecture