About & Contact
About Architourism.eu
City tourism, exploring and experiencing modern architecture, is the goal. This site presents lesser known European destinations. A preference for selecting and presenting destinations is that the architecture is (partly) accessible, more than the gaze. There is no practical tourism information on this site; architourists are mostly mature visitors who can find their own way.
Peter Nientied (Rotterdam) manages this website. I am partly retired from academic and teaching work on urban questions, tourism and innovation studies. I am a long time architourist who prefers new destinations rather than ticking the 'seen'-box of spectacular architecture. Weather permitting, I go to architourism destinations on my motorbike.
Photos on this site
On the photography: photo's copyright Architourism.eu, except when an external (open) source is mentioned. A limitation of photography is of course that pictures stress the visual while we suggest that the experience with all senses is key to enjoying architecture. Alas, it is diffcult to add smell, sound and sense of direction or sense of place and space to photos.
I apply the WYSIWYG principle for the photography on this website. What You See Is What You Get. It is not very difficult to create artistic representations of architecture, but the stand is that WYSIWYG-photos better inform city tourists. Registration rather than art photography; no black-and-white photos, because people see in colour, no drone photos because people cannot fly. Photo adjustments of photos on this site are mostly merely light/contrast and colour corrections.
Some architecture photographers show photos after waiting for the perfect light or heavily using Photoshop to make photos more attractive. Architects' offices have advanced skills to create alluring images of their designs. One can compare architects' presentations with a fashion photo of a model before and after Photoshop. How architecture looks in reality can be quite different. On Archdaily a presentation can be found of the Science Park in Granada - when it is completely empty. Compare the pictures of the architect (click here) with what the visitor encounters (see the pictures on this site).
Resources
Some references:
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Virginia Duran, https://virginia-duran.com/ is an architect and city explorer and offers, for free, a range of well studied architecture guides of main architecture cities around the world. Her (affordable) book 'London Architecture Guide' is being revised, and a must-have for visitors.
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A few interesting TED-talks on architecture and people. Stephan Behling (Foster & Partners) gave an interesting TEDx Talk about architecture and the science of the senses, click here. In another TED talk, Thomas Heatherwick uses phrases like 'an epedemic of boringness', 'MacBuildings' to depict modern cities. His case is about radically human buildings. Click here. "Architecture is interplay between life and form." says Jan Gehl in his talk about human scale and 20th Century history of urban planning. Click here.
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more to come
Contact
Get in touch through Instagram. or mailto: nientied1 [at] chello [dot] nl
