Over the past few months, I’ve had the good fortune to photograph roughly 35 projects by Arquitectonica, the Miami, Florida, based architecture firm known for iconic projects such as American Airlines Area, Brickell City Centre, the Lima Airport, Atlantis Miami (Hello, Miami Vice!) and many more. Arquitectonica has projects across the entire US and around the globe, so when the call came through that I’d been hired to document their most recent projects in the US I was absolutely psyched.
This was without question one of the most physically and mentally demanding things that I’ve ever done. The projects would be photographed straight through – over the course of about two months, we only had a handful of days off between shooting, post production, travel, and playing office catchup. At one point we had not a single day away from the camera over a stretch of 21 days. Our usual routine was something like this: Get out of bed while still dark, fumble around for batteries, cameras, memory cards, drag cases of gear down to the car which was parked on the 10th floor of a quintessential high-rise parking pedestal, load up the car, go around in circles until were dizzy, drive like Meatloaf’s ‘Bat Out of Hell’ while racing the rising sun, set up the camera in our pre-scouted locations, get the sunrise shot. Break for breakfast, and be back on location an hour later to shoot interiors, exteriors, you name it, all day long. Hang out for a twilight shot or three, grab a quick bite (hopefully quick…the need for a quality meal was always at odds with our need of maximum sleep). Wrap up dinner around 10pm, upload the day’s images, back them up, charge the batteries, get into bed around midnight, wake up at 5:30 and repeat.
And it was freaking awesome. I am pretty sure it was the most productive I have ever been in my career, even if it took my body a week to recover from the entire project. We got to hang out in incredible places, get onto rooftops with epic views, and capture some of the best architecture in the world almost non-stop.
While most of the images will be used for Arquitectonica’s marketing efforts, a large number of them will also be used in a soon-to-be released title from Assouline which chronicles Arquitectonica’s work around the globe over the last three decades. Many of the images we shot can be seen on my portfolio pages, but here is just a small sample of the images we took that haven’t been included in my portfolio.
