Michael Wolf's "Architecture of Density Scouts" @ Gallery Buchkunst Berlin

 
A densely packed apartment exterior crowds the frame. Michael Wolf, Architecture of Density Scout #52, 2006. Courtesy of Gallery Buchkunst Berlin, ©Michael Wolf Estate

Michael Wolf, Architecture of Density Scout #52, 2006. Courtesy of Gallery Buchkunst Berlin, ©Michael Wolf Estate

Galerie Buchkunst Berlin presents the series "Architecture of Density Scouts" by photographer Michael Wolf. The scouts are visual sketches made during his famous photographic long-term study of the series "Architecture of Density". For over twenty years, Michael Wolf captured life in Hong Kong's dense urban development through photographs of high-rise architecture, showing an abstracted view of the city's dizzying and seemingly endless facades. Like no one before, Michael Wolf has captured the specific visual aspects of one of the most densely populated cities in the world in breathtaking images.

For this series, Wolf has developed an exceedingly distinctive style. Without streets, sky, horizon, space flattens into an impenetrable abstraction of urban expanse - there is no escape for the viewer's eye.

Michael Wolf's life's work is the depiction of the densification of our cities, which he makes visible and tangible in a unique way in Hong Kong, but which has also taken him to Tokyo, Chicago and Paris. His exact viewon the facades of the big city is at the same time an image of the architectural surfaces as well as an interior view, which tells so much about the inhabitants and their living realities.

Text and translation by Ana Druga

Architecture of Density Scouts is on view through July 22 at Galerie Buchkunst Berlin, Oranienburger Straße 27, 10117 Berlin-Mitte