yinjispace

ARCHITECTURE
Antonio Attolini Lack
PHOTOGRAPHY
Alejandro Ramirez Orozco
EDITOR
Gina
Collection

Casa del Atrio is located in the San Angel district of Mexico City. It is a private residence designed by Mexican architect Antonio Attolini Lack in 1990. Nowadays, it has become a "backdrop", showcasing 25 original works by 13 designers. The images are handled by Mexican photographer Alejandro Ramirez Orozco. His highly emotionally charged photographic style presents an aesthetic experiment on materials, light and shadow, and spirit, bringing a brand-new narrative approach to contemporary design.

As a brilliant modernist architect, Antonio Attolini Lack once put forward the concept that "architecture is a posture of life, a way of being", and emphasized the role that emotions play in architecture - "just like poetry." In the middle of the 20th century, he localized modernist architectural language and formed an ideological system with a highly personal style.

Antonio Attolini Lack's architectural career can be divided into two stages: In the early stage, he constructed the main materials with light and transparent steel and glass, depicting the ideal picture of modern life on the volcanic rock landform of Pedregal; His mature works, however, shift towards more weighty volume structures, clean geometric language and monastery-like ethereal expressions, tracing the spiritual threads of local traditional craftsmanship and architectural heritage.

Casa del Atrio is precisely his representative work in the later period. The building is composed of multiple tall Spaces, inner courtyards and gardens interlaced, filled with natural light. Antonio Attolini Lack's ultimate control over details is reflected in every corner - from the handcrafted pine furniture to the fireplace and bookshelf that are carved into the white walls. The door handles designed by him personally reflect his pursuit of the concept of overall art, making the building a unified and complete emotional carrier.

It is precisely such a spiritual space that has aroused the creative impulse of the photographer Alejandro Ramirez Orozco. He placed 25 artworks respectively in different areas of the building: from the living room, the charming spiral staircase and the garden corridor, to the several walls of ochre, stone blue and egg yellow in the atrium - products and the building, light and shadow, lines and volumes, generating a tense dialogue.

The designers of these 25 products come from multiple regions of Mexico. They use various materials such as clay, metal, wood, wool, rubber, and volcanic soil to create works with different functions and expressiveness. Some are rough, some are smooth, some are highly sculptural, and some are as delicate as a painting. Some of the works were even specially customized for this shoot, or tailor-made for a certain perspective.

The shooting techniques of Alejandro Ramirez Orozco also demonstrate exquisite narrative logic. He uses a telephoto lens to compress the depth of field, eliminate perspective vanishing points, and make the image present a flat feeling and compositional tension close to that of a painting. The post-production of the images also adheres to a rigorous conception strategy, emphasizing the correspondence between light, structure and color, to create a visual depth with a tactile sensation.

Not only is there an intertextual interaction between objects and Spaces, but in photography, a figure dressed in minimalist clothing often appears. This neutral image is not for concrete narrative, but to introduce a silent human existence between scale and proportion, allowing viewers to freely move between rationality and sensibility.

The final visual presentation is like a set of visual concertos that transcend materials, space and emotions. In these works, design is not the decoration of objects, but the response to space. Architecture is no longer a silent vessel but has become the subject actively participating in the dialogue. This spiritual consistency of "the container and what it contains" is precisely the philosophy that Antonio Attolini Lack and Alejandro Ramirez Orozco have jointly pursued.

Just as Alejandro Ramirez Orozco has been exploring all along - how to capture the spirit of space with the lens, at Casa del Atrio, while shooting the design works in architecture, he also recorded a collective portrait of contemporary design expression in Mexico. This is an alternative to a static exhibition, and even more so, a reproduction of spatial poetics.

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