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The 10 Best Cities for Architecture Nerds Who Photograph Buildings

Ten of the best cities for architecture lovers who travel with a wide lens and a sore neck. From Brutalist concrete to Art Nouveau curves, where to point the camera up and what to shoot when you get there.

I travel with a permanently sore neck and zero regrets. The best cities for architecture aren’t the ones with one famous building — they’re the ones where you turn a corner, look up, and forget to walk for a minute. I shoot buildings the way other people shoot food: badly at first, obsessively forever. These ten reward the obsession, ranked by how many frames I burned before I made myself stop.

The White City — the largest collection of Bauhaus buildings on the planet, thousands of them, all clean lines and curved balconies and ribbon windows. Most are a bit faded and lived-in, which I actually prefer to a polished restoration. Walk Rothschild Boulevard early before the heat. The shade-and-shadow game on those balconies at 8am is gorgeous.

Bombed flat in the war, so it rebuilt itself weird and brave instead of pretty. The Cube Houses tilted at 45 degrees, the horseshoe Markthal with its painted ceiling, the Erasmus Bridge strung up like a harp. Climb the Euromast or just stand on the river at dusk when the office blocks light up. It’s the rare European city that points at the future instead of the past, and it photographs like a city that knows it. Go on a grey day, oddly — the flat Dutch light flatters all that concrete and steel far more than harsh sun does.

A whole capital designed at once by Niemeyer, all swooping white concrete and reflecting pools, laid out in the shape of an aeroplane (or a bird, depending who’s telling it). The Cathedral with its crown of curved ribs is the shot, but honestly the whole place is a modernist fever dream. Bring a wide lens. Bring a wider one.

Quietly one of the best, if you like restraint. The big stone National Romantic train station, Aalto’s elegant modernism dotted around, and the Temppeliaukio church blasted straight into solid rock with a copper dome — a proper showstopper. Finnish design has this calm confidence that reads beautifully in a photo. Winter light is short but unbelievably soft.

Luis Barragán’s pink and ochre walls alone justify a trip — go to Casa Luis Barragán (book ahead, it’s a tour and it fills up) and learn what a wall and a beam of light can do together. Add the muscular UNAM campus murals and the Soumaya Museum’s shimmering silver blob, and you’ve got centuries clashing happily in one frame.

For the Art Nouveau curves. The Secession building with its golden dome of leaves, Otto Wagner’s Majolica House dripping with floral tiles, the gilded everything. Then, because Vienna can’t help itself, Hundertwasser’s lopsided rainbow apartment block that looks like a child drew a building and the city said yes. Joyful. A bit much. Photograph all of it.

The whole 20th century is written on its streets — Prussian grandeur, Bauhaus, grim functional GDR slabs, and the glittering glass of the rebuilt Reichstag dome. Karl-Marx-Allee is a Brutalist-socialist canyon you can walk for a kilometre. Berlin doesn’t tidy its history away, and that contradiction is exactly what makes it so good to shoot.

The city that basically invented the skyscraper, and it still does it best. Take the architecture river cruise — yes it’s touristy, yes do it anyway, the angles off the water are ones you can’t get on foot. The early steel-frame towers, the black Miesian boxes, Marina City’s twin corncobs. Look up constantly. Apologise to no one.

The wild card and my personal soft spot. Crumbling wooden balconies leaning over alleys, then a swooping glass concert hall, then a genuinely deranged Soviet-era ministry building that looks like stacked tree branches made of concrete. It’s chaotic, half-falling-down, half-rebuilt, and there is nothing like it. The first time I went I shot two memory cards full before lunch.

It had to be. Gaudí turned a whole city into something that looks grown rather than built — the rippling stone of Casa Milà, the bone-like balconies of Casa Batlló, and the Sagrada Família, which after a hundred-plus years is finally, almost, nearly finished. Go inside at midday when the stained glass throws the whole interior into colour and the columns branch overhead like a forest. I’ve been four times and I still gasp. Number one, and it’s not close.

So where should a building-obsessed photographer book first? Barcelona if you’ve somehow never been, Chicago for the cleanest skyscraper drama, and Tbilisi if you want to shoot something almost nobody else has. Charge two batteries. You’ll fill a card before you mean to, every single time.

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