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utopian visions, but I was experiencing pale imitations around me,’ he notes wryly, ‘but it was very interesting none the less.’

Phipps studied fine art at Newport College of Art, ‘at a point where the town had been devastated by the 1980s recession.’ He was influenced by the documentary photography course run by Magnum photographer David Hurn, and by the students who were ‘documenting gritty realism everywhere’. At this point, and during a residency at the Bemis Foundation in Omaha, Nebraska (a similarly declining industrial town where he had a studio in a vast bag warehouse) he remembers being more struck by massive industrial forms than by architecture. Moving to the Royal College of Art for an MA in Sculpture, he began making what he describes as ‘quite basic modular units, working with as-found materials’, such as chipboard and concrete.

He went on to work as an assistant to established sculptors including David Mach (best known for Polaris, his 1983 rubber-tyre submarine) and Rachel Whiteread, and making artists’ maquettes soon led to model-making for architects including Denton Scott Associates and Sheppard Robson. Access to a dark room led him into photography, from architect commissions (including the Lasdun extension to the Royal College of Physicians) to developer portfolios (such as the Keeling House refurb), commercial and lifestyle photography, and most recently, documenting huge musical events in Europe and Africa with the Africa Express project.

Not everyone would agree that the buildings he has so far selected are indeed brutalist. Asked to explain his selection, he emphasises how he sees the BT Tower as like a minimalist sculpture, and how he likes the way its base is not readily seen (you have to get right up close to get the view he’s chosen). He makes a similar analogy to the work of Donald Judd with Trinity Square. But as public perceptions of brutalism evolve, and definitions and interpretations develop, Phipps’s series poses questions of categorisation and longevity that add richness to the debate.

Simon Phipps asks me if I’ve read Adrian Forty’s Concrete and Culture (reviewed in C20 2/13) and I’m surprised at the reference he cites. What struck him most was how Forty saw the Italian architect Gio Ponti as an example of a C20 architect ‘preoccupied with the problem of how to make matter disappear so that other qualities would emerge.’ The quote he especially likes comes from Ponti’s In Praise of Architecture (1957): ‘Architecture, a plastic and abstract fact… has no colour.’ The aluminium on which he prints his images is the closest he can get to ‘no colour’. As Forty points out, conceptualising concrete in this way is the very opposite of more recent architects’ celebration of its sensuous and tactile properties, and a world away from what Reyner Banham saw as a key definer of brutalism: the valuing of materials for their inherent qualities ‘as found’.

Although Phipps’s on-going series of images is entitled ‘Brutalism’, this concept of dematerialisation immediately resonated with him, and he speculates that his choice of aluminium is partly because he wants to push the buildings he has selected back towards their initial life on the drawing board, to the ideas that generated them. However, this tendency towards abstraction, reinforced by the framing of each shot, sits alongside the very material presence that his work has. You can see the thickness of the aluminium sheets; they are not framed, and they sit on batons proud of the wall. He likes the way that when a bus goes past, a red streak temporarily becomes part of the images. Moreover, the images are screen-printed directly onto the aluminium itself using a half-tone process in which the negative is transformed into a pattern of dots, rather than being images on paper mounted on aluminium. Phipps likes aluminium’s sense of being a neutral material, which (in his view) concrete is also. He also enjoys the way his images have physical depth, casting their own shadows, recalling Le Corbusier’s definition of architecture as the ‘magnificent play of masses brought together in light’ – ‘I wanted a process that took the images away from the world of architecture,’ he explains.

Artist’s view

Metal worksCatherine Croft meets photographer Simon Phipps, whose latest images of buildings are printed on aluminium

Above: original image for another in the aluminium series, Post Office Tower, and (left) a photograph taken for the refurbishment of Keeling House in Bethnal Green

Top: Simon Phipps’s aluminium print Park Hill on wall display, and, below, Estate (1992), built from 50cm chipboard cubes, reflecting the sculptural possibilities of modular construction.

‘Brutalism’ screen prints by Simon Phipps in an edition of 25 at £275 each are available from www.twentytwentyone.com. Five per cent of the proceeds go to the C20 Society

His own practice though, is firmly rooted in the world of architecture. Both his parents are architects, who during the 1970s and 1980s were working for the Milton Keynes Development Corporation. The family grew up in Milton Keynes, but (rather reinforcing the clichéd accusation made against modern architects) their home was an old house in a village. His father Colin Phipps worked for YRM, and has now retired to Woolstone in Milton Keynes, the 1970s Aldington and Craig estate. ‘The talk was all of futuristic