Ways of seeing: re-framing familiar buildings

Timothy Soar talks to AT Editor Isabel Allen about his approach to taking up-to-date photography of the winning buildings in the Architecture Today Awards for buildings that stand the test of time.

Burntwood School in Wandsworth, London, by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris.

Entries are now open for the 2025 Architecture Today Awards. Find out more and enter here.

Tell me first about your approach to photographing the AT Awards winners. Do you tackle it differently from a conventional assignment?
Embedded in the conceit of the project is the idea that we are not attempting to overlay the kind of ideas you’d expect from a marketing or PR exercise. Instead, we’re approaching these projects as a piece of analysis. It’s research photography. So I don’t take a tripod, I don’t take a heavy camera. I don’t use an assistant. I don’t do any tidying up. It’s literally got to be as I find it on the day. If it’s cloudy, it’s cloudy; if it’s raining, it’s raining. I don’t ask the occupants to make a special effort. I walk around the building with a Leica in a reportage style, capturing it as it is. It’s a scouting visit, viewed through the lens of 40 years of looking at buildings. It’s a high-wire act, because you want to make attractive photographs, but at the same time, you want to be honest. There’s minimal Photoshop. I want people to see the quality of these buildings as though they’ve stumbled upon them walking down the high street. The essential argument of the awards is that great buildings don’t need to have their hands held. They stand on their own.

Have you found any resistance to that approach? Have architects or clients ever said, “Don’t go today, the sun’s not out,” or “Can I redecorate before you come back with your camera?”
Sure. If you look back over the magazine, you’ll see that a couple of the award winning buildings haven’t been re-photographed. That’s usually because we haven’t been able to negotiate the controlling instinct of the architects. And that’s okay. Reputations hang on winning awards and public presentation. But people who commission buildings are intelligent. The best architecture comes with the best clients; clients smart enough to see past the veneer of marketing. A really good client is turned off by poor advertising. They seek authenticity, integrity, and confidence from people doing intelligent work. That’s the spirit in which we photograph the projects. These buildings are already great – they wouldn’t be on the list if they weren’t. And they’ll withstand Tim Soar on a bad day.

Westlake Brake in Heybrook, South Devon, by David Sheppard Architects.

Not many people can say that! Have there been instances where your “quick-hit guerrilla photography has usurped the original glossy photographs to become the official set used by architects or clients?
I haven’t noticed that directly – I’m rarely involved in that end of the discussion. But certainly there have been buildings I’ve photographed in less-than-ideal conditions, and they’ve turned out beautifully. AHMM’s Burntwood School, for example, which I photographed in thick fog. It was just extraordinarily beautiful.

Those photographs had a real magic to them. Like something out of Narnia. AHMM are such perfectionists, and such accomplished communicators – and of course that building has been so widely published – that it felt like a real coup being able to publish a photograph of their work that was totally unanticipated and show it in a way it hadn’t been seen before. Similarly, your photographs of RSHP’s Macallan Distillery completely re-contextualised the building. How did the architects react?
Rogers didn’t like them. They didn’t fit their narrative. And that’s fair. Their practice operates in a very particular ecosystem – luxury brands, blue-chip clients. Their photography needs to reflect that. They’re a luxury product, so they have to look like one. But my approach was different. I didn’t want James Bond glamour shots. I wanted the reality of a working distillery – the smells, the heat, the physicality of the stills. And that day was perfect. The mist, the landscape – it all came together. It revealed the building as entirely of its place, not just an expensive object that could be anywhere.

The Macallan Distillery in Abelour by RSHP.

I love the fact that the Architecture Today Awards is not just an awards programme; but also an ongoing photographic project.
There used to be a tradition of using photographers as part of a continuous editorial narrative, but that’s mostly gone. Now, architectural photography is dominated by one camera, one lens, one processing style, dictated by YouTube influencers. It’s homogenized. Architectural photography now is mostly about selling the next job, not about real discourse. What we’re doing here is different. It’s about documentation, analysis, and context. With the AT Awards, we’re also overlaying the history of previous buildings. You see the influences – Brutalism, postmodernism, high-tech modernism – all filtering through the lens of time. The jury’s choices reflect that, too. Some buildings that were iconic in their moment – shiny, totemic structures – are later dismissed. Others, like those by Penoyre & Prasad, having a resurgence. They were never fashionable, but they’ve matured beautifully, and they now speak to today’s sensibilities.

Rushton Street Surgery in Shoreditch, London by Perkins&Will, formerly Penoyre & Prasad.

Have the awards thrown up any surprises? Buildings you didn’t know existed or that weren’t what you expected?
Park Hill in Sheffield was even better than I remembered it. Westlake Brake, David Sheppard’s house on the south Devon coast, was an amazing revelation. He’s a true artist, deeply committed to his architecture. It’s inspiring.

And any moments where you’ve thought, “The judges got it completely wrong?”
Let’s just say there have been moments on-site where I’ve thought, “What on earth?” But those experiences teach humility. These buildings haven’t made the grade by accident. There is an incredible jury with diverse experience. Who am I to stand in judgment over them? The process has reinforced the importance of keeping an open mind.