Bricks and clicks

Take 90 architects and designers, give them hand-held digital cameras, and send them off to Cologne and Porto, Stockholm, Valencia and Bregenz to photograph the architecture. Next select the best 30 images, and the result is an exhibition that reveals as much about architectural photography as it does about architecture. The architectural and interior design practice Jestico & Whiles did just this. It has an annual study trip when its staff explore far-flung cities. Usually, they sketch the local architecture, but this year they took pictures. The Jestico & Whiles staffers snapped the buildings of Rem Koolhaas, David Chipperfield, Santiago Calatrava and Frank Gehry, yet it wasn’t entire structures that caught their eye, but rather their fleeting moods. It’s the ‘essence of a place’, as exhibition judge and Royal Institute of British Architects assistant director of photographs Robert Elwell puts it. His co-judge, architectural photographer Tim Crocker, was impressed with the technical capabilities of £200 digital A Tale of Five Cities runs from 20-27 June at Jestico & Whiles, 1 Cobourg Street, London NW1. It is part of the London Festival of