Fashion photographer Juergen Teller accepted the challenge of photographing, over five years, the building of Goldman Sachs new City of London headquarters. I believe architects and construction companies like to keep a visual record of their major projects, basically for internal use (though I have published books about the constuction of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, both in New York). The 412 photos in the book reveal Teller's fascination with building technology, he took some stunning shots of the London skyline with various tall office blocks in the distance and in the foreground part of Plumtree Court construction. Others capture beautifully the minor chaos of a building site with equipment at odd angles to the precise uprights of interior walls and horizontal girders.
I feel though that the editorial focus of the book has gone awry. I was expecting a sort of time-line photo book of the construction from a hole in the ground to the finished building. Instead this is Teller's artistic interpretation of putting up a corporate headquarters. There is no date sequence to the photos or captions explaining what is going on in the them (no page numbers either). Several pages have montages of quite technical but interesting photos within photos, which I thought looked rather confusing but as Teller designed the book (with Catalin Plesa) this is very much their interpretation of the commission.
The publication, with some excellent photos, seems more a keepsake for the staff of Goldman Sachs of their new offices.
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