Isolated Building Studies

Copies of Isolated Building Studies will start shipping in mid-August.

Isolated Building Studies is the visual confluence of David Schalliol’s interests in urban dynamism, socioeconomic inequality, and photography. By using uniform composition in photographs of Chicago buildings with no neighboring structures, he hopes to draw attention to new ways of seeing the common impact of divergent investment processes on urban communities.

Isolated buildings are particularly useful for the exploration of neighborhood transformation and its social correlates because they are immediately recognized as unusual. As urban buildings, their form illustrates their connection with adjacent structures: vertical, boxy, an architecture confined by palpably limited parcels. When their neighboring buildings are missing, a tension emerges: the urban form clashes with the seemingly suburban, even rural, setting. Thoughtfully engaging the landscape requires further investigation to resolve this tension: Why is this building isolated? It is from this fundamental friction that the Isolated Building Studies launches.

The book includes over fifty photographs taken by David Schalliol over the last twenty years. It also includes texts by David Schalliol and Karen Irvine, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.

Isolated Building Studies has been designed by Renata Graw and Lucas Reif of Chciago-based Normal and Iker Gil of MAS Context.