Gabriele Basilico. Urbanscapes

Beirut, Madrid, Porto, Paris, Palermo, Berlin, Valencia, Lisboa, Barcelona, Napoli... the stunning black-and-white pictures of great cities in the world taken by the Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico from 1991 to 2004, in the catalogue of the first solo exhibition in Switzerland after the death of the internationally renowned photographer.
Gabriele Basilico (1944-2013) was one of the most important representatives of architectural photography. After studying architecture, in the 1970s he began photographing the transformation of the urban landscape. He was particularly interested in cityscapes, and his pictures show the modern age and its architecture in the most beautiful light. He became famous through his black and white photographs of industrial buildings on the periphery of Milan, for which he directed his lens at isolated elements such as chimneys and facades. His coolly elegant photographs are emphatically objective and deserted. He documented the changes in European port cities as well as the destruction of Beirut in the civil war. The architect Aldo Rossi said no other photographer had made "the typologies of urban planning" so intensely visible in his pictures.