The Inner Life of Buildings

“We stand in front of your photographs and have arguments,” said Toshiko Mori to Candida Höfer at the opening of Heaven on Earth at the Sean Kelly Gallery. Höfer’s massive, intricately detailed compositions of (mostly) architectural interiors filled the gallery, itself a Mori design. Although she had earlier led attendees from photograph to photograph, Höfer grew impatient with the malfunctioning mic handed to her on stage; declining to engage in a Q&A, she left Mori’s side and joined her friends in the audience.

The show, which closes in April, gave pride of place to Höfer’s much-loved shots of libraries, while her work on sacred spaces was relegated to a basement gallery. In a side room devoted to mixed subject matter, I stumbled across a poignant juxtaposition: a print depicting the dramatic roofscape of Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, hung next to a much smaller one of Berthold Lubetkin’s London Zoo Penguin Pool, in which a pair of residents are caught midwaddle. What poignancy, indeed.