Atlas of Forms

Atlas of Forms is a typological survey of architecture built entirely from found images, gathered online rather than shot by the artist.

Eric Tabuchi assembled roughly 1,500 photographs of buildings and structures from around the world. He sorted them not by place or period but by geometric shape and state of completion: spheres, cubes, polygons; under construction, finished, abandoned, in ruin. The sequence runs from purely spherical forms to a closing image of an inverted bunker. Poursuite Éditions published the book in Paris in 2017, with French and English text.

Tabuchi (b. 1959) works in series that sort vernacular and infrastructural subjects, gas stations, storefronts, industrial architecture, into systematic visual catalogues. He later extended that method with Nelly Monnier in the long-running Atlas des Régions Naturelles. Atlas of Forms came first. It applies the same classifying instinct to images the artist did not take himself, an archive of anonymous, appropriated photographs rather than his own fieldwork.