Nine Elms Point is a residential development completed in 2016 on the south bank of the Thames in Vauxhall, London. Designed by Broadway Malyan for the Berkeley Group, it consists of two towers of twenty-one and forty-one storeys containing 437 private and 181 affordable units, alongside ground-floor retail and a residents-only gym and concierge. Situated at the centre of a 560-acre regeneration zone—one of the largest in Europe—the development sits on land formerly occupied by industrial warehousing and is flanked by the ongoing construction of the American Embassy and the repurposing of the Battersea Power Station. Nine Elms Point belongs to a now-familiar typology: the mixed-tenure high-rise apartment estate produced through public-private partnership, marketed as urban regeneration, and structured by the financial logics of build-to-sell and leasehold tenure
Although any architecture is ultim ately inhabited by people, the human figure has rarely been treated as a serious medium for studying it. Architects tend to remove figures from their drawings or relegate them to the background, and where they do appear, they are preset silhouettes borrowed from rendering software—cheerful, generic, and demographically inoffensive. The consequence is that architecture presents itself as a formal and spatial problem while its social production—who builds it, who cleans it, who delivers to it, who is priced out of it—disappears from view.
This project proposes portrait photography as an architectural survey method. The argument proceeds through three bodies of work. August Sander's Citizens of the Twentieth Century (1892–1952) established a typological discipline: using a large-format camera, frontal framing, natural side light, and minimal props, he portrayed sitters not as individuals but as social specimens, constructing a visual taxonomy of Weimar Germany through faces, garments, and pose. Sander transformed portraiture into analysis by insisting on seriality: each image contains its own narrative, but the project's meaning is only legible in the accumulation of types. The Bechers extended typological method to industrial structures, systematising differences across similar architectural objects. Yeondoo Jung's Evergreen Tower (2001) translated both precedents into the domestic interior: photographing thirty-two families in the identical living rooms of a single Seoul apartment building, Jung produced a typology not of faces but of rooms—revealing how a standardised architectural plan generates both uniformity and differentiation in the forms of life it contains.
People of Nine Elms Point follows this lineage while shifting its terms. Where Jung photographed residents within the identical living rooms of a single building, this project photographs people in the specific spaces that organise their daily life within and around Nine Elms Point: a seventh-floor flat, the reception desk, the gym, the basement bicycle store, the ground-floor retail units, the shared courtyard. The subjects include a dentist, two receptionists, a boxing coach and a manager, a cobbler, a dog owner, a student, a delivery driver, a gallerist, and the photographer himself. Each person is photographed in the space that defines their relation to the building—as resident, worker, visitor, or service provider. The building is approached not primarily through drawings, though its floor plan and aerial photograph are acknowledged, but through the bodies, tools, postures, and spatial situations of the people who constitute it.
The distinction between Sander and Jung that organises this project is simple: Sander focused on similar frameworks to reveal different people; Jung focused on the same plan to reveal different forms of life. People of Nine Elms Point combines both operations. Nine Elms Point is a building defined by the extreme stratification of its section—penthouse and affordable unit, private and social entrance, gym and delivery bay—and it is this section, rather than any single floor or apartment type, that the portraits attempt to document. The result is a typology of roles rather than faces or rooms: an attempt to understand a building as a social and economic formation made visible through the people who inhabit, service, and pass through it.
Nine Elms Point is a residential development completed in 2016 on the south bank of the Thames in Vauxhall, London. Designed by Broadway Malyan for the Berkeley Group, it consists of two towers of twenty-one and forty-one storeys containing 437 private and 181 affordable units, alongside ground-floor retail and a residents-only gym and concierge. Situated at the centre of a 560-acre regeneration zone—one of the largest in Europe—the development sits on land formerly occupied by industrial warehousing and is flanked by the ongoing construction of the American Embassy and the repurposing of the Battersea Power Station. Nine Elms Point belongs to a now-familiar typology: the mixed-tenure high-rise apartment estate produced through public-private partnership, marketed as urban regeneration, and structured by the financial logics of build-to-sell and leasehold tenure
Although any architecture is ultim ately inhabited by people, the human figure has rarely been treated as a serious medium for studying it. Architects tend to remove figures from their drawings or relegate them to the background, and where they do appear, they are preset silhouettes borrowed from rendering software—cheerful, generic, and demographically inoffensive. The consequence is that architecture presents itself as a formal and spatial problem while its social production—who builds it, who cleans it, who delivers to it, who is priced out of it—disappears from view.
This project proposes portrait photography as an architectural survey method. The argument proceeds through three bodies of work. August Sander's Citizens of the Twentieth Century (1892–1952) established a typological discipline: using a large-format camera, frontal framing, natural side light, and minimal props, he portrayed sitters not as individuals but as social specimens, constructing a visual taxonomy of Weimar Germany through faces, garments, and pose. Sander transformed portraiture into analysis by insisting on seriality: each image contains its own narrative, but the project's meaning is only legible in the accumulation of types. The Bechers extended typological method to industrial structures, systematising differences across similar architectural objects. Yeondoo Jung's Evergreen Tower (2001) translated both precedents into the domestic interior: photographing thirty-two families in the identical living rooms of a single Seoul apartment building, Jung produced a typology not of faces but of rooms—revealing how a standardised architectural plan generates both uniformity and differentiation in the forms of life it contains.
People of Nine Elms Point follows this lineage while shifting its terms. Where Jung photographed residents within the identical living rooms of a single building, this project photographs people in the specific spaces that organise their daily life within and around Nine Elms Point: a seventh-floor flat, the reception desk, the gym, the basement bicycle store, the ground-floor retail units, the shared courtyard. The subjects include a dentist, two receptionists, a boxing coach and a manager, a cobbler, a dog owner, a student, a delivery driver, a gallerist, and the photographer himself. Each person is photographed in the space that defines their relation to the building—as resident, worker, visitor, or service provider. The building is approached not primarily through drawings, though its floor plan and aerial photograph are acknowledged, but through the bodies, tools, postures, and spatial situations of the people who constitute it.
The distinction between Sander and Jung that organises this project is simple: Sander focused on similar frameworks to reveal different people; Jung focused on the same plan to reveal different forms of life. People of Nine Elms Point combines both operations. Nine Elms Point is a building defined by the extreme stratification of its section—penthouse and affordable unit, private and social entrance, gym and delivery bay—and it is this section, rather than any single floor or apartment type, that the portraits attempt to document. The result is a typology of roles rather than faces or rooms: an attempt to understand a building as a social and economic formation made visible through the people who inhabit, service, and pass through it.