Schinkel2011

Schirmer/Mosel
ISBN 978-3-8296-0427-7 english
ISBN 3-8296-0427-0 german

„In Engel’s viewfinder, Schinkel’s buildings are isolated against starkly neutral skies that seem almost without season, without time; the buildings stand in mute recollection of earlier events and in anticipation of our involvement. And yet everywhere time is lurking at the edges. Since Engel keeps his distance, his portraits of architecture are profoundly urban, they capture only a sliver of surrounding spatial frame that hints at the random change of order. ...
...Gerrit Engel’s deceptively straightforward photographs bear witness in fact to a complex world.”

Barry Bergdoll

Berlin2009

Schirmer/Mosel
ISBN 978-3-8296-0392-8 english
ISBN 978-3-8296-0378-2 german
ISBN 978-2-7427-8306-9 french

„With his catalogue of Berlin that depicts the city only by way of its buildings, Gerrit Engel seemingly eludes this dilemma. With apparent impartiality, Engel’s chronology of buildings creates images akin to a form of portrait photography. All of his images receive a similar treatment, featuring a white sky, reduced coloration and a uniform depth of focus. His photographs are stark in their apparent objectivity, only rarely depicting people and generally restricted to the simple physiognomy of the architecture. In their final effect, his buildings take upon the aspect of beings in their own right. …
…In the end, however, the reduction of each image to its essentials creates the conditions for a surprisingly precise differentiation of content. Gerrit Engel’s images allow for a precision of comparison that enables us to recognize the uniqueness of each individual object.”

Matthias Sauerbruch

Manhattan NEW YORK2006

Schirmer/Mosel
ISBN 978-3-8296-0157-3 english
ISBN 978-3-8296-0227-3 german
ISBN 2-7427-6442-9 french

„… Engels photos - taken together - can´t be considered as a tourist guide, despite their specificity to a single place: the most populous and most viseted of New York Citiy´s five boroughs, Manhattan. And even though they are arranged chronologically, the book does not aspire to be a history of architecture either. Rather, the photos themselves and the way they are presented suggest a taxanomic ethos, a panoramic view of the species architectura manhattaniensis. … The even-handedness of the presentation of the images in this book further underscores it´s quasiscientific approach. Does the photographer prefer early or later works? Does he have a favorite? These are questions that are secondary to the pursuit of the taxanomic whole. Like butterflies pinned on boards under glass, Engel´s Manhattan architecture remains passively available for objective scrutiny, …”

Terence Riley

Marzahn1999

Walther König
ISBN 3-88375-371-8

Berlin Marzahn, a child of socialist planning, ideal city of a perished society. The most impressive construction project of the GDR, which was placed on the green fields on the eastern rim of Berlin, is nowadays Germany’s lar gest housing estate. 60.000 apartments for 150.000 inhabitants, a city within the city. Engel’s book describes a place of change and transformation between two worlds. A state which is symptomatic for the condition of Eastern Germany ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The inhabitants are an important factor in this examination. Thus Engel puts architectural photographs into context with portraits of people living here. The question remains, whether this place, which was based on the principle of equality, can continue to function in a socially diverse society.

Buffalo Grain Elevators1997

Walther König
ISBN 3-88375-277-0

The Buffalo Grain Elevators belong to a number of industrial buildings, which, at the beginning of our last century, fascinated and inspired Europe’s architectural and artist avantgarde. Without a cultural theoretical background, strip- ped of all ornaments, these structures expressed a radical functionalism, not known to date. In their powerful and pure forms they heralded the dawn of the new age of modernism. Early black and white photographs of the silos soon belonged to the iconographic quiver of this young movement. It should significantly influence the twentieth century, at the closing of which Gerrit Engel visited these structures, on the shores of Buffalo River. His photographs show the now mostly idle and deserted silos, which have been turned into mature personalities by the traces of time. As a whole life reflects in old people’s faces, Engel portrays „architectural individuals” that shaped the Twentieth Century, and which in turn were shaped themselves.