‘Not just an entrance to the house but an entrance to the landscape itself’, Photolanguage’s report on a private house in the Surrey countryside by Toh Shimazaki Architects, The Architects’ Journal, 12|04|07, pp. 23-35. (Cover images.)

Our documentation of the Toh Shimazaki Open and Shut House used an experimental combination of solarised fragment photographs for the outer cover of the journal and medium format colour photography for the main article. The aim of the report was to represent the house as a complex response to landscape context and to emphasise an understanding of time and process in the development and evolution of the building: ‘Once one leaves the A25, the route to the house is distinctly a journey into a landscape, beneath woodland canopies, roadside thickets, the bare roots of coppice wood banks, and the exposed geology of a section of road called ‘Hollow Lane’. In this sense, OSh and its cave-like entrance is intended to be both a destination and a continuation of the landscape journey’ (p.28).