"What constitutes the idea of architectural joy for you?," STIR asked photographer and filmmaker Jim Stephenson in a conversation that discussed his experiential audio-video installation, The Architect has Left the Building. Previously hosted at the RIBA gallery in London, the exhibition is currently on view at the Farrell Centre in Newcastle, and Stephenson hopes to take it to a new spot very soon.

"Joy in architecture for me is found in user activity," he says, adding, "the thing that makes me smile is seeing buildings used, sometimes misused." With The Architect Has Left the Building, Stephenson has weaved together moments of architectural joy and intimacy as cinematic vignettes from his personal archive shed light on the importance of ‘use and mess’ in architectural photography. In the video installation, works of UK and Ireland based practices such as Grafton Architects, Henley Halebrown, Carmody Groarke, and Jamie Fobert Architects, stand in contrast to the ‘neat’ visions of empty buildings that have populated mainstream media for a very long time. But why is it that people and activity have been amiss in architectural photography, STIR asks Stephenson? "I think for a long time it was a style and people wanted to stick to it. I think some architects prefer not to have people in [photos] because they think they have more control over the image that way,” he observes.

The life of a building starts when architect leaves and people come in.

Embedded in our frozen conscience, we continue to consume architecture across magazines and the internet as inanimated vessels devoid of human presence. Stephenson points out that this kind of documentation goes back to the 50s and 60s, and has been characterised by two broad styles. On one side there were professionals like Julius Shulman (1910-2009), he says, whose ‘lifestyle-like’ photographs ensued people posing in careful demeanours—“somebody in a cocktail dress, or someone in a suit sat looking all smiles and very perfect and poised.” The alternate to this were empty buildings “where architecture was sculpture, an edifice.”

Against the visually saturated landscape of architectural photography, Stephenson’s work with The Architect has Left the Building positions people at the centre of the built environment. Two large screens with seven-speaker surround sound display clips of architectural moments documented by the photographer, each moment’s distinguishing marker is its functional ordinariness: from people casually swimming in the Britannia Leisure Centre in Shoreditch Park, Muslims offering namaz inside the Cambridge Mosque, to the everyday bustle of the London Bridge. “The whole idea is an exercise in people watching,” Stephenson says, adding that the installation pulls you to sit down, watch it, and completely immerse yourself in it with the visuals and the sound.

In a lot of ways our work is about finding and discovering, rather than just documenting.

In the 15 projects that feature in the video installation, architecture’s popular image of being the attention-seeker takes a backseat. Here people and their everyday routines take precedence over calculated frames of brick, steel, and concrete. As per Stephenson, one of these sites—a school by Henley Halebrown in Hackney—was the starting point of this installation. A bench placed against a rust red wall outside of the school premises where parents waited for their children appeared quite fascinating to him. It was the joy of ‘people watching’ that not only the people sitting on the bench were immersed in, but also what attracted him to the peripheral site. The moment, he confides in STIR, was so inspiring that he wanted to initially name the exhibition, BENCH.

When asked why architectural photographers ‘fear’ or don’t dare to include people in their documentation, Stephenson observes that it is perhaps the nature of the discipline where precision takes precedence over everything else, which often spills over to the visual side of it. “Good architecture,” he says, “responds well to inhabitation and use and mess. I think partly it was about control [of the architect] for a long time but we are moving away from that. We are seeing more commonly now, images and films where there is mess, life and joy.”

Tap on the interview at the top of the article to find many moments from the installation that express ‘architectural joy’, and also why we should talk about it more.