Published by Metropolis Books in 2004, Robert Polidori’s Metropolis gathers architectural and urban photographs selected by Polidori from his own archive. Its geography is deliberately broad: war-damaged Beirut, deteriorating New York tenements, the disordered interiors of Versailles, the modernist spaces of Brasília, and the abandoned, contaminated cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat. Rather than presenting the metropolis as a unified spectacle, the book considers cities through places where history has unsettled their intended form.
Polidori’s subject is architecture, but buildings here are never merely formal objects. Ruin, neglect, political ambition and habitation remain legible in their surfaces and rooms. His photographs connect visual precision with social observation, treating the built environment as a record of decisions, disruptions and accumulated time. The movement among capitals, domestic interiors, civic monuments and damaged structures enlarges the book beyond a survey of architectural styles.
Each photograph is accompanied by a first-person account developed from interviews conducted by Martin C. Pedersen. Polidori discusses the circumstances in which images were made, his responses to buildings he admires or dislikes, favored architects, and his interest in mosques. This image-and-commentary structure gives the monograph an unusual degree of proximity to the photographer’s working thought: the pictures retain their autonomy while the texts clarify choices of location, subject and approach.
For collectors concerned with architectural photography, the book’s importance lies in this concentrated view of Polidori’s practice across several major bodies of work. The 144-page hardcover does not isolate a single city; it draws together recurring questions about damage, preservation, modernism and the afterlife of urban ideals. As both an archive of photographs and an articulated account of their making, Robert Polidori’s Metropolis offers a substantive point of entry into how Polidori reads architecture through history.
