The address could hardly be more ordinary: Potsdamer Strasse 50, Berlin. Behind it stands one of the defining buildings of the postwar era, Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, built between 1962 and 1968 and his only European project after the Second World War. Ulrich Schwarz, an architect by training who has photographed buildings for decades, treats that structure not as a monument to be documented but as a spatial problem to be worked through.

His method is sequential. Using precise axial shifts of the camera, Schwarz traces movement through the building image by image, so that each photograph is partly overwritten by the one that follows; motifs accumulate and cancel one another across the page. The result is less a survey of the Neue Nationalgalerie than an inquiry into how a building orchestrates the passage between city and museum, public and non-public, interior and exterior, subject and object.

Hartmann Books publishes the project in a hardcover volume of 228 pages and 103 illustrations, at 22 by 30.5 centimetres, with German and English texts by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler and a quotation from Thomas Bernhard. Schwarz is credited as photographer and conceived the book; Helmut Völter in Berlin is responsible for its design, a contribution that matters given how much the argument depends on sequence, pacing and the relation of one plate to the next.

For readers of architectural photography and of the photobook as an argued form, the appeal lies in that structure. Schwarz joins a lineage of architect-photographers who use the camera to test spatial experience, and the book’s strict conceptual discipline places it alongside recent publishing that treats architecture as a subject for sequences rather than single views.