Jon Tugores’ Barcelona lifts our gaze to a new vantage point over our city, revealing a new territorial scale that has never been shown before.

Jon Tugores – architect, photographer and pilot – has managed to reinvent urban aerial photography through his determination to capture multiple moments over a period of several years from the same position in the cockpit of an airplane or a helicopter. The images bring the geographic scale and the urban scale face to face, emerging from an atmospheric mist, as the sunlight filters through. Jon Tugores has the ability to connect the passion and beauty of a territorial aerial image with the direct compression of a humanized landscape. When Jon takes pictures, he is also drawing.

His images of Barcelona are images of a capital city. At this scale, when it is represented in plan, we see the large-scale transport infrastructures and the large natural parks – it is the scale of a territorial map, where it is very hard to discern urbanity and humanity. But Jon Tugores’ photographs, which often represent this scale, can create a precise ethereal image, where the city seems to have grown up as a natural process in the territory, with landmarks, profiles, silhouettes, and structures that match nature. And through these images we see humanity, order, abstraction, and life.

With the beauty of his images, with his intent in capturing sunrises and the feeling of heat, Tugores shows us that the single global image provided by Google Earth may represent a technical feat, but it can’t communicate a place’s soul.

For the first time we can see all of Catalonia in one image, with the Eixample and the Pyrenees. Barcelona, capital of Catalonia, as photographed by Tugores, is the image of the new Catalonia to come, where the entire territory responds to a single project, understood as a local entity, connected internally and to the world through flows of material and information. A territory built as an urban habitat, where everything is inhabited, including the sky, where urban and rural environments are part of a consistent, rational, planned whole.

His photographs remind us of part of our history, and we realize that the visions of 17th century marine artists who represented, as part of the same profile, the church towers in central Barcelona, the Collserola mountain range, and the outline of Montserrat is a possible image – a real, neighboring landscape. These images connect the capital and the soul of Catalonia, built as a series of layers separated by water vapor, flattened by the view through a telephoto lens.

Tugores has also photographed the port and the Zona Franca as they have never been seen before. As a quintessential productive territory, which serves as a logistical Delta, located between the airport and the city, it defines a hub that connect us to the world.

Jon Tugores has invented a new art of aerial photography. He has shown us real landscapes, colors and transparencies, which we had only seen before in Eastern paintings. And with them he has taught us to look at the world anew from a different point of view, from above and looking straight ahead, with a perspective which, when transferred onto paper or into pixels, leads to a shift in our collective imagination.

«I have know Jon and his work for many years now. Together we have shared a common desire to learn and investigate, whether conversationally or professionally.

His dialogue has always been a collaborative investigation of thoughts, with the best possibly outcome for the project at the forefront of the discussion. As a result, his buildings maintain a clarity of purpose and understanding of client program.

In our collaboration toward an artistic solution to his church project in Casteldefels, it was always the overall experience of the space and purpose of the building which took precedence. This is an unusual and, unselfish approach to collaborative design, in that it allows everyone involved to do their best within their field, knowing they have the full trust of the architect in allowing the best solution to develop.

I always look forward to hearing more from Jon as he is cross-references his knowledge and abilities into ever more confident expressions and projects.»

Jon Tugores is a flyer. He flies at high altitudes, diving, and low to the ground.

High altitudes: from a vantage point built on a passion for looking, observing the smallest detail of the structure of materials and the resilience of a way of practicing architecture.

Diving: entering the territories of proximity to the places and the things that spark his curiosity – it unfolds in his flights, which are calculated and stringently monitored based on technical expertise.

Low to the ground: because he experiences the materiality of the earth from the air and the phenomena of daily life, intent on opening up new surroundings for his professional practice and his life. Beyond multidimensional, he is intent on making a creative act of doing, without any prior frame of reference.

And on the subject of architecture, we should say that it is implicit in the way he flies – acts – or how he meets people in his studio. Like in the cockpit of a plane, he takes us on a flyover above the basecamp of global interactions among different fields, always linked to architecture – film, exhibitions, books, etc. What’s more, he does it through enthusiastic and ironic conversation on daily life, art, technical knowledge, or cosmic drift.

So when we look at his website, we should expect it to be like a series of flight plans for various different flights taken continuously. He is the flight team; we are the active observers, piloting the experience.

Opening up the website, I suggest it should show us a flight simulator: high altitudes, diving, low to the ground. A simulator that displays the projects as work seen from the sky, or materials for industrial design, or byproducts of the aerospace industry. I suggest that he combine technical reasoning with cinematography; drawing with structural engineering; construction details with literary narrative; acoustics with geometry; Balearic muti-views with the 1001 Nights of his demiurgic flights. In short, that he take us into the cockpit of unformed material and chaos, from ideas toward perfection or impure imagination. To put it plainly: to the creation of space, which is but a world to imagine ourselves in.

Don’t look for a builder, but for the path of an unrelenting flyer; a universal craftsman.