Roofscapes

These striking patterns, resembling works of modern art, are actually buildings, photographed from the air. On page 30, Jonathan Glancey discusses the work of the great conceptualist, Georg Gerster

Dr Georg Gerster must never be allowed to hold a pilot's licence. This brilliant Swiss photographer has at least 3,000 hours' flying experience in light planes and helicopters, yet only very rarely has he had his sharp eye on compass and altimeter.

In the course of the past 30 years, Gerster has hung from the cockpits of Bells and Cessnas - on their sides, in dives and at stomach-churning angles - to capture on camera extraordinary views of cities, towns, villages and individual buildings. The results, as you can see on these pages, are extraordinary. Gerster's eye refocuses our perspective on the built world.

"Yes, it's true; I would make a lousy pilot," he says over the telephone from his studio in Zurich. "I am always looking at what's below, and I get far too excited by what I see to handle the aircraft, too. The poor pilots have to pass over the places I want to photograph again and again until I find exactly what I want to see."

What Gerster sees is townscape and architecture through the eyes of a writer turned photographer who is in love with modern art and architectural perspective. His foreshortened perspectives are the stuff of architect's dreams (or nightmares). Just look at the way he sees such familiar buildings as Longleat House (below left). In this dazzling view, the caravans lined up in the sightline of the Marquess of Bath's breakfast table appear to be parked above the great, sunlit house.

Le Corbusier and his disciples would have drooled over Gerster's photograph of the tower-block housing of Kowloon (right). Gerster's towers march triumphantly up the length of his viewfinder; it is as if Le Corbusier's Twenties sketches of a dream city-in-the-sky have come to life.

In Gerster's eye, roofs become fantastic landscapes and facades of high- rise buildings become virtually unfathomable abstracts. "Why? For two reasons, I think," says the photographer. "First, my great love is architecture, so I guess I do look at the world below in terms of axes and perspectives. Secondly, like many of my generation, my eye has been trained by the work of modern artists. So if, as you say, you see the ghost of Jackson Pollock in my rooftop view of Luzon [a fishing village in the Philippines, pictured on page 28], then maybe at some time the artist has made me see the way he saw. I am not recording a landscape in a conventional manner; I record what I see in my mind's eye, and the camera is the agent that helps me do that. That, and a lot of luck."

What Gerster says holds true. All his photographs do bear an uncanny resemblance to images we have seen (or think we have seen) hanging on the walls of art galleries, or printed in architectural polemics such as Le Corbusier's La Ville Radieuse. But then, the master painters and architects of the early Modern Movement were thrilled by the aesthetic possibilities of the world as seen from the newfangled aeroplane. Le Corbusier published an extraordinary book on the aeroplane, extolling the ways in which it allows us to see cities from entirely new perspectives (which it does, as Gerster's pictures prove).

"There was the case of Matisse, too," says Gerster. "He first went up in an aeroplane as an old man; I think he was nearly 80. Looking down on the landscape below, he said something like, `If only I could have seen like this before, I would have avoided a lot of detours in my work'."

The aeroplane is a blind missile; only the pilot sees. Even then, pilots are duty-bound to talk into radios, to keep a tight rein on their winged chariots, to maintain as vigilant a lookout as a bird of prey. The pilot's view is godlike, yet never as free as Gerster's, as the photographer leans perilously from cockpits on his airborne camera platform.

"The aeroplane," says Gerster, "presents the photographer with a jumble of visual planes: the possibilities are boundless, but the picture that makes it in my eye can only be caught in a thousandth of a second. You need more than a little patience to make your living recording the art of architecture and human settlement from the air."

Many of Gerster's photographs have made their way into books over the years (Flights of Discovery, Flugbilder, Over China, The Art of the Maze, Amber Waves of Grain: America's Farmlands from Above). Much of his work, starting in 1959, has been for National Geographic, the American monthly that has enabled him to globetrot on a scale that would have impressed Amy Johnson. Gerster, now 57, plans to keep flying into the distant blue yonder. As long as his finger remains on the shutter and his hand away from the joystick, that is where he and his eagle eye should be