Sue Barr

Searching for the Sublime in Motorway Architecture Between the Alps and Naples.
Motorways are architectural megastructures in the landscape, crossing nations, natural or political borders, and making previously remote places accessible to development. Between the Alps and Naples motorways connect highly complex topographies and urban conditions, often retracing antique trade paths and routes taken by northern Romantics on the Grand Tour, searching for arcadian and sublime landscapes as painted by de Loutherbourg, Claude, and Turner. The experience of the sublime in untamed nature became a highlight on the Grand Tour. In those days the journey took days; today we speed through the landscapes via motorways over concrete bridges, ramps, through galleries and tunnels. But with this speed comes a new accelerated and simultaneously calm sublime of concrete motorway megastructures against the backdrop of constantly changing landscapes and cities. Sue Barr, Head of Pho-tography at the Architectural Association (AA), London, is a photographer obsessed with con-crete and Brutalist architecture. On countless journeys from the Alps to Naples she took the carefully constructed pictures for her first monographic publication and documented the omnious beauty of motorway architecture, within landscapes and urban spaces.