Manuel captured the monoliths scattered around the world and created a “connection with the world of aliens” | Architecture

Looking for “new ways of capturing the built landscape” can be “a huge challenge”. But during two long walks around the world, camera in hand, Manuel Alvarez Diestro found “exceptional spaces” and tried to “transform the real into the unreal”.

The new series by the Spanish photographer, Monoliths, began to take shape a few years ago while wandering around Madrid. When he saw the Vallecas 20 Building, “the vertical black box”, with “the sun hitting the structure”, it reminded him of the film Space Odyssey. “In the film, a black monolith appears in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by rock formations in a vast, epic landscape. With that in mind, I took photos of skyscrapers that look like monoliths and are placed in a similar way,” says the photographer who likes to capture the architecture of new cities, from the battle between cities and nature, to skyscrapers in China from a train​. The main requirement: the buildings had to generate “surreal scenes”.

It was in South Korea, China, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Malaysia that he found, “in the middle of nowhere”, these vertical structures with an “enigmatic presence, which seem disconnected” from their surroundings. The result are these images, which seem to “evoke a connection with the world of aliens“. And that not only transform the real into the unreal, but also into the surreal.