“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” With this simple statement, Winston Churchill brilliantly conveyed our complex relationship to architecture. The physical forms of buildings are subject to their designers’ control, but the impact the built environment has on us is unpredictable, subjective, and often indefinable. You Are Here: Architecture and Experience brings together work by two artists who take different approaches to exploring our engagement with the architectural world. German photographer Candida Höfer’s lush color photographs of historic and contemporary cultural spaces absorb the viewer with both their scale and detail. Employing the seemingly disparate media of video and etching, French-born Cyprien Gaillard probes the messy, charged legacy of the Modernist housing block abroad. At once disjunctive and complementary, these two bodies of work capture the constant oscillation between what we make of our buildings, and what they make of us.

You Are Here is organized by Tracy Myers, curator of architecture at the Heinz Architectural Center.