Finding Poetry in London's Concrete Jungle

Many people, especially those who prefer suburbs, tidiness, and comfort, tend to view concrete buildings and structures as marks of violence inflicted on cities, scars of old ideas that didn’t work out so well. However, many architects and city-dwellers have an opposite view: that these seemingly brutal structures have a poetry and elegance of their own. Concrete buildings and bridges revel in heaviness and mass, anchoring urbanites to the built environment.

Photographer David Sopronyi new photo series, entitled West Way after a major highway in London, takes these concrete wonders as their subject. Sopronyi uses the subtleties of natural lighting and the seasons to give a new softness to London’s West Way and its surrounding residential monoliths. In these images, a normally grim onramp bridge becomes a graceful arc. There is still plenty of grit, to be sure, but somehow, Sopronyi’s work removes the threat from these typically passed-over zones, and imbues them with interest.

This post originally appeared on Architizer, an Atlantic partner.