Germany – Urbanscapes

Backstory: The persistent financial crisis in the Europe – especially in the Euro-Zone – and my recent trip to Frankfurt am Main (which can be regarded as Europe’s financial heart) generated an idea in my mind.With Frankfurt being one of the few European cities with a significant number of skyscrapers, meaning buildings at least 150m tall. 14 out of a total of 15 skyscrapers in Germany are located in Frankfurt. Most of them are built by or owned by banks or other financial institutions. (For instance: The Westend Tower is the headquarters of DZ Bank or Commerzbank Tower functions as headquarters of the Commerzbank)All these institutions are financial actors within the financial crisis. Some of them received a share in the profits; some of them paid fines; some of them even declared bankruptcy. (To be precise: Most declarations of bankruptcy happened outside of Frankfurt). But the common denominator, or the most importantsimilarity of all actors is that they are intrinsic players of a game we call finance.So as I was going through my images, I thought if finance was a game, and if this game had certain rules (I have my own concerns at this point) I thought it could be regarded as chess – finance as highly strategic game to manifest certain hegemony.So I will label my minimalistic architecture images according to chess pieces. None of the names reflects actual roles or duty of the aforementioned actors; they are just a verbalization of the composition presented in the images.