Photo essay: Swiss photographer Nicolas Grospierre has spent the last 15 years meticulously documenting Modernist architecture across five continents, a process that has turned him into an "obsessive collector" (+ slideshow).
Space Museum and Heliport, International Fairgrounds, Tripoli, Lebanon, 2010
For Grospierre, Modernism embodied one of the "most beautiful ideals of mankind: progress". But in this exclusive essay for Dezeen, the Warsaw-based photographer discusses how his images of the movement's now dilapidated concrete-formed churches, Soviet housing estates and various saucer-shaped structures show its failure.

Related story: Arndt Schlaudraff recreates Brutalist buildings in Lego for Instagram
Grospierre has whittled down his collection to create the book Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th Century Architecture, an encyclopaedic volume of closely cropped architectural images arranged by form rather than location.
Sanctuary of the Divine Mercy, Kalisz, Poland, 2012
Its launch coincides with an exhibition at the Architectural Association in London between 30 April and 28 May 2016.

Modern Forms is the synthesis of 15 years of my photographing Modernist architecture. However, the origin of this set of photographs was quite tortuous.
When I started to photograph architecture, I would focus on one particular building to try to document it extensively and make closed series of photographs dedicated to these...