In an age of rapid digital media and fleeting Instagram images, every now and then a hardcover book can land on your desk with a thud and cause you to stop for a moment in awe. That’s the case with Shooting Space: Architecture in Contemporary Photography, a weighty new tome by curator and writer Elias Redstone that is in essence a compilation of photographs of the built environment. But where many design books are a study of a particular space or designer or building, Shooting Space turns its attention instead to the place of architecture within art photography, exploring the importance of the built environment, whether intentionally or subconsciously, in the overall artistic approach of various photographers.

These include Annie Leibovitz, Wolfgang Tillmans, Catherine Opie and Andreas Gursky – not names typically associated with the photography of architecture (but instead fashion and photo-portraiture, for example) but which engage in a relationship with it nonetheless. The book comprises some 300 images detailing the work of Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry and Le Corbusier, alongside less-known or unknown architects and designers, and stretches across the world from Shanghai to New York, Hong kong to Mexico City. Essays by curators Kate Bush and Pedro Gadanho explore our ongoing fascination with the built environment.

Shooting Space: Architecture in Contemporary Photography is published in tandem with a major exhibition, Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age, also curated by Mr Redstone, at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, which is on display until January 2015.