In the 1990s, the award-winning British architect Michael Hopkins was searching for someone to take black-and-white photographs of his buildings. He contacted Eric de Maré, the visionary chronicler of the postwar British landscape, then in retirement. "It was like watching an old gunslinger back in action," says Hopkins. "The first shots were a little off the mark. Then he found his aim and was bang on target. Those photographs are some of my proudest possessions."  Richard MacCormac, architect of the Ruskin Library in Lancaster and other jewel-like buildings, shares Hopkins's reverence. "Did Eric de Maré influence me?" he says. "Funny you should ask. I've just been using his shot of 'skyscraper' fishermen's sheds at Hastings as inspiration for a housing scheme."  This foreboding image shows a cluster of improbably tall sheds with pitched roofs, all tilting haphazardly. Referred to as "skyscrapers" by De Maré, their scale is revealed by two young women floating by in summery frocks. It was taken in 1956, when De Maré, an architect-turned-photographer born in London of Swedish parents, was in his mid-40s and working for the Architectural Review, on a mission to record venerable yet largely forgotten industrial buildings. The shot seems to be saying that architecture, no matter how unexpected, is for everyone: the women couldn't be less like the fishermen for whom the sheds were built, yet they seem in curious harmony with the hulking structures that they are ambling past almost without noticing.  Breweries, bridges, boathouses, windmills, watermills, naval yards – De Maré's shots of them would eventually become the backbone of a 1958 book that was to prove profoundly influential: The Functional Tradition in Early Industrial Buildings, written by JM Richards. The fact that an architect of MacCormac's stature is, half a century on, still using De Maré's work for inspiration says much about its power; Norman Foster calls his photographs "a social conscience of visual values – more valid than ever".  De Maré's finest images are currently on show at the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) in London. His sublime prints record delightful textile mills and canal bridges that make remarkably modern use of materials. No decoration. No stucco. No classical airs and graces. To architects of MacCormac's generation, already questioning the cold-blooded modernism they had been spoon-fed in tutorials, De Maré offered the shock of the old. "We'd been brought up to hate flamboyant Victorian design," says Hopkins, whose own buildings have an earthy, industrial look. "But we hadn't been properly aware of this powerful industrial architecture that was as functional, honest and fit for purpose as any new architecture we had been shown from 1920s France and Germany. It was gloriously, robustly physical – all bones and sinews."  One of De Maré's finest images is of St Edward's church in Yorkshire, overlooked by the cooling towers of Ferrybridge B Power Station. It is a magnificent composition: the power of the medieval church and its God seem on the point of being overwhelmed by another type of power. Both buildings, however, are beautiful – and demonstrate De Maré's love of the vernacular, of buildings whose creators received little recognition, yet which electrify the architectural imagination.  Hopkins bought De Maré's extensive archive before the photographer's death in 2002 at the age of 91, and gave it to the Architectural Association. The collection stands as a reminder of how powerful architectural photography can be – especially when charged with a moving and timely idea.
Eric de Maré's sublime photographs of British industrial buildings forced postwar architects to look again at the landscape. His influence is still felt today, writes Jonathan Glancey