One hundred years ago, architects found in the medium of photography-so good at representing a building's lines and planes-a necessary way to promote their practices. It soon became apparent, ...however, that photography did more than reproduce what it depicted. It altered both subject and reception, as architecture in the twentieth century was enlisted as a form of mass communication.
Claire Zimmerman reveals how photography profoundly influenced architectural design in the past century, playing an instrumental role in the evolution of modern architecture. Her "picture anthropology" demonstrates how buildings changed irrevocably and substantially through their interaction with photography, beginning with the emergence of mass-printed photographically illustrated texts in Germany before World War II and concluding with the postwar age of commercial advertising. In taking up "photographic architecture," Zimmerman considers two interconnected topics: first, architectural photography and its circulation; and second, the impact of photography on architectural design. She describes how architectural photographic protocols developed in Germany in the early twentieth century, expanded significantly in the wartime and postwar diaspora, and accelerated dramatically with the advent of postmodernism.
In modern architecture, she argues, how buildings looked and how photographs made them look overlapped in consequential ways. In architecture and photography, the modernist concepts that were visible to the largest number over the widest terrain with the greatest clarity carried the day. This richly illustrated work shows, for the first time, how new ideas and new buildings arose from the interplay of photography and architecture-transforming how we see the world and how we act on it.
In November 2014 the display New Brutalist Image, 1949–55 opened at Tate Britain. Co-curated by the authors of this Look First feature, the display centred on a reconsideration of two key icons of ...the New Brutalism: Hunstanton School, completed in Norfolk in 1954; and the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art held at the ICA, London, in 1953. Even though the building and the exhibition shared creators, executors, and documentarians, subsequent criticism had obscured the historical relationship between them. In our display, we considered differences between these projects, yet we also revealed shared concerns around the question of communication through photographic images, identifying a communicative “language” that lies somewhere between syntax and lexicon.
Taking its cast of characters from the history and pre-history of post-World War II empire, and focusing on the United States, the narrative arc sketched here stretches from the Second Industrial ...Revolution to the Cold War. Surveying a longer research project currently underway, the essay explores the work of an architecture firm that was left out of modernist historiography, despite the firm's profoundly modern approach to building. Albert Kahn Associates of Detroit was instrumental in constructing the industrial infrastructure of the United States; yet the working methods of the firm, along with its output, still await thorough examination. The essay surveys the firm's work over the first four decades of the twentieth century, noting connections between large-scale, transnational industrialisation and growing military super powers. At the same time, the disappearance of Kahn Associates from architectural history during the second half of the century prompts a more complex explanation than that of simple neglect. Instead, a retreat from the political conditions of the built environment, by those engaged in cultural discourse in architecture is sketched here, along with its effects on the discipline and practice of architecture as a whole.
Reading the (Photographic) Evidence ZIMMERMAN, CLAIRE
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,
12/2017, Letnik:
76, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Histories of the built environment, like contemporary discourse on architecture, have been populated by photographic images for more than a century, even as photographic technologies have changed ...radically. For architects and historians, photographs offered seemingly evidentiary representations throughout the analog life of the medium (often dated from 1839 to roughly 1990) despite frequent doctoring of images in the darkroom or on the page. Products of an obsolete technology, photographs are yet fabulous discursive propositions as much as dry records of building. They are revealing diagnostic devices, speaking with more than one tongue to say more than one thing. Reading photographic evidence, then, complicates the architectural historian's task by adding multivalent, nonexclusive, sometimes contradictory visual “texts” to other information about the production and consumption of architecture. Photographs do tell us about the hard stuff of buildings on sites; they also tell us how that stuff is seen at a given moment...
The articles in this issue explore the question of cost in architectural design, building construction, and architectural historiography, working from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and ...across the globe.
Reviews "Metropolisarchitecture and selected essays," by Ludwig Hilberseimer, edited by Richard Anderson (GSAPP Sourcebook, 2012). Hilberseimer's Metropolisarchitecture is a remarkable book. ...Troubling in some respects, utterly compelling in others, it occupied a particular space in Weimar architecture culture, as a theoretical excursus in which architecture and urban design are given the charge of altering social organization. The book resonates very differently today, and to review a book first published in 1927 is also to consider its appearance in 2012, when the very question of architecture's agency has resurfaced with some urgency. "Metropolisarchitecture" redefined architecture in its day, subdividing it, targeting one particular subset for research (metropolitan architecture), and demonstrating the possible ramifications of such research on mass transit, worker relations, and market speculation. In addition to anticipating contemporary debates on activism through architecture, "Metropolisarchitecture" encourages reflection on the constitution of the profession today, when architects define themselves as experts in material systems, in digital fabrication, in health care architecture, or in curtain wall design. Revised Publication Abstract
PDF
