I have here the first photograph ever taken. Well, not really, its just a bad printout
of it. The original is actually at the University of Texas in Austin. But that’s beside the
point, the image is a blurry impression of some buildings, a courtyard, and a roof. It
was produced using a device called a camera obscura, a darkened room with a small hole
or lens at one side. This one was produced by covering a window and leaving a small hole
in the covering.
Due to the physics of light, a curious thing happens in a space like this. An image forms
on the opposite side of the room from hole. But, the image is flipped upside down. The
light rays converge through this small hole and continue their angled path until they’re
projected on the other wall. So, here, the image is the view one would have through the
window if your eye was in the place of the whole, and of course if the window wasn’t
covered up.
It took an entire room to make this photograph, whose subject is the view of other buildings
as seen framed through a window. Architecture is clearly an important part of photography.
It was there at every level right from the beginning.
In fact, a lot of early photographs were taken of buildings. This is because the chemical
processes used to etch the image into an accepting material, or substrate, required lots of time
to properly react. In the case of that first photograph, it took 8 hours of exposing the
bitumen covered plate to produce the grainy picture. Not too many willing subjects can
sit still for so many hours, but buildings were uniquely up to the task.
Over time, chemists found ways to tweak the processes until they became quick enough to
capture human subjects. But at first, they all had to sit stiffly with no smile because
an image would still take a long time to form and people had to find a comfortable place
they could keep for while.
Contrast this with one of the most famous architectural photographers, Iwan (EE Wan)
Baan. He is famous for being able to capture the unexpected and quick moving life inside
of buildings and for being on the move himself. In a typical week he might be in Basel, Switzerland
on Friday
Saturday: Zurich Monday: Bilbao
Tuesday: Madrid Wednesday: Murcia
Thursday: Cartagena Friday: New York
In fact, he spends a total of two weeks a year in his own apartment, meanwhile racking
up hundred of thousands of airline miles to visit all the buildings he’s commissioned
to photograph. He’s the preferred photographer of almost every influential architect today
like Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl.
But what makes him so popular as an architectural photographer? What is it about his images
that stand out among the rest?
Well, it has to do with his desire for constant movement and how this shapes the way he sees
buildings. One of his go-to techniques is hopping in a helicopter to get away from his
subject and observe it from the sky. From here, he’s able to capture how a building
interacts within its surroundings. How it shapes them and they shape the building.
After hurricane Sandy--while half of Manhattan was plunged into darkness without power--Baan
boarded a helicopter and captured images of the city in its battered state. One of these
made it on the cover of New Yorker Magazine and became an iconic image of 2012.
Once he lands on the ground, Baan is fascinated by how people behave in new spaces and how
people explore them in this time of unease. Anyone might show up in the cast of his images
featuring their everyday activity with the architecture as their backdrop: a dog pulling
a man along on a bicycle, two joggers, a man on a phone, a woman lugging her groceries.
This idea of mobility and people are what makes photography so important to architecture
in general. It is difficult to view buildings in their native context, and this can be prohibitive
for the study. Even more, some buildings are private and you wouldn’t be granted access
even if you did show up.
But photographs move at the speed of light and we can visit so many more buildings through
their photographs than we can physically with our bodies. The photograph becomes a standin
for when a building can’t be where you want it when you want it. So, architects really
rely on photographers to be able to capture their design intentions.
This is how certain architectural photographers become synonymous with certain architects
or architectural movements. This is true for people like Julius Shulman, a photogrpaher
whose primary subject were modern houses during the 1940s through 1960s in California. While
Iwan Baan has a more casual snapshot style, Shulman’s photographs were highly constructed
and meticulously staged affairs.
Lighting, transparency, shapes, textures, and human models are all perfectly in their
place to convey a life of affluence and leisure through good design. His Case Study House
#22, Los Angeles might be the most famous architectural photograph of all time. It features
two well-dressed women conversing within a heroically cantilevered building hovering
above the dancing lights of Los Angeles.
While appearing spontaneous, the image is highly constructed. Through the camera placement
and focus, we as observers, we’re voyeurs looking into the action, on the outside of
an exclusive life of privilege.
Early in his career, Shulman worked for another photographer name Ezra Stoller. Rather than
focusing on domestic environments like Shulman eventually did, Stoller’s photographs were
more abstract and heroic — showing spaces as sweeping curves spring from off frame or
highly contrasting textures and shapes.
Stoller turned buildings into monumental works for art through his camera lens. Even in this
early photo of his of a modest house, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer’s Chamberlain
Cottage, the diminutive structure looks grand and impressive.
This is all carefully calculated. Stoller agonized over every detail of every photograph.
Including things like the angle of the open window and even how the logs are stacked under
the building.
He told an interviewer in 1990 about his typical working method: “I would wander around the
building and make notes with arrows on the plans. When this was done, I’d put a time
next to each arrow, and when I was all through the day would be gone. So the next day, hopefully
it was a sunny day again, I’d go back and make all those pictures.”
A Stoller photograph could make your building famous and the process of his images capturing
and propelling a building to celebrity was called getting Stollerized. But eventually
over time into the 1970s architectural preferences and interests swung the other way. There was
no longer a desire to make the ordinary seem monumental and extraordinary. Rather, architects
were interested in the inherent beauty of the ordinary.
And architects, like Venturi Scott Brown turned to photographers like Stephen Shore to capture
the reality of everyday lives. They commissioned him to tour the United States as part of their
show ‘Signs of Life.’ Which I talked about in the episode about curb appeal. Shore helped
the architects to pay attention to the average moments in life, not just the dramatic ones.
He photographed main streets, but also car parks, road signs, gas stations and shopfronts
as well as the furniture in his rented motel rooms and the food he had for breakfast. He
used all sorts of cameras and hardly ever staged anything or even used a flash. This
is almost the complete opposite of Shulman and Stoller. Shore would famously take only
shot of a given subject, and does very little editing of the image afterward.
Shore’s approach to photography is both deadpan, straightforward, and unglamorous.
He would say “What I was trying to do was take pictures that looked like they weren’t
composed. I wanted to get away from the visual conventions of photography, the weight of
tradition that informed how you were supposed to structure a photograph. Basically, I wanted
to take screwy pictures, but intentionally screwy pictures.”
Venturi Scott Brown the architects who commissioned Shore were pretty screwy too and designed
architecture that learned from way of appreciating the world. They wanted to create buildings
that revel in the unplanned and everyday. And even to create buildings that could work
like a picture. For instance their design for the NFL Hall of Fame is called the Building
Board, because the main inhabitable hall hides behind a giant flat image meant to be seen
from the nearby highway.
While few still take photographs with actual film, and images have never been more easily
sharble, architecture is consumed at an alarming rate. In lesser hands, this knowledge that
a building might mostly be constructed for an image can lead to a more cynical interpretation,
where architects only design to produce the most instagrammable image while neglecting
all the other parts of buildings that are important. While this is certainly rampant,
firms like Johnston Mark Lee have turned it back into an art form.
Their design process for a project called the Hill House actually begins with the famous
Julius Shulman photograph we talked about earlier. The one for the Case Study House.
Rather than trying to make the building to produce a great image, they start with the
photograph and produce the building from it.
They take Shulman’s image and through collage, create new architectural possibilities. They
erase parts of the image, or at least color them white, to imply a form for a building
around the windows that strays from the familiar plans of the original. It reframes the interior
condition without eluding to things like what materials the eventual building will be made
from.
The house itself then maintains the abstraction of the collage as a smooth, white faceted
form. It egnages the hill like a gem popping out. It actually completely fills out the
buildable area of the site which is controlled by various zoning regulations, giving the
final form. A sculpture that is completely dependent on its context.
The whiteness is both on the interior and exterior and creates a complete visual contrast
with the color and texture of the surroundings. From the inside, this makes the window look
even more like a picture.
In the end, the building isn’t very similar overall to the one on the Shluman photo, but
it will always have that association due to this part of its design process. And photography
is important to its life at all levels.
The House also shows up in their book called A House is a House is a House. In it, they
challenged the conventional model where architects commission photographers to make the houses
look perfect or heroic. Rather, they chose to “collaborate” with artists who reinterpreted
the buildings in their own way. The voice of each featured photographer is made explicit
as a coauthor and the book presents multiple points of view of the same buildings.This
is where the strange name for the book comes from. A House is a House is a House.
Anyway, the Hill House shows up multiple times in the book in grainy spooky night shots,
comic book style framed images with talk bubbles that animate the building, and some reminiscent
of what Julius Shulman might do if he were alive today..
But my favorite collaboration in the book is around another house called the Sale House,
interpreted by the artist Livia Corona. She stages these elaborate scenes with elderly
actors engaging in a series of absurd activities. The house has these intense colors on the
interior and the actors dress in the same colors as the architecture as they engage
with strange furniture inside of otherwise barron spaces.
Let’s continue the conversation about architectural photography down in the discussion section
below. I’d love to hear your thoughts about the subject, which photographs are your favorites,
or which photographers today are making waves. If you enjoyed the video, I’d be grateful
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