IMPACT OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN ARCHITECTURE

An essay written for the book accompanying the

exhibitionConstructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in
the Modern Age, Barbican Gallery London,25 September 2014
11 January 2015; ArkDes Stockholm, 20 February 17 May 2015;
MuseoICO Madrid, 3 June 6 September.
Through photography one might be able to get hold of
architecture. By this the cultural critic Walter Benjamin meant,
that while a physical building is owned and used, a photograph of
it is able to isolate, define, interpret, exaggerate or even invent a
cultural value for it.
Benjamin went on to suggest that the kind of art that will
triumph will be the kind of art that looks good in photographic
reproduction
and that architecture will not escape the same
View from the Window at Le Grasby Joseph
fate.
Nicphore Nipce, 1826-27
remember photographys attraction
toarchitecture goes back to the very earliest
camera pictures. Nicphore NipcesView
fromtheWindow at Le Gras(1826) was a lucid
demonstration of the new mediums consummate
translation of three dimensions into two,
although it lacked the detail .

The perfection and fidelity of the pictures are such that, on

examining them by microscopic power, details are discovered
which are not perceivable to the naked eye in the original
objects. Say, a crack in plaster or or an accumulation of dust in a
hollow moulding of a distant building.
Since then, photography has been put to use recording the
worlds older buildings and ruins.
It has also been used to document and promote new
constructions that very much do belong to the time and
technology of photography: Victorian bridges and glasshouses,
monuments and towers in steel, high-rises and high-tech
Beneath
a cluster of towers of varying merit
buildings.
nestles a two-storey show home built with
the latest techniques and equipped with
state-of-the-art gadgets.
The house was temporary but Abbotts
photograph preserves the event and offers a
pause for reflection. While Americas offices
went skyward, its homes would sprawl
laterally to become an endless suburbia.

Walker Evans, took up photography in the late 1920s. At first the

giant architecture of Manhattan attracted him. He made
celebratory images of soaring verticals, dynamic angles and
grid-like facades.

Modish gave way to a more neutral, less forced way of thinking

and photographing. He focused on provincial towns away from the
extravagance of the big cities.
A commission to record Victorian houses around Boston allowed
him to develop his approach.
In 1933 the results were exhibited, essentially as documents, in
the Architecture Galleries of the Museum of Modern Art. Five
years later, Evans was the first photographer to be given a solo
exhibition in his own name at MoMA, and more than half of his
one hundred prints were architectural.
In 2009 the artist Victor Burgin was invited to make a piece of
work in response to the city of Istanbul.[xxiii] After several visits
he became interested in the Talik coffee house and garden,
constructed in 1947-48. Designed by Sedad Hakki Eldem, on a site
overlooking the Bosphorus, it blends elements of seventeenthcentury Ottoman architecture with twentieth-century Modernism.
It was open to everyone.
Then in 1988 it was dismantled to make way for a luxury
Swisstel. Part of the coffee house was re-built but in a different
position, and now serves merely as an orientalist tourist
restaurant. Working from drawings and photographs, Burgin
resurrected the building virtually. A 3D model conjures it up in all

The rapid development of photography has resulted in an ease

of communication and has been of great advantage to critics,
publicists and readers.
Photos can now be sent to almost any corner of the world
without any limitation in time or space.
The possibility of publishing these photos on the internet has
opened up new horizons for all. It has removed the differences
between large and small countries.
At present, architectural images on the internet are often in
the form of photography, but this is evolving as an increasing
number of images are being animated.
This allows a much better depiction of an architects work and
the interiors of a space.