Claire Zimmerman

1886 - 1969 (Basic Architecture Series)

Mies Van Der Rohe

Jean-Louis Cohen

Christina E. Crawford

An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945

Detroit-Moscow-Detroit

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.

Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century

Mark Crinson

The neo-avant-garde and postmodern movements have long been understood in terms of their re-working of modernism and a narrative emphasizing rupture and new beginnings. Compelling continuities between the two, especially in postwar Britain, suggest that a new account is needed. This collection of provocative essays discusses the work of architects and their associates, including Alice and Peter Smithson, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, James Stirling, James Gowan, Eduardo Paolozzi, Leon Krier, Allan Greenberg, Reyner Banham, and Charles Jencks, and explores why the debate over postwar modernism was especially vocal in Britain. Essays by sixteen distinguished scholars examine such topics as Brutalism, pop architecture, 1950s London, the legacy of Mies van der Rohe, housing, civic architecture, Italian neo-realism, and changing alignments in theory and philosophy of the period. While the essays focus on Britain, they also look beyond to Brazil, New Zealand, and the United States, expanding the discussion to include new kinds of internationalization that developed rapidly in the postwar period and set the stage for architectural developments today.

Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond

Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern

Discover the master of the modern minimalist, Mies van der Rohe, one of the defining and most hotly debated tastemakers of the twentieth century. In pursuit of elemental truth, van der Rohe crafted an "almost nothing" architecture, criticized by some as bland, extolled by others as the paradigm of purity.

Claire Zimmerman

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