In Le Corbusier: Secret Photographer Tim Benton reflects on the famous architect's use of photography, starting with the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret's attempts to take professional photographs during his travels in central Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. While Le Corbusier always claimed that he saw no virtue in taking photographs, he actually bought three cameras and took several hundred photographs between 1907 and 1917, many of them of publishable quality. This previously unpublished material is the basis for the publication. It reveals Le Corbusier to be a sensitive and brilliant manipulator of a wide range of photographic styles.
In 1949, the photographer Lucien Herve (1910-2007) took a picture of an innovative apartment building in Marseille, France, and sent it to the building's architect, Le Corbusier (1887-1965). Le Corbusier responded by asking Herve to become his official photographer. This book recounts the creative collaboration between these two groundbreaking Modernists. The author takes the reader on a tour of sixteen of Le Corbusier's most iconic buildings using Herve's edited sheets of contact prints as visual guides. These sheets, which became an effective tool in the collaborative dissemination of Le Corbusier's work, capture Herve's dynamic perspectives and dramatic use of light. His sequencing of the individual prints creates an exhilarating rhythm that powerfully showcases the architect's novel forms and materials.
Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media, and that in so doing it radically displaces the traditional sense of space and subjectivity. Privacy and Publicity boldly questions certain ideological assumptions underlying the received view of modern architecture and reconsiders the methodology of architectural criticism itself. Where conventional criticism portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice in opposition to mass culture, Colomina sees the emerging systems of communication that have come to define twentieth-century culture—the mass media—as the true site within which modern architecture was produced. She considers architectural discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation such as drawings, models, photographs, books, films, and advertisements. This does not mean abandoning the architectural object, the building, but rather looking at it in a different way. The building is understood here in the same way as all the media that frame it, as a mechanism of representation in its own right. With modernity, the site of architectural production literally moved from the street into photographs, films, publications, and exhibitions—a displacement that presupposes a new sense of space, one defined by images rather than walls. This age of publicity corresponds to a transformation in the status of the private, Colomina argues; modernity is actually the publicity of the private. Modern architecture renegotiates the traditional relationship between public and private in a way that profoundly alters the experience of space. In a fascinating intellectual journey, Colomina tracks this shift through the modern incarnations of the archive, the city, fashion, war, sexuality, advertising, the window, and the museum, finally concentrating on the domestic interior that constructs the modern subject it appears merely to house.
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.
This volume examines Le Corbusier's relationship with the topographies of five continents, in essays by thirty of the formeost scholars of his work and with contemporary photographs by Richard Pare.
Lucien Hervé (b. 1910), one of the great architectural photographers of the twentieth century, collaborated with Le Corbusier from 1949 until the renowned architect died in 1965. Hervé approached his subjects seeking not only to document the buildings he was commissioned to photograph but also, especially, to convey a sense of space, texture, and structure. Through light and shadow, Hervé defined the dialogue between substance and form. By delineating a strong contrast between light and shadow as well as placing emphasis on building details, the photographer was able to communicate the depth of a room, the surface of a wall, or the strength of a building's framework. For too long, Hervé the master of architectural photography has eclipsed Hervé the photographer whose career began as early as 1938 and whose subject matter varied widely. Featuring more than one hundred of his photographs in every genre, this book celebrates Hervé's work as an artist, creating images that serve not simply as records but stand as works of a singular imagination.
Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Simultaneously a historian, critic, and prophet, he provocatively juxtaposes views of classical Greece and Renaissance Rome with images of airplanes, cars, and ocean liners. Le Corbusier's slogans--such as "the house is a machine for living in"--and philosophy changed how his contemporaries saw the relationship between architecture, technology, and history. This edition includes a new translation of the original text, a scholarly introduction, and background notes that illuminate the text and illustrations.
In 1927, when 24-year-old Charlotte Perriand (1903–1999) walked into Le Corbusier's studio and asked him to hire her as a furniture designer, he responded, "We don't embroider cushions here." After seeing her remarkable designs, however, Le Corbusier enjoyed a long collaboration with Perriand, who would go on to work as an architect, town planner, and political activist. This revelatory book is the first to show Perriand's photography, an important tool in her creative process and intellectual development, and a reflection of her political views. Made from the late 1920s through 1941, these striking images, many previously unpublished, testify to the collaborative spirit of the avant-garde movement, in which painters, architects, and photographers worked together to achieve creative breakthroughs.
In "Photography or Life," Juan José Lahuerta contrasts well-known images tied to the history of twentieth-century architecture with anonymous graphic materials and pictures from the popular press. In doing so, he demonstrates that pointing a camera at a building is neither natural nor innocent-it involves deliberate and telling decisions. His analysis of the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, for example, suggests irreconcilable differences between the two architects that represent radically opposed approaches to architecture and life. Furthermore, a close study of snapshots of Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building taken by teachers and students leads to new ways of understanding the myths associated with the Dessau school. Using the same method in "Popular Mies," Lahuerta looks at photographs of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's work and shows that Mies was influenced not only by Stieglitz and Camera Work, but also a mass culture that enjoyed zeppelins, music halls, x-rays, and phantasmagorical gadgets. At the same time, in their portrayals of Mies's work, the press and anonymous photographers situated it in a popular context that stands as a counterpoint to the notion of a heroic modern era.