Jesus Vassallo Fernandez

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Escuela Técnica Superior

de Arquitectura de Madrid
REALITY BITES:
DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
AND ARCHITECTURAL REALISM /
FRAGMENTOS DE REALIDAD:
FOTOGRAFÍA DOCUMENTAL
Y REALISMO EN ARQUITECTURA
Tesis Doctoral
Jesús Vassallo
Arquitecto 2014
Departamento de
Proyectos Arquitectónicos
Escuela Técnica Superior
REALITY BITES:
DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
AND ARCHITECTURAL REALISM /
FRAGMENTOS DE REALIDAD:
FOTOGRAFÍA DOCUMENTAL
Y REALISMO EN ARQUITECTURA
Autor:
Jesús Vassallo Fernández
Arquitecto
Director:
Juan Herreros Guerra
Doctor Arquitecto
2014
D.12
Tribunal nombrado por el Mgfco. y Excmo. Sr. Rector

de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, el día
Presidente D.
___________________________________________________
Vocal D.
___________________________________________________
Vocal D.
___________________________________________________
Vocal D.
___________________________________________________
Secretario D.
___________________________________________________
Realizado el acto de defensa y lectura de Tesis

el día ____________ en la Escuela Técnica Superior
Calificación:
EL PRESIDENTE LOS VOCALES
EL SECRETARIO
3
A mi mujer Irene, mi gran amor, cuya generosidad
y sacrificio personal han hecho posible esta tesis.
A mis hijas María y Olivia, que dan sentido y plenitud a mi vida.
A mis padres Luis y Maria, cuyo afecto infinito

nunca podré recompensar del todo.
Index
Acknowledgements 13
Abstract / Resumen 15
Introduction: Methodological Framework

and Other Disclaimers 19
Chapter 0. Documentary Photography and

Architecture, or the Problem of Truth and Beauty 25
01. Introduction: An Alternative History
of Documentary Photography 27
02. 1840-1880: The Architect as a Client: Architectural
Conventions and Photographic Vision 28
03. 1880-1900: The Urban Planner as a Patron: Seriality
and Nostalgia in Urban Photography 36
04. 1900-1930: The First Documentalist:
Eugène Atget’s Unique Archival Project 40
05. 1930-1940: The Canonic Documentary Form:
Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans 42
06. Conclusions: What Is It that Architects See
in Documentary Photography? 49
Bibliography 52
Chapter 1. Nigel Henderson vs.

Alison and Peter Smithson 55
01. Introduction: The Collaboration and the Context 57
02. Nigel Henderson 62
– The Early Years 62
– A British Documentary Tradition 64
– Reconstructing Nigel 72
03. The Smithsons 78
– “As Found”: An Inherited Sensibility 78
– “As Found”: A Series of Strategies 81
– The Urban Overlay: Golden Lane, Berlin Haupstadt
and Robin Hood Gardens 81
– A Synthetic Vernacular: Burrows Lea Farm,
Close Houses, Fold Houses, Sugden House 84
04. Conclusions: The Solar Pavilion 90
Bibliography 94
7
Chapter 2. Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore
vs. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown 97
01. Introduction 99
– Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown 100
– Ed Ruscha 103
– Stephen Shore 113
02. Learning from Las Vegas 117
– The importance of A&P Parking Lots – 1968 117
– The Las Vegas Studio – 1968 119
– The book(s) – 1972-1977 124
03. Learning from Levittown 128
– On Pop Art, Permissiveness
and Planning – 1969 128
– The Learning from Levittown Studio – 1970 129
– Signs of Life: Symbols in the City,
the Exhibition – 1976 132
04. Conclusions 138
– Exploring the Ordinary 138
– A Moment of Glory 141
– Doing Damage Control 143
– The Oldenburg Effect 145
– Inclusive Superficiality 146
Bibliography 150
Chapter 3. Italian Neorealism 153

01. Introduction 155
02. The Emergence of Neorealism 158
03. The Canonical Works 165
04. Late Neorealism 173
05. A Coda: Michelangelo Antonioni vs. Aldo Rossi 177
– The Crisis of Neorealism 177
– Michelangelo Antonioni 178
· The Documentaries 178
· The Trilogy 180
· Abstraction and Autonomy 182
– Aldo Rossi 185
· The Architecture of the City 185
· Analogous Architecture 186
· A Scientific Autobiography 190
06. Conclusions 193
Bibliography 202
8
Chapter 4. German Objectivity 205
02. Paul Schultze-Naumburg and the Emergence
of Modern Architecture 208
– Kulturarbeiten 208
– “Um 1800” and Progressive Realism Before the War 211
– The Radicalization of the Debate 212
– Reactionary Coda 212
03. New Objectivity and Walter Benjamin 215
– Albert Renger-Patzsch 217
– August Sander 221
– Karl Blossfeldt 225
04. Bernd and Hilla Becher on Typology 229
– The Early Work 229
– Anonymous Sculptures 234
– Typologies 237
05. Oswald Matthias Ungers and
the Morphological Transformation Project 239
06. Hans Kollhoff and the Reduction
of the Morphological Project 243
– The Block and the Slab 245
– The Megaform 246
– The Urban Facade 248
– The ETH Years: a Reactionary Coda, Once Again 251
07. Conclusions 255
Bibliography 260
Chapter 5. The Library for the Technical

University in Eberswalde 263
02. Thomas Ruff 265
– The Dusseldorf School of Photography 265
– An Autobiographical Trilogy 267
– Appropriation Work 269
– The H&dM Collaboration 270
– Digital Image-Making 274
03. Herzog & de Meuron 276
– Signs and Things 277
– Making Images 278
– Building with Images 281
04. Conclusions 288
Bibliography 297
9
Chapter 6. T
he Nagelhaus Project 299
– The Sugden House Group 301
– Tony Fretton 302
– The Lisson Gallery 303
– Familiarity and Abstraction 307
02. Caruso St John 309
– Faithful Inheritors 310
– Almost Everything 318
03. Thomas Demand 320
– The Formative Years 321
– An Interpretation of the Work 323
04. The Collaboration 326
– Exhibition Projects 326
– The Nagelhaus 330
05. Conclusions 334
Bibliography 338
Conclusions 341
01. The Terms of the Debate 343
02. A Tree of Realisms 345
03. Realism or Avant-garde 348
04. Towards a Contemporary Project 349
10
Acknowledgements
I would first want to express my gratitude to the professors, colleagues
and administrative staff at Madrid ETSAM, where I have spent a large
portion of my life. Very especially I want to thank Pedro Feduchi, with
whom I learnt how to teach. In this respect I also need to thank Álvaro
Soto, Javier Maroto, Silvia Canosa and Luis Díaz-Mauriño, for a terrific
time in the classroom. Iñaki Ábalos, Luis Fernández Galiano and Luis
Rojo were instrumental in encouraging me to write, for which I cannot
thank them enough. Thank you also to Alejandro Martín-Mate, and
Javier and Jacobo García-Germán for being such generous colleagues.
Finally, my special appreciation goes to Blanca García de la Fuente,
whose tireless administrative work made it possible for me to write this
dissertation in the distance.
Most importantly, I owe a debt of gratitude to my Dissertation Advi-

sor, Juan Herreros, for his intellectual generosity and sharpness, which
have strengthened this text tremendously, and which have made me
grow as an architect and a writer.
Some of the ideas in this text started to emerge at Harvard GSD, in the
studio taught by Adam Caruso and Peter St John, and in the theory
courses taught by K. Michael Hays, Antoine Picon, Rafael Moneo, Syl-
via Lavin, Jeff Kipnis and Irénée Scalbert, who has remained a friend
and a mentor through the years. Among the many friends I made
at the GSD, I must foreground Laura Martínez de Guereñu, whose
friendship and advice have benefitted me greatly, and who is a reader
for this dissertation.
In Cambridge too, I met Luis Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón, whose

office I joined for six years, in what I consider was a decisive part of
my education. From Luis and Emilio I learned how to be an architect,
the meaning of work ethic, and many more things about architecture
and life. I am deeply indebted to them for their trust and I will always
consider them my masters.
13
The bulk of this research and writing has been done at the Rice School
of Architecture, where I have found a supportive atmosphere and a
fantastic group of colleagues, who have helped me in many different
ways. Among them I want to thank Grant Alford, John J. Casbarian,
Scott Colman, Farès el-Dahdah, Dawn Finley, Stephen Fox, Reto Geiser,
Carlos Jímenez, Albert Pope, Troy Schaum, Sara k. Stevens, Mark
Wamble, and Ron Witte, just to name a few. Among these, I have to
thank Professors Christopher Hight and Lars Lerup especially, for their
thoughtful assessment of this text.
In this regard, I owe special gratitude to Dean Sarah Whiting, for her
continued and generous guidance, and more precisely for her insight-
ful and intensive editing of an early draft of this dissertation, which
was decisive in helping me understand and articulate the different
levels of discourse involved in my work.
My students at Rice were exposed to this project in different stages, and

their intelligent questions during our seminar meetings made me think
about the contemporary repercussions of my historic work. Also at Rice,
my Research Assistant, Jae Boggess, provided much needed proof-read-
ing and support with illustrations and has been a real asset all along.
A mention should be made to all the librarians and archivists that have
assisted me during research, especially Jet Prendeville at Rice Fondren
Library and Inés Zalduendo at the Loeb Library at Harvard.
Some of the protagonists of this text are still alive and have been very
generous with their time. Stephen Shore, Adam Caruso and Peter St
John have been extremely accessible and helpful. This is especially
true of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, whose hospitality and
warmth made a deep impression on me.
Finally, I would want to thank my brother Luis Vassallo for his great
talent and his effort in contributing to the graphic design and layout
for this volume. He is truly his brother’s keeper.
14
Abstract
Today we are faced with a series of economic, geopolitical and envi-
ronmental challenges that outline a deep transformation of the world
as we know it. Architecture is – it has always been – ingrained in all
of these problems. In our current condition of limited resources and
global inequalities there is a necessity to overcome the dichotomy be-
tween progress and tradition, between innovation and preservation –
an urgency to even redefine these terms altogether. The types of crises
that we are facing will not be solved with more technology and more
growth – a deep reevaluation of our systems of values and our sensi-
bilities are also needed. In this context, the humble contribution of this
text is to put forward the idea of an architectural realism, understood
as an attitude that is both progressive and attentive to what is already
in place, willing to open its eyes to the present and accept the real con-
ditions and problems around us.
In thinking about this prospect, it immediately becomes apparent

that even if realism lacks a clear definition in the field of architecture
today, there are numerous partial precedents for it, among them some
of the most notorious episodes in the recent history of architecture. In
crafting a tentative list of realist architects in the last century, another
realization takes place: many, not to say all of these architects, have had
a fixation with photography, either appropriating the work of contem-
porary photographers or taking photographs themselves as a way to
look out their windows and bring the reality of the built environment
into their practices. It seems then logical to think that architecture, as
a visual discipline, has looked to other visual disciplines in search for
its own take on the problem of realism – within this field, photography
specially resonates with architecture, since both are regarded simulta-
neously as utilitarian practices and belonging to the fine arts.
The idea then becomes to organize the research as a series of cases,

with the hope that the accumulation of diverse instances in which
architecture has approached photography in its realist drive will shed
some light on the larger ideas at stake. Therefore, each of the episodes
in this text is examined on its own terms, with a series of interconnec-
tions slowly emerging as our survey proceeds with a soft chronologic
order. Towards the end of the study, larger issues regain relevance as
the political repercussions of our inquiry become more pressing and
we start to question the contemporary implications and future poten-
tials of our discussion on realism.
15
Resumen
En el día de hoy nos enfrentamos a una serie de desafíos económicos,
geopolíticos y ambientales que apuntan hacia una transformación
profunda del mundo tal y como lo conocemos. La arquitectura está –
siempre lo ha estado – imbricada en todos estos problemas. En nuestra
actual condición de recursos limitados e injusticia global surge la
necesidad de superar la dicotomía entre progreso y tradición, entre
innovación y preservación – la urgencia de redefinir incluso cada
uno de estos términos. Los tipos de crisis que encaramos ahora no se
resolverán con más tecnología y más crecimiento – se necesita también
una profunda reevaluación de nuestros sistemas de valores e incluso
de nuestra sensibilidad. En este contexto, la humilde contribución de
esta tesis consiste en proponer la idea de un realismo en arquitectura,
entendido como una actitud progresista y atenta a lo que ya existe,
dispuesta a abrir los ojos al presente, a las condiciones y los problemas
reales que nos rodean.
Pensando en esta idea, resulta evidente que si bien el realismo carece

de una definición clara en el campo de la arquitectura hoy, cuenta sin
embargo con numerosos precedentes parciales, entre ellos algunos de los
más notorios episodios de la historia de la arquitectura reciente. Al in-
tentar confeccionar una lista provisional de arquitectos realistas en el úl-
timo siglo, otro hecho se nos presenta: muchos, por no decir todos estos
arquitectos, comparten una fijación por la fotografía, bien apropiándose
del trabajo de fotógrafos contemporáneos, bien tomando sus propias
imágenes como una forma de mirar fuera de sus estudios e incorporar
la realidad del medio construido a sus proyectos. Parece entonces lógico
pensar que la arquitectura, como disciplina visual, ha acudido a otra
disciplina visual en búsqueda de su propia respuesta al problema del re-
alismo – dentro de este campo la fotografía reverbera con la arquitectura
especialmente, ya que ambas son consideradas simultáneamente como
prácticas utilitarias y como parte de las bellas artes.
Parece entonces lógico el organizar la investigación como una serie de

casos, con la esperanza de que la acumulación de diversas instancias en
las que la arquitectura ha acudido a la fotografía en su búsqueda de un
realismo arrojará luz sobre las ideas más generales a debate. Por tanto,
cada uno de los episodios en este texto se examina en sus propios
términos, si bien una serie de interconexiones emergen a medida que
el estudio procede con un suave orden cronológico. Hacia el final del
texto cuestiones más grandes recobran protagonismo, a medida que
las repercusiones políticas de nuestro estudio se hacen más patentes
y comenzamos a interrogar las implicaciones contemporáneas y el
potencial futuro de nuestra discusión sobre el realismo.
17
Introduction:
Methodological Framework
and Other Disclaimers
The birth of photography in the first decades of the nineteenth century
paralleled the influx of rural populations to urban centers and the emer-
gence of the industrial city. Eventually, photography replaced painting as
the preferred mode of representation for the human landscape, coincid-
ing with this shift from a rural to an urban perception of the environ-
ment. Architects immediately detected the potential of the new medium
as a vehicle to promote their work, but also – because of its aura of
objectivity – as a source of images with which they could buttress their
arguments. Consequently, it is now almost impossible to dissociate some
of the most heated polemics of our profession from the photographs that
were used to support them, serving as true instruments of propaganda.
Because of this capacity to lend a certain materiality to ideas, pho-

tographs have been consistently used by architects to project their
obsessions in their search for a new architecture. At the beginning of
the twentieth century, European architects used images of American
industry and progress in order to forward their technologic utopias.
After the Second World War, the destruction facilitated by technolog-
ical development and totalitarian thought influenced many architects
as they turned towards images of the quotidian in search for a more
democratic architecture. Renouncing the possibility of a tabula rasa,
they approached the ways of life of the people as source material for
building a more participative and open society. Herein started a long
and fruitful exchange between photography and architecture around
the concept of realism, which has marked a considerable portion of the
production of both disciplines over recent decades.
In the study of this parallel development of the two disciplines, we

will sidestep considerations about architectural photography as such
– we will not discuss Lucien Hervé, Ezra Stoller or Jullius Shulman.
That is, we will not be concerned with how architects represent their
own work in publications, but rather with how they look at the world
outside their offices through the lens of photography. According to
this logic, we will signal out a series of moments in which certain
architects became obsessed with photography and incorporated it into
their research and practice, questioning in each case what is at stake in
the choice of subject matter and photographic reference. Admittedly,
there is a certain degree of subjectivity involved in the selection of the
specific instances to be studied in this text, just like there is subjectivity
involved in the act of isolating a fragment of reality through the frame
of the photographic camera. In the context of this dissertation such
subjectivity is embraced as a way to construct new meaning through
the curation of discrete pieces.
Therefore, the text will adopt a methodology analogous to that of the

cases being studied; isolating a series of fragments from a historic
19
continuum in the hope that when put together, such collection of frag-
ments will elicit an explanation of the larger themes and ideas behind
the recurrence of the specific fixation of architects with photography.
The text then adopts the structure of a loosely ordered case study: after
a short historic introduction on the shared history of photography and
architecture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we
will focus on a series of six episodes of special intensity of exchange
between photographers and architects. Within this larger structure,
the six individual cases are chronologically and geographically ordered
and grouped into couples, allowing a reading of the whole project as
comprising an introduction and three equivalent segments.
Accordingly, the first and second chapters focus on instances where ar-
chitects of the postwar period appropriated the work of photographers
in order to generate a new sensibility towards their environment. More
specifically, we will look at the work of Alison and Peter Smithson in
England and their concept of “as found” as inherited from Nigel Hen-
derson’s photographic expeditions, to subsequently examine Robert
Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s use of photography as influenced by
artists Edward Ruscha and Stephen Shore in America. In both cases we
will try to clarify what the motivations were that caused the archi-
tects to approach these photographers, how it is that the relationships
between them unfolded and what the transformative effect of these
experiences was in the work of the architects.
The second segment of the text is in turn devoted to bringing into

focus more extended instances in which photography and architec-
ture described parallel trajectories within a specific national context.
With this in mind, the third chapter attempts to outline a genealogy
of Italian neorealism in architecture, placing the emphasis on the
legacy of Giuseppe Pagano as a photographer and architect, as it was
advanced and gradually redefined by Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Aldo
Rossi, finally comparing the work of the latter with the late neorealism
of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. In parallel, the fourth chapter looks
at the German-speaking world and tries to outline a particular gene-
alogy for the conflicting themes of seriality and objectivity in German
architecture and photography. Within this larger arch, special attention
is paid to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher as representatives of a
century-long enquiry around the problem of typology, influencing the
project of architects like Oswald Matthias Ungers and Hans Kollhoff.
Closer to our time, the third and final segment of the text zooms into
more specific and collaborative projects between architects and pho-
tographers, resulting in crossover works of shared authorship. Thus,
the fifth chapter looks at the early work of Jacques Herzog and Pierre
de Meuron through their relationship with photographer Thomas Ruff,
outlining a chronology of their relationship leading up to the project
for the Library at the Technical University in Eberswalde. Similarly, the
sixth chapter looks at the work of the office of Adam Caruso and Peter
St John vis-à-vis their collaborations with artist Thomas Demand,
concluding with their collaborative entry for a public art competition
in Escher Wyss Platz, Zurich.
The sequential study of the cases in this text and the connections
between them will then allow us to assess how a body of knowledge
is built as architectural practices involved with photography become
increasingly explicit about their heritage with each generation. In
parallel, we will also examine how these practices become increasingly
20
invested in the use of the photographic image as a tool in their design
process, allowing for closer collaborations between photographers
and architects. As the lineages traced through this text become more
self-conscious and as photography gets increasingly instrumentalized
in architectural practices and vice versa, we will discuss the shift that
takes place when highly articulated transdisciplinary projects emerge,
beginning to take on their own life and significance detached from the
ethical, social or political drives that initially propelled them. Finally,
the consideration of this arch of development will enable us to draft
a general conclusion on the political significance and the potential of
these experiences in our current cultural condition.
It seems evident after going through the selection of cases to be studied

that there are many other instances that could and probably should be
included in this text, among them several Spanish experiences, out of
which we could mention the collaboration between the photographer
Joaquín de Palacio (a.k.a. Kindel) and the architect José Luis Fernán-
dez del Amo during the Spanish postwar. The reason why this case
has not been featured is because of a certain thematic overlap with the
work covered in the Italian chapter of the text. Another suitable case
would be the intense collaboration between photographer Manolo
Laguillo and architect Josep Lluís Mateo in the pages of Quaderns
magazine during the late 1980s. This collaboration is probably the most
notable absence in this dissertation, since it represents the culmina-
tion of a period during which European photography and urbanism
became increasingly intertwined, a process that is also palpable in the
coetaneous work of photographer Gabriele Basilico or in the collective
photographic production of the French d.a.t.a.r., during a similar
timeframe. Perhaps a parallel text should be produced bringing togeth-
er these European cases with previous American experiences revolving
around photography and planning, such as the well-known publica-
tions by Kevin Lynch.1 While the conscious choice here has been to fo-
cus on cases in which specific architecture projects could be discussed,
the possibility to develop a parallel research focusing on a larger scale
remains an attractive prospect for the future.
Similarly to the selection of the photographic and architectural cases

for this text, the choice of secondary critical references also becomes
a critical operation. Given the monographic/panoramic structure of
this text and the fact that two distinct disciplines are surveyed across
an extended period of time, using photography as the main fulcrum to
discuss the architectural authors and projects becomes the only effec-
tive way to cover the necessary ground and still produce new commen-
tary without becoming encyclopedic. Indeed, the architectural works
and authors discussed here are approached primarily through their
specific relationship and involvement with photography, as opposed to
through the discussion of critical texts on their work or through their
historic contextualization. While an effort has been made to include
the most important references and produce a self-explanatory text,
this strategy inevitably implies a series of absences from the narration
that in some cases may become irritant for the reader. This renounce is
probably most notable in the reluctance to engage in long theoretical
discussions, or to address the works in the chapters in relationship to
1. The best known of these texts is Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, (Cambridge;
Mass.: MIT Press, 1960).
21
current discourses on the “vernacular”, the “ordinary”, the “everyday”,
or the “generic.” Thus, the body of the dissertation employs the concept
of “realism” in a way that is elastic and covers many of these concepts,
while the conclusions of the text attempt to more precisely define and
situate these terms in relation to each other.
Interestingly enough, despite the many different authors and voices

involved in the text, it can be said that there are not many critical texts
on the specific theme of this dissertation, namely the deeper relation-
ship between photography and architecture. Among these rare texts,
we could signal the work of Martin Steinmann, who during his tenure
as editor of the magazine Archithese, made a conscious effort to situate
the use of images by architects within a larger disciplinary perspective.2
In our own time, theorist Philip Ursprung has focused on producing
a comprehensive explanation for architects’ contemporary obsession
with images.3 In his writings, Ursprung has successfully managed to
theorize a general framework for the relationship of architecture with
the image, situating it within the larger context of a contemporary em-
phasis on vision, and alluding among others to the writings of Henri
Bergson, Jean Paul-Sartre and Roland Barthes.4 This dissertation does
not attempt to expand or challenge such theoretical framework, but
rather tries to advance it by becoming more specific. While Ursprung’s
work covers the multiple ways and channels through which the re-
lationships between image and architecture unfold, this text seeks to
focus on a very particular part of this spectrum in an attempt to clarify
what the relationship is if any, between the idea of realism in architec-
ture,5 and the use of the photographic image made by architects.
2. A
ccording to Steinman, the core of the discipline of architecture gradually as-
similates new themes and technologies following its own logic, with the use of
photography and images becoming just another episode in this recurring process.
Steinmann’s continued effort to trace a lineage for architectural realism from
pre-modern sources to our day can be best appreciated in his compilation of arti-
cles, Martin Steinmann, Forme forte: Ecrits 1972 – 2002 (Basel; Boston; Berlin:
Birkhäuser, 2003).
3. S
ee Ilka Ruby, Andreas Ruby, and Philip Ursprung, Images: A picture book of archi-
tecture (Munich; New York: Prestel, 2004). Ursprung has also curated monograph-
ic volumes for the architecture offices of Herzog & de Meuron and Caruso St John
in which he touches on their relationships with Thomas Ruff and Thomas Demand
respectively. See Philip Ursprung, Caruso St John: Almost Everything. (Barcelona:
Ediciones Polígrafa; New York: D.A.P., 2008). And Philip Ursprung, Herzog & de
Meuron: Natural History (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Baden, Swit-
zerland: Lars Müller, 2002).
4. P
hilip Ursprung, “Built Images: Performing the City”, in Images: A picture book of
architecture, 4-11.
5. U
rsprung is also responsible for putting forward the question of what an architec-
tural realism would entail. See Philip Ursprung, “The Fragile Surface of Everyday
Life, or, What happened to realism?” in 2G nº 34 (2005): 84-91.
22
Documentary Photography
and Architecture, or the Problem
Chapter 0 of Truth and Beauty
01. I ntroduction: An Alternative History
of Documentary Photography
02. 1 840-1880: The Architect as a Client:

Architectural Conventions and
Photographic Vision
03. 1 880-1900: The Urban Planner

as a Patron: Seriality and Nostalgia
in Urban Photography
04. 1 900-1930: The First Documentalist:

Eugène Atget’s Unique Archival Project
05. 1 930-1940: The Canonic Documentary

Form: Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans
06. C
onclusions: What Is It That Architects
See in Documentary Photography?
25
Figure 1: Walker Evans,
Negro Church, South Carolina, 1936.
01. Introduction: An Alternative History
of Documentary Photography
While architects were involved in the technical development of photo-
graphic systems and patents from the beginning – one of the fathers of
its invention, Louis Daguerre, was trained as an architect – it is primar-
ily through their role as clients that designers would come to influence
and shape photography during its first years of existence. Architects,
tending to be visual people by nature, immediately fell prey to the al-
lure of photography. In fact, the first professional photographic houses
that emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century, when
the purchase of photographs became popular, had architects and archi-
tectural firms as their prime clients. Through this patronage, architects
were able to project their distinct way of looking at the world – and
their conventions on how to represent cities and buildings – onto the
new medium of photography.
In addition to their role as individual clients, architects, in their

capacity as urban planners and public servants, would also shape
Figure 2: Charles Marville, Rue d’Ecosse, photography through large public commissions. This became espe-
Paris, ca. 1865.
cially evident with the increased speed of urban change in industrial
cities near the end of the nineteenth century when photographers were
commissioned to record the areas of destruction and subsequent urban
renewal. These extensive and systematic photographic commissions,
such as those carried out by Charles Marville in Paris (Figure 2), Georg
Koppmann in Hamburg and Thomas Annan in Glasgow, were intend-
ed to serve as demonstrations of the objective improvements carried
out by city officials. Interestingly, the photographs of derelict and im-
poverished quarters awaiting demolition became fixed in the popular
mind and on many occasions actually had an unanticipated effect on
public opinion, helping to galvanize a feeling of nostalgia that swept
the European continent around the turn of the century.
Precisely during this period, Paris was one such industrial metropolis
immersed in an ongoing process of renewal. In this setting, Eugène
Atget (Figure 3), an anonymous commercial photographer who worked
largely for architects and painters, decided to adopt and transform the
institutional project of urban documentation into a personal quest and
Figure 3: Eugene Atget,
Rue St. Rustique, March 1922.
a life-long self-initiated project: to record the endangered environment
of the old streets of Paris through the creation of an archive of catego-
rized series of photographs. This shift in agency and scope, in addition
to his influence on a new generation of photographers in America – in
particular Berenice Abbott (Figure 4) and Walker Evans – situate Atget
at the center of the emergence of documentary photography as a genre.
In fact, both Abbott and Evans departed from a shared initial interest
in Atget and parallel formative experiences with architectural pho-
tography in order to construct their own archival projects during the
Great Depression in America. Through close examination of these
works and their subsequent acceptance within the market and art
institutions, we will conclude our brief overview of how documentary
photography gradually emerged as a differentiated genre to reach a
canonical form, and how architecture was a consistent force all along
this development. The analysis of this process will allow us to assign a
more specific value to what it is that documentary photography means
for architects, enabling us to distill a tentative set of conclusions and
Figure 4: Berenice Abbott,
establish a basic framework to confront the different cases that consti-
Allen Street, nos. 55-57, 1937. tute the core of this text.
27
02. 1840-1880: The Architect as a Client:
Architectural Conventions
and Photographic Vision
Architects were among the first professionals to include photogra-
phy as one of their tools for representation, focusing initially on the
documentation of monuments, both in exotic locations and in their
own countries.1 Very early on, the use of photography in the resto-
ration of buildings was consistently advocated by Viollet le Duc in his
Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française and used extensively
in his own work. Other French architects who pioneered the use of
the Daguerrotype in restoration projects were Félix Duban and Jean
Baptiste Lassus.2
In England, John Ruskin, who would later become one of the most ar-
dent opponents of the use of photography, was actually one of the very
first architects to own a Daguerreotype machine. Other prominent
architects who used photography in preservation projects during this
period include Sir George Gilbert Scott for the restoration of Chich-
ester Cathedral and George Austin in the Canterbury Cathedral.3 The
capacity of the Daguerreotype to fix every single detail of a building
on a large plate was not only tremendously useful in practical terms; it
also resonated with a period-specific understanding of architecture as
the articulation of ornament in a surface.
Unlike in England, where photography was a matter of upper-middle

class aficionados, in France, state patronage played a major role in the
development of architectural photography by sponsoring large projects
aimed at recording its historic heritage. In 1851 the French Commis-
sion des Monuments Historiques, formed by historians and architects
including Félix Duban, decided to undertake an ambitious documen-
tation of the architecture of ancient France.4 To carry out the project,
known as Mission Héliographique, five photographers – Hippolite
Bayard, Henri Le Secq, Auguste Mestral, Gustave Le Grey and Édouard
Baldus – were sent to the different regions of the country in order to
document its monuments with the intent to compile a body of precise
information for their preservation. Upon the return of the photog-
raphers to Paris, the commissioners of the Mission were taken aback
when they realized that each photographer had a completely different
technique and approach to the subject matter, therefore rendering the
effort to create a homogeneous body of work utterly useless.5
Despite the fact that the Mission Héliographique was considered a

failure and subsequently discontinued, it made a decisive contribution
as it pointed towards the need for a photographic language suited to
the views of architects and architecture historians while in the process
shattering the previously held belief that photography was a merely
1. F or a comprehensive account of early use of photography by architects see Robert

Ellwall, Building with Light: The International History of Architectural Photography
(New York; London: Merrell; In association with The Royal Institute of British Archi-
tects, 2004), 54-55.
2. D
uban commissioned Hippolite Bayard to photograph the Chateau de Blois in
1943, in one of the first known uses of photography for a restoration project. See
Barry Bergdoll, “A Matter of Time: Architects and Photographers in Second Empire
France” in The photographs of Édouard Baldus, ed. Malcolm Daniel (New York: Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art; Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1994), 103.
28
Figure 5: Photograph of Troyes Cathedral by Henri Le Secq Figure 6: Photograph of the Roman Arch at Orange by Eduard Baldus
for the Mission Héliographique, 1851. for the Mission Héliographique, 1851.
scientific process devoid of human agency. It becomes especially sig-

nificant then to note the different responses to the work of the photog-
raphers involved in the project, mainly in the case of Le Secq (Figure
5) and Baldus (Figure 6), who came to be identified with two opposite
positions. While Le Secq’s images were questioned for their strong
contrasts, atmospheric effects and excessive integration of the monu-
ments in the building fabric around them, Baldus’s photographs were
appreciated as crisp and bare renditions of discrete buildings.6 This is
especially relevant since the more pictorial bias of Le Secq was rejected
in favor of what was considered a more architectural vision on the side
of Baldus, establishing an identification between architectural ways of
seeing and representing and an idea of realism. The importance of this
moment cannot be overstated since it situates the moment of realiza-
tion of the inherent subjectivity of photography with the start of a sus-
tained effort to construct a visual language of impersonality in order to
restore photography from its original sin of subjectivity and back to an
illusion of scientific objectivity. The history of this process, which we
3. Robert Ellwall, Building with Light, 16.

4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Barry Bergdoll, “A Matter of Time,” 106.
29
identify with the gradual formation of documentary photography, was
influenced all along by architects, not the least in the paradigmatic case
of Édouard Baldus.
Indeed, during the course of the Mission, the young Baldus had been
able to distill a set of techniques that closely adhered to the specific
ways in which architects of the time expected to visualize these mon-
uments in terms of both their aesthetic preferences and their strong
views regarding the science of history.7 In Baldus’ surviving plates from
this project, the monuments appear as free-standing structures, eman-
cipated from their surroundings. This was achieved by intentional
framing and, when necessary, by extensive manipulation involving the
painting, cutting and pasting of the negatives.8 In Baldus’ photographs,
the monuments dominate the frame from the center. His choice of
viewpoint was driven by a search for minimum distortion of perspec-
tive lines and maximum legibility of profile (Figure 7). With this in
mind, he favored elevated vantage points that allowed him to minimize
Figure 7: Edouard Baldus,
Eglise St. Augustine, Paris, ca. 1850.
optical deformation and frontal views similar to architectural eleva-
tions. In addition to this, his preference for even light distribution was
geared towards achieving maximum detail and legibility of form, in
terms of both surface and profile, for which he customarily removed
the skies during the processing of the negatives.
That he was successful in devising a photographic language for the

depiction of architecture became apparent when in 1855 he was awarded
the commission to document the construction of the New Louvre, the
most important project undertaken in Paris during the Second Empire.9
Over the course of nearly a decade, Baldus worked closely with the
architect Hector Lefuel in order to document the construction of the
complex (Figure 8). The thousands of prints he produced during that
period served two purposes: while a few selected images were used as
propaganda of the new construction, the bulk of the production be-
came an additional set of working documents for Lefuel and were kept
with his architectural drawings and models. The main role of Baldus’
photographs was to help discuss and communicate with the different
teams, more specifically in organizing and following the thousands of
plaster models that were being produced at different scales to serve as
models for the army of sculptors producing the ornament directly on
the facades. A decade of continuous work at the construction site gave
Baldus a unique insight into the work process of the architect, and the
scale of the Louvre commission allowed him certain working condi-
tions that had been previously unavailable for him. For this well-funded
commission, he was able to work with glass negatives as opposed to the
paper negatives he had used before, and he also counted on the help of
twelve assistants and an on-site darkroom to develop the plates. This
luxury, in addition to the opportunity to work on the same subject for
a long period of time, accounted for the pristine quality of the images
that were produced, in which an exact photographic language based on
frontality and luminosity was distilled and perfected.
It was during the construction of the New Louvre in the mid 1850s that
a polemic emerged in the field of photography between the advocates
of precision, detail and orthogonal views – mainly aimed at profes-
sional clients such as architects or historians – and those who favored a
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 107.
9. Ibid., 111
30
Figure 8: Photographs by Édouard Baldus
documenting the construction of the
New Louvre ca. 1857.
31
Figure 9: Photograph by Edouard Baldus depicting Figure 10: Photograph by Bisson Frères depicting
the Pavillon Richelieu at the Louvre in 1857. the Pavillon Richelieu at the Louvre in 1858.
picturesque approach based on chiaroscuro and an expressive use of per-

spective – which were aimed at the general public.10 The first trend was
dominant in France with Édouard Baldus (Figure 9) leading the way and
firms like Bisson Frères (Figure 10) quickly following on his steps,11 while
the second was advocated mainly in England with figures like Francis
Bedford (Figure 11).12 Interestingly, during the course of this polemic,
British architects were influential by campaigning in favor of adopting
the French approach to photography as seen in the work of Bisson Frères
or Édouard Baldus. The Architectural Photographic Association, found-
ed in London in 1857, was instrumental in their dissemination of French
photography through exhibitions as well as through their subscription
system.13 Despite its short-lived existence, the Association was decisive in
rallying for a home grown strain of photographic objectivity à la Baldus,
which was soon to be fulfilled by the emergence of local practices such
as Bedford Lemere & Co. (Figure 12), who immediately became the
10. R
obert Ellwall, Building with Light, 18.
11. Baldus’ photographs of the New Louvre were used for institutional purposes. The
firm of Bissons Frères was quick to emulate Baldus’ technique and assemble an
album with their own photographs of the building for sale to the general public.
See Malcolm Daniel, “Édouard Baldus, Artiste Photographe” in The photographs
Figure 11: Francis Bedford, of Édouard Baldus, ed. Malcolm Daniel (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art;
Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire, 1859. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1994), 64.
32
Figure 12: Bedford Lemere & Co.,
Midland Gand Hotel, 1881.
photographers of choice for architects and architectural publications as

well as industrialists, bankers and other architectural patrons.14
During the following decades, the consumption of architectural pho-

tography by professionals of architecture, art and art history, and their
demands for a specific expertise in the photographing of monuments
and modern buildings, led to the definitive success and popularization
of the style and techniques perfected by Baldus, among others. Then
emerged a number of specialized professional firms and the gradual
definition of an international standard for portraying buildings. A
good example of this could be the similarities in framing, perspective
12. T his dilemma seemed to reenact an opposition between French positivism as ex-
emplified in the very precise and fine rendering delivered by the metal sheets of the
French Daguerreotype and English romanticism embodied in the stronger grain and
contrast found in William Talbot’s salt prints derived from his Calotype process.
13. F or a more detailed account of this episode see Robert Ellwall, Building with
Light, 18-19.
14. N
icholas Cooper, The photography of Bedford Lemere & Co (Swindon [Eng.]:
English Heritage, 2011).
33
and lighting found in the work of Bisson Frères, Bedford Lemere & Co.
and Fratelli Alinari (Figure 13) in Florence, who became some of the
main suppliers of images for architects, architecture students, interior
decorators and craftsmen at large.15
Once photography adopted the visual conventions preferred by

architects, it was quickly incorporated into the work routine of most
architecture schools and offices, which during the late nineteenth cen-
tury started to hold photographic albums of architectural images for
use by their students and draftsmen (Figure 14).16 This custom reached
its maximum popularity in America, where access to the monuments
of antiquity was far more difficult than in Europe. One of the most
outstanding American collections was assembled by Henry Hobson
Richardson (Figure 15), who organized his photographs of French,
Spanish, English and Italian architecture either topographically or by
building feature in order to make the information more rapidly avail-
able to the people in his office.17 Other famous architects who deployed
Figure 13: Fratelli Alinari, Il Portico degli Uffizi such direct use of photography were Russell Sturgis, with a collection
e il Palazzo Vecchio, ca. 1860. of over 15,000 images, and McKim Mead & White (Figure 16), who or-
ganized their photographic archive of Greek, Roman and Renaissance
Architecture in over 100 bound volumes that were used extensively in
their fashioning of a Classical Revival style.18
Figure 14: Examples of architectural details

at Southwell Minster photographed
by Bedford Lemere, ca. 1865.
15. B
ecause of the constant flow of grand tourists and other affluent travelers Italian
cities were among the first to count with well established photographic establish-
ments. Among them Fratelli Allinari were the best known and respected.
16. R
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
34
Figure 15: Photograph of Trinity Church
in Boston, MA by Wayne Andrews, from
the collection of Henry Hobson Richardson.
Figure 16: Photograph of Rhode Island State

House by Ralph Lieberman from the archive of
McKim, Mead and White.
35
03. 1880-1900: The Urban Planner as a Patron:
Seriality and Nostalgia in Urban Photography
Another way in which architecture influenced the new medium of
photography was through large commissions by municipal agencies.
In the late nineteenth century, the tremendous rate of urban renewal
taking place in the industrial cities of Europe led to the photographic
recording of the buildings and areas being demolished. The unprec-
edented migration of population from the countryside to the cities
where industries had settled resulted in overpopulation and unsanitary
living conditions in the quarters of the working class, and the demoli-
tion of large sections of the city was viewed among city officials as the
only solution to this problem, in many cases. In order to counter the
growing discomfort that such extreme measures ignited in the public
opinion, photographers were called upon to register the misery and
lack of hygiene – both physical and moral – that reigned in these quar-
ters in order to build a case for urban sanitation.
A quintessential example of such use of photography is the documen-

tation of prefect Baron von Haussmann’s radical program for modern-
izing Paris undertaken by photographer Charles Marville.19 Haussman,
working on behalf of Napoleon III since 1853, sought to modernize the
city by inserting a set of networks of infrastructure ranging from rail
lines and stations to ample boulevards suited for a new traffic intensity,
as well as new sewer and water systems. This muscular effort necessar-
ily entailed the destruction of wide areas of the old city, as well as the
forced relocation of their inhabitants, who belonged in most cases to
the less favored classes. As the response to this social injustice and his-
toric erasure began to be articulated, Baron Haussman – soon labeled
by his opposition as the artiste démolisseur – realized that a parallel
campaign was necessary to counter this criticism.20 Under his rule,
several bureaucratic agencies began to commission photographers to
record the positive effects of the transformations being undertaken.
The most remarkable of those was the Service des Travaux Historiques,
which was entrusted with the documentation and publication of every-
thing related to Parisian history and its monuments, and was meant to
Figure 17: The streets of Paris in the 1860s photo-
graphed by Charles Marville for the Service des
act as a foil to the critics of Baron Haussman.
Travaux Historiques.
Marville started to work for several of these agencies in the late 1850s,
and his most extensive commission arrived sometime around 1860
in the form of an extensive urban survey for the Service des Travaux
Historiques (Figure 17). The commission comprised a series of more
than four hundred photographs systematically depicting the streets
to be demolished by Haussmann, each of them carefully captioned to
indicate the exact position and direction in which the photograph had
been taken. He became the official photographer of the city of Paris in
1862, and continued his study by systematically photographing each
street in the old quarters twice, from opposing perspectives, before and
after their demolition and reconstruction.21
19. P
eter Barberie, “Charles Marville’s Seriality,” Record of The Art Museum, Prince-
ton University (2008): 30-45.
20. Ibid., 34.
21. Ibid., 37.
36
Figure 18: Photographs of Hamburg
by Georg Koppman, 1872.
The photographs taken by Marville are thus not only propaganda,

but most importantly are tools for planners and architects. Not only
are they captioned topographically in order to be consulted in as-
sociation with maps – almost a proto Google Street View – but the
images themselves are captured in a way that speaks to their utilitarian
character. They are framed in a neutral and easy way, trying to maxi-
mize the amount of information in the frame while renouncing formal
or geometric compositions.22 This can be appreciated in the way that
different elements get cropped by the photographic frame in uninten-
tional ways, speaking to the photographer’s intention to just record as
broad as possible a segment of reality. Additionally, the fact that the
exact same system was used for photographing both the old streets and
the new avenues is very telling of how Marville saw his photographs as
mere records to be used by others – as vehicles for information.
Much like for Baldus, Marville’s years of experience working for urban
planners were fundamental in creating a photographic language of
clarity and objectivity. While Baldus defined the ultimate way to por-
tray the architectural object as a discrete entity according to the French
concept of dégagement,23 Marville, with his urban landscapes, created
a systematic way to replicate the all-encompassing quality and atmo-
sphere of an urban environment.
Marville’s work may be the best known and most emblematic urban
survey of the late nineteenth century, but similar photographic ef-
forts were undertaken in different European cities during that period.
Among these, the most thorough and extensive in its output was the
22. Ibid.
23. T his was enunciated by Voltaire in the mid eighteenth century when he suggest-
ed that Paris should demolish the fabric of ordinary structures surrounding its
monuments in order to enhance its public image. Barry Bergdoll, “A Matter of
Time,” 108.
37
Figure 19: Closes of Glasgow photographed
by Thomas Annan, ca. 1868.
photographic campaign undertaken by Georg Koppmann & Co. (Fig-

ure 18), who in 1872 was commissioned by the building authorities of
Hamburg’s Municipal Housing Committee to portray both the dilapi-
dated quarters of the city and their replacements, such as the new port
that was inaugurated in 1888.24 Over the course of a decade Koppmann
and his company produced more than 10,000 photographs that remain
until today the most comprehensive record of Hamburg prior to the
industrialization of its water frontage.
Though much more reduced in quantity, Thomas Annan’s depiction of

the old wynds, closes and tenements of Glasgow awaiting demolition
resulted in equally fascinating examples of photographic work (Fig-
ure 19).25 By the time Annan received the commission in 1868 he was
already trained in the photography of architecture and concerned as
24. R
25. F or a full account of this commission see Thomas Annan, Photographs of the
Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, 1868/1877: With a supplement of 15 related
views. (New York: Dover Publications, 1977).
38
Figure 20: Photographs by the Society for Photo-
graphing Relics of old London, ca, 1880.
a citizen about the rapid transformations taking place in Glasgow and

the erasure of the old city. Actually, as he worked on his urban survey
he was also working on two volumes dealing with preservation issues,
namely The Old Country Houses of the Old Glasgow Gentry (1870) and
Memorials of the Old College of Glasgow (1871). Annan’s sensibility
towards the architecture of the slums – which were actually part of a
medieval development related to the university – subverted the orig-
inal bureaucratic intent of the commission, turning them into sought
after images by those citizens opposing the demolition of the area.26
The feeling of nostalgia that pervades these photographic projects of

the late nineteenth century goes one step further in the series of pho-
tographs taken by the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London
(SPROL) founded in 1875.27 The Society, active until 1886, was formed
by a group of friends to record one of London’s oldest inns (The Ox-
ford Arms) before it was torn down and then continued to photograph
other endangered anonymous architectures within the urban fabric of
London (Figure 20).28 The aim of the Society was to put forward the
significance of these built structures from different periods of the past,
regardless of their architectural quality, as a testament to a disappear-
ing way of life. Several similar associations appeared in the following
years throughout the United Kingdom and other countries in Europe,
displaying not just a certain cultural pessimism, but also the first
symptoms of a distrust towards modernization’s capacity to provide a
brand new world that would be unarguably better than the old one.
26. A
nita Ventura Mozley, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” in Thomas Annan,
Photographs of the Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow,vi.
27. Robert Ellwall, Building with Light, 79.
28. T he photographs were at first taken by A & J Bool and from 1877 by Henry and
T.J. Dixon. Both couples of photographers were actually considered amateurs in
the photographic circles of the time. For a full account of their careers see “The
Photographic Careers of A. & J. Bool and Henry Dixon and Son.” Library Chroni-
cle no. 15 (March 1981): 41-47.
39
04. 1900-1930: The First Documentalist: Eugène
Atget’s Unique Archival Project
The slow process through which the scientific documentation of urban
renewal turned into a nostalgic portrayal of a disappearing way of life
found a turning point in the work of Parisian photographer Eugène At-
get.29 Indeed, Atget lived an eventful life before his forays into photog-
raphy: as an orphan living in a seaport, he soon enrolled as a merchant
sailor, an occupation that he would abandon in his twenties, when after
lengthy travels across the world he returned to France to become an
actor. Despite his efforts to succeed in theater, Atget never made it be-
yond support roles in dramas for third tier companies, working mostly
in the periphery of Paris and in the provinces. As he approached his
forties, the roles he was offered became scarcer, so he found it neces-
sity to reinvent himself. After failed attempts at becoming a painter he
finally decided to take up photography, which he began to do upon
relocating to Paris around 1890.
During his early years as a photographer, Atget made a living exclu-

sively by selling his photographs door to door to a clientele of painters,
architects, set designers, decorators and the Amateurs of Old Paris.
His images consisted primarily of architecture – monuments and
emblematic views of the historic city – but also included myriad other
themes including street scenes, shop windows, architectural details,
trees and people (Figure 21). Each of these heterogeneous categories
was dealt with consistently as a series, which was in turn organized
into an annotated volume. A collection of such volumes was patiently
carried across Paris by Atget when selling his pictures. This formative
experience marked Atget’s approach to photography, as it determined
that his images were conceived as documents depicting fragments of
reality that were found and isolated by the keen eye of the photogra-
pher but destined to be elaborated and elevated to the category of art
by others. While his reputation as a photographer soon grew and his
pictures began to be purchased by several cultural institutions, includ-
Figure 21: Streets of Paris photographed
ing museums, he continued to deny his status as an artist, keeping until
by Eugene Atget, 1908. the last days of his life a sign on the door of his apartment-studio that
read documents pour artistes.
More specifically, during the years leading up to 1920, Atget managed

to secure substantial acquisitions of his estate from several institutions,
including the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque Historique de la
Ville de Paris, the inheritors of the Service des Travaux Historiques for
which Marville had worked. As he gradually secured economic indepen-
dence, his work as a photographer became more driven by the system-
atic employment of the series, which in turn became increasingly tuned
to his personal interests and obsessions. Some of the most daring and
shocking examples were his series of interior views of Parisian apart-
ments (Figure 22), portraits of prostitutes and tree trunks (Figure 23).
29. U
nless otherwise noted biographic data regarding Atget are taken from Eugène
Atget, Berenice Abbott, and Clark Worswick, Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget. (San-
ta Fe, NM: Arena Editions, 2002).
40
Figure 22: Interiors of Parisian apartments pho-
tographed by Eugene Atget, 1909-1910.
Although Atget’s photography can in many ways be considered a con-

tinuation of Marville’s urban work – especially in those series devoted
to the depiction of streetscapes – it is also necessary to point out that
Atget greatly expanded Marville’s range of motifs and techniques, get-
ting closer on some occasions to the clarity and isolation of the subject
achieved by Baldus – such as in his depiction of architectural and orna-
mental elements in public parks – and even inventing new subgenres
altogether, as in his haunting images of empty apartment interiors,
which have influenced generations of photographers to our day.
In addition to Atget’s capacity to diversify and differentiate his work in

each of his series, there is an even more substantial divergence between
Atget and Marville. While Marville – like Koppmann – can be regard-
ed as an agent of bureaucratic power enforcing urban transformations
from above, Atget was just a citizen who decided on his own account
Figure 23: Photograph of a tree to record his surroundings. In fact, the disappearing world document-
by Eugene Atget, 1910-1926. ed by Atget was his own environment, the one he shared with sailors,
actors, painters and prostitutes. Additionally, while Atget’s highly
constructed system of samples and series reconstituted the objective
impression of a world that is now gone, the subjectivity and lack of
authorial explanation in his choice of motifs – trees instead of flowers,
or prostitutes instead of couturiers – speaks to us about the transition
between an utilitarian conception of photography and its emancipation
as a new category within the realm of art.
41
05. 1930-1940: The Canonic Documentary Form:
Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans
As much as we can say today that Atget was pivotal in transforming
a bureaucratic process for the acquisition and organization of infor-
mation into an artistic project, it is also true that we owe this reading
of his oeuvre to a later generation of photographers who saw in his
work a powerful conceptual apparatus by which to confront the world
with a camera. While Atget always refused to call himself an artist, his
reputation as such was established by a group of young foreign admir-
ers including Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, who not only purchased
his photographs, but also organized exhibitions and books about his
work.30 This is especially true in the case of the American photogra-
pher Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) who, in the long process of studying,
curating and interpreting the work of the French photographer, ended
up creating an alter ego for her own career.31
Abbott (Figure 24) had come into contact with Atget in 1925 while
working as an assistant in Man Ray’s portrait studio in Paris. Impressed
by the stern Atget, and the power of his photographic vision, Abbott
purchased some of his prints and convinced him to sit for a portrait
Figure 24: Berenice Abbott, Charles Lane, 1938. in July 1927, just a few days before his death. Abbott then bought as
much original material from the Atget archive as she could and took it
to promote his work in the US, subsequently publishing the first book
on his work: Atget, Photographe de Paris, in 1930. It was precisely while
selecting and developing the images for this book in the context of the
rapidly changing city of New York that Abbott came to the realization
that she could translate Atget’s Parisian archival project to New York
City, designing an ambitious analogue project by the name of Changing
New York.32 During the following years Abbott unsuccessfully tried
to get funding for her project from institutions like the Museum of
the City of New York and the Guggenheim Foundation.33 During this
period she sustained herself by teaching at the New School of Social
Research and through a series of commissions involving architectural
photography. In the summer of 1934 she travelled with historian Henry
Russell Hitchcock to take photographs for an exhibition he was curat-
ing for Wesleyan University with the title American Cities before the
Civil War: The Urban Vernacular of the ‘40s ‘50s and ‘60s.34 While she
continued to collaborate with Russell Hitchcock, this first commission
on vernacular architecture proved to be pivotal in enabling Abbott to
define her own photographic approach to the fabric of the city.35
Her photographs for the 1934 exhibition were primarily composed

around groups of four or five buildings defining a street front, pho-
tographed in an oblique angle foregrounding the correspondence of
Figure 25: Berenice Abbott, photographs
the vertical plane of the street facade and the horizontal surface of the
of Charleston for the 1934 exhibit with street, thereby creating a theatrical effect that frames the few people
Henry Russell Hitchcock.
30. F or many years Berenice Abbott’s book on Atget was the only published refer-
ence on the French photographer. Berenice Abbott, Atget: Photographe de Paris
(Paris: Jonquières, 1930).
31. F or an extensive account of Abbott’s life-long involvement with the work of Atget
see Clark Worswick, “Abbott and Atget,” in Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, 13-47.
32. F or a detailed account of Abbott’s New York project see Olivier Lugon, El
estilo documental: de August Sander a Walker Evans, 1920-1945 (Salamanca:
Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2010), 93-97, and Terri Weissman, The
Realisms of Berenice Abbott: Documentary photography and political action
(Berkeley: University of California Press; Washington, D.C.: Phillips Collection,
2011), 121-171.
42
Figure 26: Berenice Abbott, Images from Chang-
ing New York, 1935. People, buildings
and events conform an urban environment. in the photograph in an urban stage (Figure 25). As with Atget, the
framing of the picture is precise in its editing of reality but still feels
easy and uncomplicated, as if there was no other possible way to pho-
tograph the subject. In these images we witness a synthesis of photo-
graphic dégagement and a certain neutrality of framing derived from
a concern for information rather than composition. Unlike Baldus or
Marville, Abbott was not singling out specific buildings, nor diving
into the all-encompassing urban environment, but rather depicting an
intermediate scale in which she could construct scenes through the
careful editing of fragments of the city.
This formative experience in the photography of an architectural

vernacular would prove to be decisive when Abbott was finally hired
by the Federal Art Project in 1935 to implement Changing New York. By
this time, she had managed to define her own archival project and to
articulate her choice of motifs according to three themes: the diversi-
ty of the inhabitants of the city, the physical presence of the places in
which they live and work and the energy embodied in the activities
they perform.36 For Abbott, the city was an environment formed by the
interaction of these three elements: the people, the buildings and the
events (Figure 26). The heavily political ambition behind her work was
to enable citizens to realize their capacity to change their surroundings
33. See Olivier Lugon, El estilo documental, 89-90.

34. T he result of this collaboration can be seen in a re-creation of the original
exhibition and catalogue. See Janine A. Mileaf, and Carla Yanni. Constructing
Modernism: Berenice Abbott and Henry-Russell Hitchcock: a recreation of the
1934 exhibition, the Urban vernacular of the thirties, forties, and fifties: American
cities before the Civil War: Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown,
Connecticut, October 28-December 10, 1993 (Middletown: The Center, 1993).
35. S
he would also take most of the photographs for his 1936 exhibition The Architec-
ture of H.H. Richardson and his Times. See Hitchcock, Henry Russell. The architec-
ture of H. H. Richardson and his times, (Hamden, Conn., Archon Books, 1961).
36. F or a full account of the scope of the Changing New York project see Olivier
Lugon, El estilo documental, 89.
43
Figure 27: Victorian houses photographed
by Walker Evans, 1931.
and take control of the formation of cities, as opposed to the industrial

capitalist forces that had shaped American cities until then.37
Abbott’s growing political involvement and the influence of her part-

ner, the writer Elizabeth McCausland whom she met in 1935, even-
tually gave way to a more humanistic and moralistic approach in her
work with an increasing importance of captions, which distanced her
work in the years after her Changing New York project from the visual
purity of her early photographic experiments. Interestingly, it was
precisely this shift towards the political, and away from the disinter-
ested and spare photographic language of Atget, that explains why
despite Abbott’s best efforts to present herself as the counterpart of the
French master, it was not her but Walker Evans who, with time, would
be regarded as the American continuator of Atget and his European
tradition of photographic objectivity.38
37. F or a discussion on the social and political agenda of Abbott see Terri Weiss-
man, The realisms of Berenice Abbott: documentary photography and political
action (Berkeley: University of California Press; Washington, D.C.: Phillips Collec-
tion, 2011), 121-171.
38. A
bbott’s growing political involvement and the influence of her partner, the writer
Elizabeth McCausland whom she met in 1935, eventually gave way to a more
humanistic and moralistic approach in her work with an increasing importance
of captions, which distanced her work in the years after her Changing New
York project from the dispassionate visual purity of her initial experiments with
Russell-Hitchcock. For more on this “humanist” phase of American documentary
photography, see Olivier Lugon, El estilo documental, 102-115.
44
Walker Evans (1903-1975) had a trajectory that was in many ways par-
allel to that of Abbott.39 As a young man interested in the arts, he had
travelled to Paris in 1926, subsequently meeting Abbott upon returning
to New York when the two of them became close friends for a brief
period of time.40 It was during this period and through his friendship
with Abbott that Evans became aware of the work of Atget, an encoun-
ter that he recounted as having a transformative power on his pho-
tography.41 Additionally, Evans’ first photographic commissions were
also in the field of preservation photography. In 1931 he was commis-
sioned by his friend and protector Lincoln Kirstein to photograph the
then-despised Victorian houses in and around Boston, a minor archi-
Figure 28: Walker Evans, Country store tecture that at that moment threatened to disappear (Figure 27).42 For
and gas station, Alabama, 1936. the documentation of this heritage, Evans favored static compositions
and frontal views, featuring great detail and luminosity. As a result
of this approach, the photographs adopted a very relaxed and almost
impersonal character. In 1933 Evans showcased thirty-nine of those
images under the title Photographs of Nineteenth-Century American
Houses by Walker Evans in what became the first solo show devoted to
a photographer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Later on, and continuing his development in parallel with Abbott,

Evans would also see his work elevated to the category of a collective
archival project in the mid-thirties. In 1935 – the same year Abbott re-
ceived her grant from the Federal Art Project – Evans became involved
with a photographic survey funded by the Farm Security Administra-
tion (FSA), a public entity devoted to subsidizing agriculture through
small grants to farmers and the fostering of cooperatives. In 1935, Roy
E. Stryker, a young professor of economics from Columbia University,
was put in charge of a new information unit and, uncertain about how
to proceed, surrounded himself with a group of photographers who
took the lead in defining the activities of the group.43 Among them,
with the special status of Senior Information Specialist, was Walker
Evans, who quickly became Stryker’s mentor and whose style became
a guideline for the other photographers of the unit (Figure 28). In
exchange, Walker Evans used the commission by the FSA as a means
to obtain a stable salary and take the pictures that he would later use
for his famous exhibition and book, American Photographs, held at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1938. The photographs in this
exhibition and catalogue, two thirds of which are portraits of anony-
mous architectures, continue to this day to be regarded as the canon of
documentary photography.44
Evans’ photographs for this show represent the crystallization of a

visual language that had been in the making for almost exactly a
century, and that had evolved not least as a result of the demands of
39. A
ll biographic data on Evans otherwise noted taken from Belinda Rathbone and
Walker Evans, Walker Evans: a biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).
40. B
etween 1929 and 1930 Evans used Abbott’s photo-lab, before their strong
personalities and colliding ambitions caused them to suddenly break apart. See
Clark Worswick, “Abbott and Atget,” in Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, 14.
41. Ibid.
42. Olivier Lugon, El estilo documental, 86.
43. S
tryker had been responsible for collecting existing footage for the illustrations
of the book American Economic Life, by Rexford G. Tungwell, which had been very
successful, but was otherwise completely unaware of how to proceed to produce
new images. See Lugon, El estilo documental, 102.
44. W
alker Evans, and Lincoln Kirstein, American Photographs, with an essay by
Lincoln Kirstein (New York: The Museum of modern art, 1938).
45
architectural practices and worldviews. On the other hand, while Ev-
ans’ work would not be conceivable without the precedents discussed
in this text, it is also true that it represents a qualitative jump in terms
of maturity and self-consciousness. It seems as if in Evans’ work, doc-
umentary photography was leaving adolescence behind and coming to
terms with its own nature.
If Evans’ photographs embody a certain canon of documentary pho-

tography, we could then say that such canon is articulated around three
main themes.45 The first refers to a concept of clarity, a high degree
of fidelity towards reality, and is related to the role of photographs as
vehicles for information or documents. When looking, for instance, at
Figure 29: Walker Evans, Negro House
in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1936. Evans’s FSA photographs, we notice not only that the degree of detail
is very high, but also that this level of detail is evenly maintained in
all areas of the frame, with absolutely no portion of the picture being
either burnt or too dark, and with all the different elements making up
the image appearing to us in relatively perfect focus, regardless of their
position in space (Figure 29). This combination of clarity or abundance
of light, sharp focus and increased depth of field result in images that
are as crisp as can be and that offer themselves as fields to be scanned
by the eye, where the density of detail is always homogeneous, there-
fore not privileging any specific element over the others.
The second theme would relate to the cool and detached way in which
Evans’ photographs present themselves to us, putting forward an
impression of neutrality, an effect that is achieved through an obsessive
Figure 30: Walker Evans, View of Easton, Penn- approach to framing that seeks to remove the photographer from the
sylvania, 1935. relationship between the object being photographed and the beholder,
as if the photographer “surrendered” the responsibility of framing to
the object. Not only is the framing of the images dry, almost violent
in its straight-forwardness, it also operates through a certain removal
of perspective, favoring images that are constructed through different
receding planes which are then collapsed into a single surface through
the use of the previously mentioned recourse to extreme depth of field
(Figure 30). In fact, it is rare to find an image by Walker Evans where
we can appreciate a vanishing point. Most of his images are frontal
views where we are presented with a surface – a facade – that domi-
nates the frame, turning the image into the equivalent of an architec-
tural elevation, with the horizon line becoming the only reminder of
the relative position of the photographer in space. In those cases when
the image is a two point perspective, the vanishing points are almost
always outside of the frame, an effect that is sometimes achieved by
photographing larger portions of urban or rural landscape from an
elevated vantage point and looking down, such as in his celebrated
photographs of Easton or Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, where the frame
of the photograph is evenly filled with landscape and the relation to the
horizon is partially or totally lost.
The third theme in Evans’ photography that we can consider as exem-

plary in the context of documentary photography is related to his use
of the series and the archive as categories inherited from Atget (Fig-
ure 31). While Evans is perhaps not the most systematic author in the
45. T his summary of the characteristics of documentary photography is a personal

reading and a clarification of Olivier Lugon’s outlining of the genre in Olivier
Lugon, El estilo documental, 123-124.
46
Figure 31: Walker Evans,
Wooden Churches, 1936.
documentary tradition, the fact that his work became the template for
the governmental recording of the depression-hit American interior is
telling of the capacity and conduciveness of his visual language to im-
plement a photographic section through reality. His photographs, like
others before , create the fiction that it is possible to freeze and conserve
in film a duplicate version of the world for future viewers. This idea
of posterity then becomes central to the whole documentary drive in
photography since it makes explicit the fact that its potential consumer
is always in the future, and that the reality being depicted is considered
to be in the process of disappearing, regardless of the pace of its erasure.
47
Therefore, if we consider the concept of clarity or high fidelity as gov-
erning the decisions regarding light and focus, the concept of neutrali-
ty or authorial removal as driving the decisions regarding framing and
perspective, and the concept of posterity or erasure as justifying the
serial and accumulative nature of the body of work as a whole, we get
a fairly accurate picture of what documentary photography is in more
specific terms and what its main features are. Of course, Evans did not
invent all of these categories – actually he probably did not invent any
of them – but we can safely say that he was responsible for clarifying
and synthesizing them in a single body of work, while in the process
turning them into a set of explicit actions that allowed documentary
photography after him to emerge as a self-conscious mode of practice.
Therefore, Evans, with his two early shows at MoMA, marked not
only the coming of age of documentary photography as a differenti-
ated genre but the acceptance of photography as a larger medium in
the context of the world of art and its institutions. It is then telling, if
perhaps not fully intuitive, to note that photography came to be ac-
cepted as an art in precisely the instance in which it was more intensely
trying to regain an aura of impersonality and lack of authorial voice. In
fact, Evans’ greatest contribution was not only to grant documentary
photography access to the world of art museums and art collectors, but
to do so conscious of the emancipation that this passage implied from
the initial utilitarian drive that had contributed to the definition and
formalization of the genre.
In fact, while Evans’s most famous photographs were taken as a result

of commissions, he was always clear in emphasizing their autonomy as
images.46 It was precisely because of his conscious acknowledgement
of the independence of his photographic language from the use value
of the images themselves, that Evans gained a new agency and status
as a photographer.47 This bold positioning also enabled his work to
become a reference for successive generations of artists investigating
the documentary formats with an increasing degree of freedom, such
as Ed Ruscha, the New Topographics or the members of the Dusseldorf
School of Photography, all of whom could not possibly exist without
Evans. In the following chapters, we will follow to trace the progression
in the involvement of these photographers with architecture through
a series of instances in which we will try to transcribe an ongoing con-
versation between documentary photography and architecture, as they
become periodically attracted to each other throughout the twentieth
century and to this day.
46. A
fter two decades of working for Fortune magazine, Evans photographic legacy
started to be reclaimed in the 1960s, with a series of exhibitions and re-editions
of his books, culminating with the 1971 retrospective show in MoMA, curated by
John Szarkowski. It was during this period of his career that Evans openly em-
braced the primacy of formal components in his work of the 1930s for the Farm
Security Administration. See Olivier Lugon, El estilo documental, 117.
47. “ Documentary? That’s a very sophisticated and misleading word. And not really
clear…. The term should be documentary style. An example of a literal document
would be a police photograph of a murder scene. You see, a document has a
use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, though it
certainly can adopt that style.” Walker Evans on his own work in Leslie Katz, “An
Interview with Walker Evans (1971),” in Photography in Print, ed. Vicki Goldberg
(Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 364.
48
06. Conclusion: What Is It That Architects See in
Documentary Photography?
Photography at its very early stages was understood as a direct and
scientific record of reality. It was only upon realization of the agency
of the photographer and his inherent subjectivity, as with the Mission
Héliographique, that photography came to be understood as a medium
and evaluated according to similar criteria as other modes of represen-
tation. It was also upon realization of this problem that an effort was
begun to construct a mode of vision that would restore photography to
its imaginary state of original purity. Architects, with their mixture of
advanced visual education, pragmatic capacity to manage information
and highly idiosyncratic views of the world, became central figures in
influencing the emergence of this new visual paradigm. Documentary
photography, understood as the result of such process, can in turn be
described as a highly constructed and controlled mode of vision that
creates a format through which information can be conveyed with an
impression of objectivity or detachment.
The problem then became that the reception of the images was still
subject to a great degree of subjectivity and completely outside the
control of the photographer, despite his best bureaucratic intentions,
as we have discussed regarding the nostalgic response to some of the
late nineteenth century urban surveys. The answer to this problem was
gradually articulated along two differentiated lines of work culmi-
nating in the 1930s. The first approach relied in the use of language –
captions – as a means to control and direct the reading of the images,
and developed to become a subgenre of journalism with deep human-
ist and emotional overtones. The second approach, which we have
focused on in this text, responded by exacerbating the openness of
the images through an increased emphasis in the rigor of their visual
construction resulting in more formal and visually autonomous work.
These two divergent responses to the problem of truth and beauty in
photography become explicit if we compare two of the most influential
publications involving American documentary photography during
the recession, namely Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (See Figures
32 and 33 in next page) published in 1941 and 1937 respectively.48 While
Evans’s portraits of sharecroppers and their families are shot in an
immediate fashion and presented without captions, Bourke-White’s
images of farmers feature strong contrasts, have forced perspectives
and are supported by extensive captions that seek to reenact the sub-
ject’s internal dialogue.
We will argue here that the option represented by Bourke-White is

based on a notion of truth derived from humanistic journalism, while
the work of Evans represents a notion of truth derived from the scienc-
es. While the former tries to bend photography’s arm into saying what it
48. F or a critical account of the divergence between these two trends in American
documentary photography see Olivier Lugon, El Estilo Documental,103-113. For
full background information on this episode see Sharon Corwin, Jessica May,
and Terri Weissman. American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott, Ev-
ans, and Bourke-White. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) and John
Rogers Puckett, Five Photo-textual Documentariesfrom the Great Depression, (Ann
Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984).
49
Figure 32a: Walker Evans, spread from
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941.
Figure 32b: Margaret Bourke-White,

spread from You Have Seen Their Faces, 1937.
50
wants it to say, the latter further vacates photography from meaning by
strengthening its degree of internal coherence and rigor. The increased
autonomy of Evans’s images as visual constructs had the parallel effect
of transforming documentary photography from a utilitarian practice
to a genre within the fine arts, already signaling towards a trajectory
that has only become more pronounced as we approach our current
condition, as exemplified for instance with the irruption of the Dussel-
dorf School of Photography in the global art scene during the 1990s.
It is important to clarify now that it is not the purpose of this short text
to put forward a radically new definition of documentary photography
or to challenge its independence by implying that it is a byproduct of
architectural practices. What we want to say, on the other hand, is that
the two disciplines are not entirely unrelated, a fact that is important
since it means that when architects approach documentary photog-
raphy they are not resorting to a completely alien or imported mech-
anism, but rather to a particular way to look at the world that is, to a
great extent, architectural. This realization also informs our under-
standing of what it is that architects see when they look at documen-
tary photography and why it has come to be an important and even
obsessive reference for some of them.
First of all, documentary photography is a deeply constructed mode of

vision. This is true to the extent that it can actually lend its inner struc-
ture to subject matters that otherwise would be too formless or difficult
to read for the architect. To put it simply, when Walker Evans photo-
graphs a rural church or a roadside shack with a technique similar to
Baldus’s photographic elevations of the New Louvre, he is allowing the
architect to suddenly consider these popular objects as Architecture,
enabling a sudden broadening of the contents of the discipline.
Secondly, despite its premeditated nature, documentary photography

presents reality in a highly unmediated state. Through its reliance in
the concepts of high fidelity and neutrality, documentary photography
approaches difficult subjects with an open and clinical eye, shameless-
ly ignoring what our feelings are for the people living in the shack or
praying in the church. This feature, which we have characterized as
a scientific approach to the problem of truth, allows the architect to
consider reality in its own terms, gaining in the process a crucial time
to develop his own take on it.
Finally, documentary photography brings formal qualities to the

foreground. Being deeply reliant on visual considerations, its hyper
constructed language acts as a filter, a first degree of abstraction that
allows the architect to start to see a world of possibilities in the inter-
nal relationships and forms present in the photographic frame. This
vague but powerful component of formal interpretation then becomes
significant as it implies that each image holds the potential for many
possible formal outcomes, turning this new documentary vision into a
propositive or projective one.
51
Bibliography
– Abbott, Berenice. Atget: photographe de Paris. Paris: Jonquières, 1930.

– Annan, Thomas. Photographs of the Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow,
1868/1877: With a supplement of 15 related views. New York: Dover
Publications, 1977.
– Atget, Eugène, Berenice Abbott, and Clark Worswick. Berenice Ab-
bott, Eugene Atget. Santa Fe, NM: Arena Editions, 2002.
– Barberie, Peter. “Charles Marville’s Seriality.” Record of the Art Muse-
um, Princeton University (2008): 30-45.
– Cooper, Nicholas. The photography of Bedford Lemere & Co. Swin-
don: English Heritage, 2011.
– Corwin, Sharon, Jessica May, and Terri Weissman. American Mod-
ern: Documentary photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White.
Berkeley: University of California Press; Fort Worth: Amon Carter
Museum; Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art, 2010.
– Crump, James. Walker Evans: Decade by decade. Ostfildern: Hatje
Cantz; Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2010.
– Daniel, Malcolm R., Édouard-Denis Baldus, and Barry Bergdoll. The
Photographs of Édouard Baldus. New York: Metropolitan Museum of
Art; Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; New York: Distrib-
uted by H.N. Abrams, 1994.
– Elwall, Robert and Royal Institute of British Architects. Building
with Light: The international history of architectural photography.
London: Merrell in association with The Royal Institute of British
Architects, 2004.
– Evans, Walker, and Lincoln Kirstein. 1938. American Photographs.
New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938.
– Gassan, Arnold. A Chronology of Photography: A critical survey of the
history of photography as a medium of art. Athens, Ohio: Handbook
Co., 1972.
52
– Gernsheim, Helmut, and Alison Gernsheim. A Concise History of
Photography. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965.
– Goldberg, Vicki. Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the pres-
ent. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.
– Hitchcock, Henry Russell. The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and
his times. Hamden, Conn., Archon Books, 1961.
– Katz, Leslie. “An Interview with Walker Evans (1971),” in Photography
in Print, edited by Vicki Goldberg, 352-370. Alburquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1981.
– Lugon, Olivier. El estilo documental: De August Sander a Walker Ev-
ans, 1920-1945. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2010.
– Marville, Charles, Marie de Thézy, and Roxane Debuisson. Marville:
Paris. Paris: Hazan, 1994.
– Mileaf, Janine A., and Carla Yanni. Constructing Modernism: Berenice
Abbott and Henry-Russell Hitchcock: a recreation of the 1934 exhibi-
tion, the Urban vernacular of the thirties, forties, and fifties: American
cities before the Civil War. Middletown: The Center, 1993.
– Mora, Gilles, and John T. Hill. Walker Evans: The hungry eye [trans-
lated from the French by Jacqueline Taylor]. New York: H.N. Abrams,
1993.
– Puckett, John Rogers. Five Photo-Textual Documentaries from the
Great Depression, (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984).
– Rathbone, Belinda and Walker Evans. Walker Evans: a biography.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
– Szarkowski, John, and Eugène Atget. Atget. New York, N.Y.: Museum
of Modern Art: Calloway: Distributed by Simon and Schuster, 2000.
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tography and political action. Berkeley: University of California Press;
Washington, D.C.: Phillips Collection, 2011.
53
Nigel Henderson vs.
Chapter 1 Alison and Peter Smithson
01. I ntroduction: The Collaboration
and the Context
02. Nigel Henderson

– The Early Years
– A British Documentary Tradition
– Reconstructing Nigel
03. The Smithsons

– “As Found”: An Inherited Sensibility
– “As Found”: A Series of Strategies
· The Urban Overlay:
Golden Lane, Berlin Haupstadt
and Robin Hood Gardens
· A Synthetic Vernacular:
Burrows Lea Farm, Close Houses,
Fold Houses, Sugden House
04. Conclusion: The Solar Pavilion
55
Figure 1: Nigel Henderson,
Chisenhale Road, 1951.
01. Introduction:
The Collaboration and the Context
Most references to Alison and Peter Smithson in architectural history ei-

ther focus on or depart from their intervention at the CIAM meeting in
Aix-en-Provence in 1953 (Figure 2). Their now famous presentation and
corresponding grid was named Urban Re-Identification and was illus-
trated with photographs of daily life in the working class neighborhood
of Bethnal Green in London’s East End.1 The structure of the panels pro-
ceeded from left to right, departing from the concept of the house and
working its way through the larger categories of the street, the district
and the city, thus enunciating a manifesto for a bottom-up approach to
urbanism. Their intent to take into account the ways of life of the people
and their inclusive approach towards the pre-modern fabric of the city
positioned the Smithsons as representatives of a younger group that was
challenging the supremacy of the first generation of modernist architects
and urban planners in the context of the CIAM meetings.2
Figure 2: Alison and Peter Smithson

with photographs by Nigel Henderson,
CIAM 9 Grille, 1953.
While all of the above is now common knowledge amongst architects,

what perhaps is not so well known is that the artist Nigel Henderson
(Figure 3), the author of the photographs of Bethnal Green included in
their presentation, had been a substantial influence on the Smithsons
in the years immediately preceding the enunciation of their position in
Aix-en-Provence. It then becomes interesting to interrogate Hender-
son’s production during those years and the impact that his work had
on the development of the Smithsons’ attitude towards architecture
and urbanism, as it subsequently informed a series of their projects
throughout the 1950s.
The Smithsons met Nigel Henderson in 1951 through the artist Eduar-
do Paolozzi at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, where
the three men were teaching at the time. Almost immediately, the four
of them – including Alison – became close friends and frequent col-
laborators, actively participating in the formation of the Independent
Figure 3: Nigel Henderson, Self Portrait, 1951 1. The content of the presentation was later expanded and reworked into a compre-
hensive text on urbanism. See Alison Margaret Smithson and Peter Smithson,
“Urban Re-identification” in Ordinariness and Light: Urban theories 1952-1960 and
their application in a building project 1963-1970 (London: Faber, 1970), 9-103.
2. For a comprehensive account of the history of the CIAM meetings see Eric Paul
Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2000). For The Smithson’s account of their role and that of their generation
see Alison Smithson, The Emergence of Team Ten Out of CIAM. (London: Architec-
tural Assoc, 1982).
57
Group3 and in a series of exhibitions during the early and mid-fif-
ties.4 At the time they met, Henderson was living in Bethnal Green, a
working class area that had been heavily punished by bombing raids
during the Second World War, where he had relocated with his wife
and daughters in 1945. One of Henderson’s favorite occupations was
to take his friends on extensive walks across the East End, where he
would act as a cicerone of sorts, introducing them to the rough and
derelict reality of his environment and fostering in them a recognition
of the mundane objects and situations that he had come to appreciate
through years of intense observation.5
Figure 4: Nigel Henderson, The Smithsons were immediately impressed upon discovering the new
Wall, McCullum Road, 1949-53. sensibility that Henderson had developed towards the artifacts of the
city and their material presence (Figure 4). For them, Henderson be-
came the original “image-finder,” the creator of a new attitude towards
life, art and architecture that they called the “as found.”6 Peter Smith-
son would later observe: “a walk with Nigel [was] to see the inanimate
as animate.”7 This emotional approach to the material reality around
them, an “affection between objects and people,”8 became for the
architects a new attitude with which they surveyed the existing city in
search for potentials for a new architecture. During 1951, the Smithsons
visited the Hendersons regularly and accompanied Nigel on his walks
and photographic excursions through London. During this period they
even started to emulate Henderson, taking similar pictures of the city
themselves (Figure 5).9 Four of these images were used as illustrations
in their primer on urbanism, Ordinariness and Light, and continued to
be reproduced in several of their publications through their career up
to their self-curated twin architectural testament, The Charged Void.
In addition to their shared urban walks, Henderson and the Smithsons

also visited the construction site of their school in Hunstanton on
3. T he Independent group was a generational offshoot of the Institute of Contempo-

rary Arts, which also included figures such as Richard Hamilton, Reyner Banham,
Lawrence Alloway, John McHale or Magda Cordell. For a more detailed account
of the Independent Group and its role in the British postwar art scene see Anne
Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and mass culture in Britain, 1945-59
(Manchester England; New York: Manchester University Press, 1995) and David
Robbins, ed., The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the aesthetics of plenty
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
4. They
co-curated the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art held in 1953 at the premises
of the Institute for Contemporary Arts and produced an installation titled Patio
and Pavilion for the group exhibition This is Tomorrow held at Whitechapel Gallery
in 1956.
5. During
the years of 1945 to 1949, Henderson was enrolled in the Slade School
of Art, but referred spending most of his time exploring the city in a series of
“compulsive” walks. See Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art
(London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 54-55.
6. The
Smithsons acknowledge starting to use this term in the early fifties as a
result of their relationship with Henderson and the influence of his photography.
The term remained private until they started mentioning it in their writings in
the 1990s. See Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the
‘Found’” in David Robins, ed., The Independent Group, 201-202. This retrospec-
tive version has come to be regarded as the official genesis of the term. For a
more detailed and contextualized account of this episode see Claude Lichtenstein
and Thomas Schregenberger, As found: The discovery of the ordinary (Baden: Lars
Müller, 2001), especially 8-9 and 40-44.
7. From
an interview of the Smithsons by Reyner Banham for an Arts Council film,
“Fathers of Pop,” 1979. As quoted in Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of
Life and Art, 54.
8. Ibid.
9. See
Alison Margaret Smithson and Peter Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, 33-35.
Also, The Charged Void: urbanism (New York: Monacelli Press, 2005), 21.
58
Figure 5: Photographs of pre-modern London by
Alison and Peter Smithson, ca. 1951.
59
several occasions (Figure 6).10 The photographs that Henderson took
during these visits focused on the rough and unfinished presence of
the construction, revealing to the Smithsons an unexpected aspect of
their work that hinted towards a radicalization of their initial interest
in Mies Van der Rohe’s early IIT campus buildings. These images re-
vealed a potential in the raw materiality of the building under con-
struction as well as in its rich layering of transparencies and reflections,
doubtlessly contributing to their formulation of a much messier and
richer engagement with material reality, one that later became a trade-
mark of their work.11
In addition to these intimate and lesser-known moments of interac-

tion, Henderson and the Smithsons also collaborated – together with
Eduardo Paolozzi – in two well documented exhibition projects during
the 1950s. The first of them, the Parallel of Life and Art show (Figure 7),
was held in London in 1953 at the premises of the Institute of Contem-
porary Arts.12 For the exhibition, the quartet selected myriad images
from readily available sources, with themes ranging from archeology
to anthropology, scientific photography, primitive art and drawings by
children. The images were then printed, and in many cases enlarged,
on coarse paper and hung from the ceiling and walls with very thin
cables. The resulting echoes, superimpositions and general lack of
hierarchy in the display – they referred to the exhibition as a “cave of
images” – produced a blurring of categories that successfully estab-
lished a nebulous whole, collapsing life and art as suggested in the title
of the exhibition. Unlike their CIAM grid from the same year, with
its absolute compartmentalization, this display did not assign specific
values to each image, but rather operated as a repository of common
visual references for the diverse individuals in the group.
The second and last exhibition in which the Smithsons collaborated

with Henderson and Paolozzi was titled This is Tomorrow (Figure 8).13
Figure 6: Alison and Peter Smithson, Held at Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, twelve teams formed by artists
Hunstanton School, as photographed and architects were asked to come together to design and build twelve
by Nigel Henderson, 1949-54.
environments that reflected on the idea of the future. The quartet’s
installation, titled Patio and Pavilion, consisted of a patio lined with
aluminum-paneled walls and a floor covered with sand on which
a small pavilion was constructed with scrap wooden boards and a
corrugated plastic roof. This precarious structure was designed by the
10. These
photographs were featured prominently occupying three carefully cap-
tioned full spreads in the Smithsons’ self-curated monograph. See Alison Mar-
garet Smithson and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture (New York:
Monacelli Press, 2001), 50-54.
11. “During
the construction of Hunstanton, we saw layering of structure at the na-
ked stage, layering of reflection at the glazed stage”. Alison Margaret Smithson
and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture, 42.
12. The
show was held in the same room where the meetings of the Independent
Group took place. The exhibition is also sometimes referred to by its working
titles - it was first called Sources and then Documents 53 before acquiring its
Figure 7: Parallel of Life and Art Exhibition definitive title. For a more detailed account see Alison Margaret Smithson and
as photographed by Nigel Henderson, 1953. Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture, 118-123. Also see Claude
Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger, As Found, 30-58.
13. For
a more detailed account of the exhibition see Alison Margaret Smithson and
Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: architecture, 178-187. Also see Anne Massey,
The Independent Group, 95-109 and Thomas Schregenberger, As found, 176-193.
14. Nigel
Henderson is a secondary figure in the history of English Postwar art, and
he is primarily referred to in relationship to his collaborations with other artists
of the Independent Group, such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi or the
Smithsons. Both the volumes by Anne Massey and David Robbins quoted in this
text and accepted as the basic literature about the artists of the Independent
Group date from the 1990s while the only monograph on Henderson was not
published until 2001.
60
Figure 8: Patio and Pavilion exhibition as photo-
graphed by Nigel Henderson, 1956.
Figure 9: Pages from the

This is Tomorrow catalog, 1956.
Smithsons and then populated by a coalition of idiosyncratic objects,

some of them found and some produced by Henderson and Paolozzi
(Figure 9). At the point of spatial climax of the installation, inside the
small shed, Henderson placed his 1956 collage Head of a Man (Figure
10). In this collaboration, the architects provided a minimal structure
and the artists operated as the inhabitants, arranging within it a series
of objects that became signs or traces of life. The group aptly referred
to their installation as a “symbolic habitat.” Though different in many
ways, both exhibitions by the group were focused on the creation of
environments, and both aimed at the dissolution of the boundaries
between art, technology, and life.
In the context of these well known and documented collaborations, we

will reexamine Henderson’s images more closely and will revisit their
reception and reformulation by the Smithsons through the enunciation
of the “as found” attitude and the production of a series of projects,
from the Golden Lane Competition to the Solar Pavilion. The work
of Nigel Henderson in his East End period, between 1948 and 1954,
represents the peak of production in Henderson’s career and overlaps
the period of his intense friendship and collaboration with the Smith-
sons between 1951 and 1956. Reading these images against Henderson’s
Figure 10: Installation view of Patio & Pavilion biography and the tradition of social documentary in England will
depicting Nigel Henderson’s collage, Head of a enable us to achieve a better understanding of what they meant for the
Man, 1956.
Smithsons, while in the process allowing us to sidestep the multitude
of common places and grey secondary references that smother the
discussion around these figures. With this in mind, the biographical
perspective becomes especially relevant if we consider that almost
all references to Henderson and his work in art history texts predate
the 2001 publication of Virgina Walsh’s Nigel Henderson: Parallel of
Life and Art, the only monograph published on his life and work to
date.14 This additional context will allow us to better understand the
formation of Henderson’s photographic vision, and to produce a fresh
explanation of how it influenced the British architects.
61
02. Nigel Henderson
The Early Years

The colorful biography of Nigel Henderson (Figure 11) was marked
from the outset by class dilemma. He was born in 1917 to parents of
different backgrounds; his father belonged to an affluent upper mid-
dle class family while his mother was a bohemian who made a living
as a dancer and occasional journalist. Their marriage was short lived:
after meeting during the First World War, they had three children and
divorced by 1928. Nigel was then left with his grandparents as his father
took off to take care of the family’s real estate interests in Argentina.15
Henderson’s childhood was therefore split between the strict and
conservative ambience of his grandparents’ house and the exhilarating
bohemian ambience of his mother’s flat at Gordon Square, where he
visited during school holidays. His mother, Wyn Henderson, was part
of the artistic and literary clique known as the Bloomsbury Group,
which included luminaries such as Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf,
W.H. Auden, and Bertolt Brecht. Driven by the desire to participate
in this lively atmosphere, Henderson forced his way out of boarding
Figure 11: Portrait of young Nigel Henderson.
school by burning an English flag, generating a scandal that allowed
him to leave his grandparents’ house and move in with his mother.16
Despite his initial enthusiasm, Henderson was soon appalled with the
realization that his mother’s lifestyle was far from what he had imagined.
Wyn’s busy life included an unending list of lovers and frequent reloca-
tions due to her volatile occupations, leaving the young Nigel with an
uneasy feeling of being alone in the midst of two worlds without belong-
ing to either of them.17 Around this time, in 1935, he enrolled in biology
studies at Chelsea Polytechnic where he spent his days feverishly dissect-
ing specimens, fascinated by the microscope and the section as a device
to explore and unveil a secret order of nature (Figure 12).18 His interest in
this technique was more visual than strictly scientific and dealt with the
Figure 12: Nigel Henderson, photograph
revelation of an expanded vision enabled by technology, and its impact
copied from Science Magazine. on art understood as a way to look at the world. He would say:
“I suppose if I read more about art (er…Art?) I would have found
somebody saying that I haven’t seen or heard […] about that form
of enquiry and presentation known as the Cross Section. Presum-
ably (?) developed as a thin slicing mode for examination with
staining techniques to differentiate tissues, etc. and also to allow
light to penetrate for microscopic examination … these scientific
innovations, backed up perhaps by the massive sectioning of the
navvies for rail and canal and dock gave the eye a new author-
itative statement about the organization of nature – a relatively
internal view (further underlined by the x-ray spectacular, not to
15. See Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art, 13-14.
16. Ibid.
17. It
was during one of Wyn’s absences from London in 1935 that Henderson was
left under the protection of his mother’s neighbors and friends Adrian and Karin
Stephen, spending most of his days and weekends with them as a surrogate
son. During this period he became close friends with one of their daughters,
Judith, who would eventually become his wife.
18. Ibid.
62
mention the sectioning or freezing of the dimension of time by the
high-speed photographic shutter). I assume that this is the overall
conditioning that forces those serious about the practice of art to be
so concerned about the integrity of the actual picture surface.”19
In late 1935, despite his enthusiasm for the cross section, Henderson
abruptly abandoned his studies of biology to take a job as full-time
assistant to Dr Helmut Ruhemann, the picture restorer at the Nation-
al Gallery. His incipient interest in painting and art was then further
advanced through a series of visits to Paris, where his mother was
working at a news agency. During these visits Henderson became
introduced to the Parisian art scene through his mother’s friendship
with Peggy Guggenheim, who granted him access to the studios of
artists such as Marx Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Marcel Duchamp.20 In
1938, when Peggy Guggenheim opened her first gallery in London by
the name of Guggenheim Jeune, Wyn Henderson was put in charge
of managing the space and subsequently included work by his son in
one of their first exhibitions.21 These early experiences clearly marked
Henderson, who at just twenty-one years of age had developed person-
al connections with the literary and artistic elites of both London and
Paris, and had also exhibited his own production, alongside names like
Picasso, Gris, Ernst and Tanguy. This precociousness later proved to
be important since it allowed him to establish a name and a position
before the outbreak of the war, situating him in a hinge position be-
tween the generation that influenced art in Britain in the 1930s and the
younger generation that would take over in the postwar period.
Indeed, Henderson’s incipient artistic career came to a halt in 1939 as

Britain went to war. Having been riddled for some time with a desire
to fly, he was quick to grasp the opportunity to fulfill that dream by
becoming a pilot for the Coastal Command, a branch of the RAF in
charge of protecting seaborne shipments, mainly through the Med-
iterranean and the Baltic seas. He quickly became fascinated by the
experience of flying, with the expanded and estranged perception of
the world that it provided. This new experience became a complement
to his previous interest in biology, tying the micro and the macro scales
in a truly new vision facilitated by technology.
“The physically amazing thing about flying, after the speed impres-
sion of taking off and low flying, is that as you gain height the sense
of motion drops away. It’s nothing like looking out of a railway car-
riage and seeing the blurry silver worms zipping past or the ritual
nodding of the telegraph lines. It is impressively stable and still up
there, and this is the important point, the world is laid out for you
in unfamiliar terms… the visual field is flattened, more after the
plan view of the microscope section than the elevation that every-
day seeing is accustomed to.”22
19. Letter
to Chris Mullen, n. d. quoted in Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel
of Life and Art, 23.
20. W
yn Henderson had become friends with Peggy Guggenheim in the early thirties
in London and the two women became closer during this period in Paris in the
mid-1930s. Parallel of Life and Art, 15-16.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 17.
63
Henderson’s remarks about the cross section and the experience of
flying seem from our standpoint reminiscent of a technologic sensitiv-
ity towards photography and art put forward by theorists like Moholy
Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes during the interwar and postwar years. While
Henderson’s original interest in these topics predates his knowledge
of the works of Moholy-Nagy and Kepes, which were not published
in English until the late forties and early fifties, it is clear that he later
became aware of these publications through his friend Paolozzi, who
owned several of them.23 Be it as it may, Henderson’s enthusiasm for
flying soon wore off when after four years of service the demands of
military aviation proved to be too much for the fragile mind of the
young artist. In an episode of nervous breakdown, Henderson almost
killed himself and his whole crew by attempting to fly his plane against
a cliff on their way back from a mission in Norway in 1943.24 This inci-
dent caused him to be relieved from combat and assigned to adminis-
trative duties until the end of the war in 1945.
He survived this episode and the subsequent post-traumatic stress

thanks to the support of Judith Stephen, a childhood friend who had
remained in contact with him during the war and who married him
Figure 13: Nigel and Judith Henderson after his crisis in 1943 (Figure 13). Judith was a true intellectual com-
on their wedding day, 1943. panion to Henderson and in fact, it was her professional career as an
anthropologist that caused the couple to move to Bethnal Green in
1945. Judith had studied anthropology at Cambridge with Bertrand
Russell and at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania with Ruth Benedict
and Margaret Mead. Upon returning to England in 1941 she served in
the Ministry of Works until 1943, when she started to collaborate with
sociologist J.L. Peterson, dean of the University House, on a study of
the settlement of Bethnal Green. As the position required residence,
the Hendersons moved to Bethnal Green in the spring of 1945, in-
stalling their young family at 46 Chisenhale Road, in the center of the
heavily bombed and impoverished East End.25
A British Documentary Tradition

Figure 14: The Samuels Family, c. 1949-53 The research project in which Judith had enrolled was called “Discover
Your Neighbour” and was aimed at gathering information about the
costumes, history and idiosyncrasy of the inhabitants of Bethnal Green
in order to facilitate the work of professionals such as doctors, parole
officers, priests and lawyers.26 All of these agents serving the newly
created welfare state found deep communication problems in their
contact with the working class neighbors whose living conditions they
were supposed to ameliorate. With this problem in mind, Judith Hen-
derson’s main task during her first two years of working in the “Know
your Neighbour” project was to secretly monitor the daily activities
of a single family, the Samuels, for which purpose she kept a detailed
23. R
eferences to the artist as scientist and to biology in general can be found
in László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1947), 31. The
original edition in German for this book dates from 1939. References to flying
and the new visual paradigm that it involved can be read in very similar terms as
those used by Henderson in Gyorgy Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: P. Theo-
bald, 1951). For a more detailed discussion of the possible chronology of these
influences see Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art, 21-23.
24. Parallel of Life and Art, 16-17.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
64
Figure 15: Still from the documentary film Figure 16: Still from the film Fires Were Started,
Drifters, by John Grierson, by Humphrey Jennings, 1943.
diary (Figure 14). The Samuels family lived at 31 Chisenhale Road and
was formed by Leslie and Doreen Samuels and their five sons, who
were playmates to the Henderson’s own children, Justin and Drusilla.27
As unnatural as this anthropologic approach to studying the working

classes – and the disconnect that justified it – may seem to us now, it
was deeply rooted in an English tradition that can be traced back to
literary genres of the mid-nineteenth century and that informed the
formation of documentary film and photography in the early twentieth
century with figures such as John Grierson (Figure 15), Humphrey Jen-
Figure 17: Humphrey Spender, nings (Figure 16) and Humphrey Spender.28 In fact, the deployment of
Funeral, Bolton, 1937. spying diarists in social studies was not unusual at the time, finding a
well-known precedent in the Mass Observation project of the interwar
period, in which both Jennings and Spender were involved.29 Hender-
son was well aware of the photographic work that came out of the Mass
Observation project,30 including Spender’s Bolton photographs (Figure
17), which were very popular at the time. Even though Nigel Hender-
son’s photographs were never intended to be illustrations or in any way
a part of Judith’s assignment, they have come to be assimilated with
27. Ibid., 53-54.

28. T he Victorian “urban explorer” was a literary genre from the mid nineteenth
century in which a character of the high class would set out to explore the life of
the lower classes, many times in disguise. During the recession of the 1880s,
London’s East End became the classical locus for a particular type of journalism
that exposed the poverty in the area with the use of analogies to African and
Middle Eastern cultures, in an evolution of this trend. For a detailed account of
the urban explorer and its role in English social sciences see Deborah Epstein
Nord, “The Social Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian Travelers among the Ur-
ban Poor,” in Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature (New
York: Columbia Univ., 1983), 118-130. A similar objectification of the working
class seen from the outside can be found in the early films of John Grierson, the
Scottish filmmaker who was responsible for coining the term documentary as
early as 1926. For more on John Grierson and his seminal film Drifters see Gary
Evans, John Grierson: trailblazer of documentary films (Montréal: XYZ Publishers,
2005).
29. T om Harrison, the founder of Mass Observation actually was aware of Judith’s
work and contributed with the gift of a typewriter and some financial support.
See Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2001), 53.
30. See Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art, 53.
65
her sociological research project.31 It is therefore important in order to
understand Henderson’s work to situate his photographs in the context
of this lineage and more precisely against Mass Observation as an
immediate precedent, in order to determine to what extent and in what
ways they become a departure from this legacy.
Mass Observation was a complex and ambitious project founded in 1937

by Tom Harrison (ornithologist turned anthropologist), Humphrey
Jennings (documentary film maker, painter and surrealist) and Charles
Madge (reporter for the Daily Mirror and communist activist).32 The
vague concept bonding the scientific, humanistic and poetic approaches
of each of the founders was thus described as “anthropology at home.”33
The underlying assumption was that the prevalent perception of public
opinion as a homogeneous and static block was flawed, and it was nec-
essary to apply new anthropological techniques in order to survey what
was in actuality a rather heterogeneous and shifting magma. Part of this
interest in public opinion was due to the impact of the abdication crisis
in 1936 and the emergence of a proto-fascism in the north of England,
both phenomena that deeply concerned the government and the ruling
elite. Despite its rather haphazard and colorful start, Massive Observa-
Figure 18: Cover of the book Britain by Mass
Observation, published in 1939. tion was actually able to gather valuable information on all these issues,
and this initial success enabled its founders to gradually transition from
private funding to state patronage.34
The methods and outputs of an association such as Massive Observa-

tion were necessarily diverse. While they started by launching studies
based on academic questionnaires and statistical procedures, they
soon decided to employ a reduced group of full-time “professional”
observers and a host of part-time volunteer diarists, painters, photog-
raphers and poets that produced a full range of qualitative and illustra-
tion materials for the multiple bulletins, newsletters and books being
published by the organization (Figure 18). Among this second hetero-
geneous group was also Humphrey Spender, whose images of Bolton
Figure 19: Humphrey Spender,
View from the Art Gallery, Bolton, 1938 and Blackpool became synonymous with a watermark of English
documentary photography and which can be considered the closest
precedent for Henderson’s photographs of the East End.35
Spender’s photographs of Bolton as a production center (Figure 19)

and Blackpool as a place of leisure for the working classes (Figure 20)
31. S
ee for instance Anne Massey, “This is Tomorrow” in Thomas Schregenberger,
ed., As Found, 176-193.
32. F or a detailed account and bibliography on the Mass Observation Project see Nick
Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, history, theory (Hampshire:
Figure 20: Humphrey Spender, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Evening, Blackpool, 1937.
33. “ The artist and the scientist, each compelled by historical necessity, out of their
artificial exclusiveness, are at last joining forces and turning back towards the
mass from which they had detached themselves.” Letter sent by Tom Harrison
Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge and Published by the New Statesman on
January 30, 1937, as quoted in Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life, 4.
34. W
hile they initially operated with small grants secured through Harrison’s con-
nection with the industrial elite of Northern England, they soon started to receive
public funds, and its founders quickly integrated into the state’s intelligence
apparatus after the start of the war when Harrison, Madge and Jennings took
on important responsibilities in different governmental agencies devoted to
monitoring the morale of the people and the production of propaganda. See Nick
Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life, 104-115.
35. F or a full account of Spender’s work and involvement in Mass Observation see
Deborah Frizzel, Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes: Photo-documents,
1932-1942 (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1997).
66
Figure 21: Photographs of Bolton
by Humphrey Spender, 1937.
fit Mass Observation’s aim to generate a general resource that collected

information on public opinion, cultural trends, and the rituals of daily
life in England, but they also brought to the table a personal sensibility
towards the depiction of these people and their environment. In the
more generic visual production of Mass Observation, the emphasis was
always in the group rather than the individual, with the working classes
being photographed in large groups, at work or in street gatherings due
to festivities or rituals such as political rallies and religious celebrations.
Against these less elaborated images, Spender’s photographs distill a
certain surreal atmosphere, featuring smaller groups of people and an
intensity in the depiction of their environment, which becomes a char-
acter in its own right, prefiguring Henderson’s attentive and emotional
approach to the surface of everyday life in Bethnal Green (Figure 21).
67
Spender’s Mass Observation work finds a coetaneous parallel in an
emerging strain of documentary literature represented by George
Orwell, who in 1937 published The Road to Wigan Pier illustrated with
anonymous documentary photographs of working class settings, three
of which depicted life in the borough of Bethnal Green. The book
opened with a dry depiction of the depressed industrial areas of the
North of England and followed with a relentless argumentation on
the class divide and the necessity for an organized Socialist party in
England. In this context, the photographs, which were not necessarily
related to the settings visited and described by Orwell in the book,
served the purpose of lending a greater degree of credibility to the
written work (Figure 22).
Interestingly enough, Orwell and the three founders of Mass Obser-

vation had all studied in Cambridge and shared an upper-middle class
background. In their efforts to embed themselves in the lower classes,
Figure 22: George Orwell, spread depicting all these forward thinkers experienced a frustrating incapacity to inte-
interior scenes of Bethnal Green,
from The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937.
grate and communicate with the communities that they were studying.
Tom Harrison, who worked for a period of time in eleven-hour shifts
at a cotton mill in Bolton, and George Orwell, who disguised himself
as a miner for several months in order to experience the living con-
ditions of the underclass, proved equally incapable of truly breaking
through the class divide. Orwell famously referred to feeling separated
from the miners with whom he lived by the “plate-glass pane of an
aquarium.”36 For photographers like Spender the problem was similar,
as we ascertain from the fact that his photographs for Mass Observa-
tion were taken with the camera concealed under his coat and without
permission from the people being photographed.37
During their first days in Bethnal Green, the Hendersons found

themselves in a similar situation as their pre-war upper-middle class
predecessors, when despite sharing with their neighbors austerity and
privation, they felt isolated from their surroundings by an invisible
barrier. In Henderson’s words:
“My wife and I knew we would experience alienation in the work-

ing class environment. Perhaps this feeling intensified the feeling
I had that I was watching life theater… like an audience of one in
a public theatre of All. My neighbours appeared to be living out
their lives in response to some predetermined script. These rituals
were formal, very strong and coercive to me [and] because of their
unfamiliarity exotic.”38
On the other hand, and despite all the similarities, Henderson’s moti-
vations were very different from those of Harrison, Orwell and Spend-
er, as was his actual relationship to his environment in Bethnal Green.
His presence in the neighborhood was in fact almost a coincidence and
his initial curiosity was only gradually turned into a mode of visual
recognition through a long period of time. When Henderson arrived at
Chisenhale Road he was a student of art at the Slade School of Art, but
the fact that he despised the institution and his still fragile psycholog-
ical condition caused him to spend most of his time walking endlessly
with no particular direction around his home in Bethnal Green.
36. Ibid., 22.

37. Ibid.
38. U
ndated manuscript, Henderson Estate, as quoted in Victoria Walsh, Parallel of
Life and Art, 41.
68
Figure 23: Nigel Henderson, photographs
of the East End, ca. 1950.
“For most of my time at the Slade 1945 – 49 I confined my activity in
Bethnal Green to wandering about looking at things. […] I bor-
rowed a camera and took a few shots. Only one ‘came out’ satisfacto-
rily. But since the kind lender of the camera (Mr. Humpfrey Swing-
ler) had offered quite an extensive loan it occurred to me to take
the Leica around with me on my compulsive walks about the East
End; for walking around – always taking streets unfamiliar to me
had become a soothing experience for a restless and anxious mind.
I disliked the Leica. It was too small for me, I thought. I liked to see
an image of what I was looking at reflected in miniature framed on
a ground glass panel. My mother-in-law offered to buy me a good
camera, a Rolleicord and so I bought my self one. It didn’t occur to
me at the time that I would be making square negatives and printing
in oblong paper – the conventional thing to do. When I realized this
obvious fact it didn’t put me off for I realized that my objective was
usually to “cover” the situation interesting me, which was often of a
fugitive nature, and to take it back to my darkroom (like a dog with
a bone) and scrutinize it. The printing came later, often much later
or not at all. I could then look with a certain disinterest at what I’d
done and was sometimes pleased but often not.”39
We understand from his own account that Henderson was also an “ex-
plorer,” but one of a very different kind than his predecessors. He was not
an intruder stealing images with a concealed camera, but rather a disori-
ented person trying to gain a higher understanding of his new environ-
ment – in fact, by the time he started taking photographs he had already
been living on Chisenhale Road for three years (Figure 23).40 Henderson
39. N
igel Henderson, Photographs of Bethnal Green, exhibition catalogue (Notting-
ham, 1978), as quoted in Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger, As
Found, 93.
40. They moved in 1945, but his first photographs date from 1948.
69
surveyed his surroundings with his camera, taking samples that he
would then “scrutinize” in the darkroom just like a sample of tissue is
scrutinized under the microscope. Henderson therefore was not trying
to produce pleasing compositions or images – he was never the kind of
artist concerned with production – but rather was trying to use the cam-
era to construct a new relationship to the world, one in which the medi-
ating technology of photography allowed him to simultaneously detach
himself from his object of study while achieving a greater level of focus
and detail. In this case, we can follow this process as he transitioned from
a small handheld camera operated at eye level – a Leica – to a mid-for-
mat camera held at the hip that has a ground glass visor – a Rolleicord
– acquiring in the process a more removed and scientific vision of reality.
For Henderson, photography played the same role that the microscope
and the airplane had played before, that of achieving a disinterested but
highly detailed account of a particular fragment of reality.
When compared to Mass Observation and its British tradition,

Henderson’s images of this period represent an abandonment of the
anecdotal or folk aspects that furnish the documents produced, for
instance, by Spender. They also clearly distance themselves from the
humanistic tone prevalent in this lineage and adopt a more scientific
and removed attitude, thus bringing his body of work closer to the
particular strain of documentary photography that we have associated
with Walker Evans. The utilitarian character of the images is missing as
well, as they abandon the theme of the masses to focus instead on the
individuals themselves, more specifically the children, who in his im-
ages become universal characters (Figure 24). For instance, if we look
at the children in Spender’s photographs, they are always portrayed
against a backdrop that characterizes them as working class, while in
Henderson’s images – at least in those chosen and immortalized by
the Smithsons – they appear to be floating in a non-referential space,
where what matters are their actions and the relationships between
them. These images in question were taken in Chisenhale Road, most
probably from Henderson’s own doorsteps, and the kids playing hop-
scotch in the photographs are very likely his own.41
We could then think that Henderson’s years in Bethnal Green offered

him the possibility to leave behind his own bitter feelings about class
while simultaneously reclaiming his own lost childhood through his
children and his own child-like wandering around the area. In fact, he
was explicit in asserting this intention after his traumatic wartime ex-
perience when he referred to being “grateful to have the opportunity to
re-knit to a truer pattern.”42 He similarly expressed to Judith his desire
to engage the world through the un-cynical eye of a child, “the wish
to retain the ‘innocent eye’ of childhood, the unblinking, guileless, not
self-deceived record of an eye not distorted by extraneous associations
or false attitudes […] The genuine ‘innocent eye’ at work.”43 The whole
41. T he famous series of photographs of children playing was taken in 1951 in

Chisenhale road. Some of them were captioned with the names of the children
appearing in them. Several of the photographs also feature children who resem-
ble Hendersons’ children Justin and Drusilla, if we are to judge by his own family
portraits. See Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art, 48, 58-61.
42. C
harlie Jackson, “Nigel Henderson”(dissertation, Hornsey College of Art, 1973).
Quoted in Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art, 17.
43. L etter to Judith, n.d., Henderson Collection, Tate Archive. Quoted in Victoria
Walsh, Parallel of Life and Art, 54.
70
Chisenhale Road, 1951.
71
experience of life and photography in Bethnal Green can thus be re-
garded as a new beginning, a search for a more immediate and unprej-
udiced engagement with reality.
In 1954, nine years after their arrival at Bethnal Green, the Hendersons
and the Samuels – the family that Judith had spied on for two years –
moved out of Bethnal Green together to live in neighboring cottages
in the countryside of Landermere Quay (Figure 25), where they were
soon joined by the Paolozzis.44 There, Henderson and Paolozzi started
a new collaboration, forming a company for the production of wallpa-
per, ceramics, textiles and furniture.45 The company was called Ham-
mer Prints, and their products were distributed by Hull Traders, the
company for which the patriarch of the Samuels family, Leslie Samuels,
worked. While Henderson’s work has been – in many ways and for
good reason – framed in the tradition of British documentary pho-
tography linked to social studies, we can also appreciate how it differs
from its precedents in its its involved relationship with its subject mat-
ter. Henderson’s work was seminal in signaling a shift in class dynam-
ics and their representation in art and the media in postwar Britain.46
Figure 25: The King’s Head and adjacent cottages
With Henderson, we witness how the first cracks start to appear in
at Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex. Orwell’s “plate-glass pane,” a process that will be accelerated as it is
Henderson Collection, Tate Archive. engaged by Alison and Peter Smithson, members of the first generation
of lower middle class that had access to higher education, and whose
work we will situate as a further evolution of this chain of events.
Reconstructing Nigel
The biographic reading of Henderson’s photographs as part of a healing
process after his broken childhood and the trauma of the war – a sort
of personal reconstruction – is underlined if we consider the portion
of his photographic work that does not depict people and is therefore
exempt of direct association with the documentary lineage that we just
described. This specific body of work, which focused on the materiality
of buildings and objects found during his walks around the East End
(Figure 26), is actually part of a larger production comprising a series
of photographs, photograms and collages that Henderson produced
in parallel from 1948 to 1956. These more materially emphatic imag-
es share with his photographs of children playing a certain absorbed
quality as exemplified in their extreme focus on their subject, which
causes the surrounding reality to vanish, just like the world around a
child tends to disappear when he is concentrated on a game or a newly
Figure 26: Nigel Henderson, Wall Painting.
Stopping out. Grove Road, Bethnal Green, 1949-53.
discovered object. This absorbed quality in Henderson’s photographs
devoted to party walls, billboards and pavements, with their extreme
focus on the surface, correlates with his previous experience with the
microscope and the section. It soon became clear to Henderson that
there was a project, a new sensitivity full of potential, behind this my-
opic fixation with the broken surfaces and messy textures (Figures 27
and 28) of his new environment.
44. T hat year the Hendersons moved to the Stephen’s family house at Thorpe-Le
Soken as Judith inherited it, and they were soon followed by the Samuels and
the Paolozzis who moved to neighboring cottages. See Victoria Walsh, Parallel of
Life and Art, 133.
45. Ibid., 137-139.
46. H
enderson’s work is situated as a precedent for subsequent developments in
British cinema and the emergence of a socially minded documentary film scene
in Thomas Schregenberger, ed., As Found, 290-311. For a full account of the
transformations in the depiction of social classes in British cinema after the war
see John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British cinema 1956-1963 (London: British
Film Institute, 1986).
72
Distressed Door, 1949-53.

Sgraffiti on a Window, ca. 1949-53.
73
Photogram, ca. 1949.
“Some particular marks like the slicks and patches of tar on the
roads, the cracks and slicks and erosive marks on pavement slabs.
The ageing of wood and paintwork, the rich layering of billboards,
etc…. I linked with the work I did with the enlarger and which I
later felt made some common ground with some aspects of the
work of artists like Tapiés [sic], Burri, Jean Dubuffet.47
The work with the enlarger that Henderson refers to is a series of

photograms produced between 1949 and 1951 (Figure 29). Photo-
grams are photographic images produced directly in the darkroom by
arranging objects in the slot of the enlarger or on the photographic
paper. The fact that Henderson called his pieces produced with this
technique Hendograms indicates that he was aware of the work of Man
Ray – who called his own pieces Rayographs – and by extension of the
seminal work done in this medium by László Moholy-Nagy or Chris-
tian Schad.48 Nonetheless, Henderson’s photograms differ from those
by Man Ray or Moholy-Nagy in that the latter were concentrated in
the production of geometric compositions that articulate and subdi-
vide the surface of the picture in a language derived from geometric
avant-garde painting, while the former dealt primarily with the rev-
elation of textures and patterns. Henderson’s all-over approach in his
work with the enlarger is deliberately a-compositional and follows the
same logic found in his photographs, in which a particular “section”
of reality is zoomed into – exceeding the picture frame in a denial of
perspective – to later be scanned by the eye in a scientific mode.
While most of Henderson’s work of the period is undated, it is certain

that the photographic work predated the productions of photograms,
since his first enlarger was a gift from Palozzi at the end of 1949, while
47. N
ham, 1978), as quoted in Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and
Art, 53.
48. P
arallel of Life and Art, 21-23.
74
Photogram to suggest microscopic life, 1949.
his first photographs date from 1948. Upon taking up this parallel line
of experimentation, it soon became apparent to Henderson that both
endeavors were connected in the search for a new sensibility relating to
his prewar interest in biology and technology.
“I sent a few of my rather dim initial prints to my friend in Paris,

Eduardo Paolozzi. He very generously, on a trip to London later,
brought me over a small enlarger he had perhaps traded a drawing
for. I was rather fascinated by it. I looked upon [it as if it] was a
kind of drawing instrument and would cram all sort of things into
the slot conventionally allocated to the negative. I would cut out the
torn and teased heels of socks and elbows of jerseys. The fractured
cells reminded me of botanical micro sections. Glass and meshes
went in, for scaling up or straight on to paper for Hendograms
using the light sensitive paper and the light source of the enlarger
for contact printing. […] I was looking for “an image” by which I
suppose I meant something that suggested an imaginative world far
beyond the terms of the material serving to project its shadow.”49
The fact that Henderson moved beyond photographing the objects

found in the derelict sites and bombed quarters of the city to actually
collecting them and using them to produce images on the enlarger
takes on a biographical and historic significance, especially if we con-
sider that all along he was using the metaphor of biology. In making
his photograms, Henderson was literally picking up the broken frag-
ments of London, and infusing new life into them through technology,
turning them into living tissues. This drive is further made explicit in
the titles of some of his Hendograms, like his Photogram to Suggest
Microscopic Life (Figure 30) of 1949. This experience with photograms
49. N
ham, 1978). As quoted in Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger, As
Found, 93.
75
Collage, 1949.

Atlas, 1954.
was no doubt decisive in his development of an integrated aesthetic in which

his previous interests in biology, technology and surrealism came together in
the melting pot of his darkroom. This coming together and blurring of cate-
gories can also be considered a clear precedent for the Parallel of Life and Art
show, which was a similar effort of recollection in which the images of science,
biology and primitive art were presented together without captions in a magma
of floating pictures.
While Henderson gave up the production of photograms as such in 1951, he

continued to use the technique as part of a more elaborate collage format
involving mixed media, which became the main focus of his work during the
76
Head of a Man, 1956.
rest of his career (Figure 31). If his Hendograms could be considered

living tissues, some of his collages continued to expand on this Frank-
steinian idea of life created in the darkroom. A good example would be
his piece Atlas from 1954 (Figure 32), in which sets of different patterns
– many obtained from pieces of charred wood – morph into each other
as they expand with an irregular and palpitating perimeter, putting
forward the illusion of organs in formation.50 The culmination of this
process of increasing sophistication and articulation of tissues and or-
gans into larger wholes was his collage Head of a Man from 1956 (Fig-
ure 33). The piece is a large format work in which the figure of a man
emerges from colliding fragments of different photographic textures,
all of them obtained around Henderson’s home, then reprocessed in his
darkroom. In fact, if we are to read Henderson’s time in Bethnal Green
as a reconstruction, it will only make sense to consider this piece as a
self-portrait: the image of a man literally pulling together the broken
fragments of his psyche and personal history after the destruction and
trauma caused by the war.
All in all, Henderson’s emotional approach to the material reality

around him, his emphasis in technology or his drive towards the enun-
ciation of a new symbolism, are all ideas that strongly resonate with
certain preoccupations of postwar art. We could think for instance
50. S
ee James Lingwood’s description of the piece in David Robins, ed., The Inde-
pendent Group, 77.
77
of authors as diverse as Sigfried Gideon and his calls for a reconcili-
ation of emotional life and technologic advancement through a new
monumentality,51 or Jorge Oteiza with his pleas for a new foundational
myth for the existential man,52 as dealing with similar problems and
anxieties. Similarly, if we think chronologically of the references that
Henderson acknowledged in his work, we will situate him somewhere
between a group of prewar artists and theorists like Kepes or Mohol-
ogy Nagy – with whom Henderson’s fixation with science bears an
uncanny resemblance – and a group of postwar artists like Alberto
Burri and Antoni Tàpies – with whom he shares a taste for informal
compositions and non-artistic materials.
What makes Henderson different in this context and relevant to our case
is that his answer to these period-specific problems is not to formulate a
new symbolic formal language for technology – Gideon, Moholy-Nagy,
Kepes – or to retreat from technology altogether and into an ancestral
spiritual universe – Oteiza, Burri, Tàpies – but rather to assume that
Figure 34: Nigel Henderson, photograph technology is a pervasive but rather invisible presence in our lives, one
of Justin Henderson in the front room of 46, that operates silently transforming our surroundings and ourselves. This
Chisenhale Road, decorated with designs
by Eduardo Paolozzi, 1952. particular sensibility towards the relationship of technology and form,
As featured in Alison and Peter Smithson, together with the powerful notion of ruin and rebirth present in his
Ordinariness and Light.
work, will be capital in order to understand the direct impact that Hen-
derson had on Alison and Peter Smithson as they were starting a career
as architects in the years immediately following the war.
03. The Smithsons

“As Found”: An Inherited Sensibility
Nigel Henderson’s figure in English postwar art is better known
through his influence on other artists than through his own work.
Henderson was slightly older than his peers in the Independent Group
and had a wide and deep network of connections in the spheres of art
and culture dating from his prewar years, which caused him on many
occasions to become the mentor or protector of his younger friends.
More precisely, he contributed to jumpstarting the careers of both
Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton by getting them their first
shows.53 This soft mentoring role also applied to his relationship with
the Smithsons, who discovered alongside Henderson the sources with
which they started to build their own personal project (Figure 34). The
Smithsons labeled this attitude, discovered with Henderson, as the
“as found,” an umbrella term which referred mainly to a new sensibil-
ity dealing with the artifacts of the built environment and how new
developments in art and architecture could depart from them. While
51. S
igfried Gideon, “The Need for a New Monumentality” in Paul Zucker, ed., New
Architecture and City Planning, a Symposium (New York: Philosophical Library,
1944).
52. J orge Oteiza, Interpretación estética de la estatuaria megalítica americana (Ma-
drid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1952).
53. In the case of Hamilton, the exhibition Growth and Form in the ICA began as a
joint project between the two, with Henderson providing the original idea and se-
curing the show through his contact with Roland Penrose, and gradually moving
out of the picture. See Parallel of Life and Art, 27. In the case of Paolozzi, his for-
mative trip to Paris (1947-1949) was funded by the sales of his first solo show
at the Mayor Gallery in London, which Henderson secured through his friendship
with Freddy Mayor, who he had met through his mother. For more a description of
this episode and more on Henderson’s role as a hinge between two generations
of British art see Anne Massey, The Independent Group, 36-42.
78
this term was originally used only in private conversations, it started to
appear in their writings in 1990, when they were asked to comment in
retrospect about their involvement with the Independent Group at the
start of their career:
“In architecture, the ‘as found’ was something we thought we named

in the early 1950s when we first knew Nigel Henderson and saw in
his photographs a perceptive recognition of the actuality around
his house in Bethnal Green: children’s pavement play-graphics;
repetition of ‘kind’ in doors used as site hoardings; the items in
the detritus of bombed sites, such as the old boot, heaps of nails,
fragments of sack and mesh and so on.”54
The Smithsons examined this new reality that had been brought to
their attention by Henderson and saw in it the potential for a more
democratic approach to architecture articulated through a new sensi-
bility regarding materiality, technology, composition and site. Being
two young architects educated in modernism who were trying to situ-
ate themselves within that particular lineage after the war, they found
in Henderson the raw materials with which to craft a personal position
that responded to the first generation of modernist architects, particu-
larly in a moment when the mainstream discourse of the discipline was
rapidly shifting away from functionalism.
During this period, like we have discussed already regarding Gideon

and his preoccupations with emotional life and monumentality, a re-
sponse was being formulated from within the core of modernism, with
people like Le Corbusier rapidly moving into his more expressive and
rougher period during the early 1950s.55 In this context, and following
from Henderson, the Smithsons situate themselves in a position that
neither fully endorses a technologic heroism nor retreats to a primitive
state of spiritual absorption. Indeed, what the “as found” sensibility
represented more than anything else was an earnest attempt at recon-
ciling the old and the new as compatible materials for a more inclusive
architecture. These ideas started to develop primarily through the
crafting of a new attitude towards materiality:
“We were concerned with the seeing of materials for what they were:
the woodness of wood; the sandiness of sand. With this came a
distaste of the simulated, such as the new plastics of the period –
printed, coloured to imitate a previous product in ‘natural’ mate-
rials. Dislike for certain mixes, particularly with technology, such
as the walnut dashboard in a car. We were interested in how things
could be with technology touching everything and everyone.”56
In these words, we notice an appreciation of the intrinsic qualities of

the materials that is related to a notion of authenticity.57 In other words,
when the Smithsons think about the qualities of brick, for instance,
they are actually discussing a very particular type of “brickness,” one
54. A
lison Smithson and Peter Smithson “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found’” in David
Robins, ed., The Independent Group, 201.
55. Maisons Jaoul were designed in 1950 and completed in 1956.
56. Ibid.
57. A
round the same as they started writing about the “as found” they also started
working on a book on the weathering of materials in their own buildings. Peter
Salter, et al. Climate register: four works by Alison & Peter Smithson (London:
Architectural Association, 1994).
79
Figure 35: Alison and Peter Smithson
in the backyard at 32 Doughty Street,
Bloomsbury, 1949.
that is coarse and weathered, as we can see in their many photographs

of the brick walls lining the courtyards of the houses they inhabited in
London through the years (Figure 35).58 On the other hand, this em-
phasis on the authenticity of traditional materials is complemented by
a notable appetite for technology. We can read this technological drive
in the disgust with which they contemplate the assimilation of modern
industrially produced materials with the qualities of more traditional
and authentic ones.59 We will argue then that for the Smithsons – as
for Henderson – technology enters the equation as an immaterial
agent, one that is able to revitalize the old, “touching everything and
everyone,” but implying what we could describe as a minimal material
footprint. Therefore the new – technological and immaterial – and
the old – authentic and sensual – would behave like the two poles of
a battery, whose capacity to generate energy is based on their distinct
composition and clear separation.
This realization is capital, since it allows the Smithsons to combine

their material and technological sensibilities into a more comprehen-
sive approach to design. In fact, we will argue that the combination of
discreteness and interdependence regarding the old and the new and
the roles played by authenticity and technology in this complex rela-
tionship become the template with which they approach the problem
of site in architecture and, more specifically, their enunciation of a very
particular sort of contextualism:
“Setting ourselves the task of rethinking architecture in the early

1950’s, we meant by the ‘as found’ not only adjacent buildings but
all those marks that constitute remembrances in a place and that
58. S
ee Alison Margaret Smithson, and Peter Smithson, The Shift (London: Acade-
my Editions, 1982), 53 or Alison Margaret Smithson and Peter Smithson, The
Charged Void: Architecture, 16.
59. E
ven though the Smithsons briefly contemplated conducting an exploration of
the formal potential of newly available materials in their 1955 House of the
Future project, they soon decided to abandon that path as demonstrated in their
Patio and Pavilion installation realized just one year later. See Alison Margaret
Smithson and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture, 162-184. In this
book the Smithsons present the two projects together, with Patio and Pavilion be-
ing read as answering or reformulating the problem about the form of technology
posed by the House of the Future.
80
are to be read by finding out how the existing built fabric of the
place came to be as it was. […] As soon as architecture begins to be
thought about, its ideogram should be so touched by the “as found”
as to make it specific-to-place. […] The as found was a new seeing
of the ordinary, an openness as to how prosaic “things” could re-en-
ergise our inventive activity […] how the new could re-energise the
existing fabric.”60
For the Smithsons, an architectural project was an ideogram – today we

would say a diagram – which would exist as an abstraction floating in
ether until finding a site. At this moment the diagram would become
specified by the site, understood as a set of highly charged preexistences
and relationships. The underlying assumption was that the internal log-
ic of a building would respond and adapt to the information in the site
in a process that would fall short of being automatic or authorless.
Figure 36: Alison and Peter Smithson, Cluster City:
Diagrammatic plan of a small city, 1952-53. “Our reaction to the 1940s – for us design was a dirty word – tried
never to be negative … We worked with a belief in the gradual re-
vealing by a building-in-formation of its own rules for its required
form … The ‘as found’ aesthetic fed the invention of the ‘random
aesthetic’ of all our ‘Cluster’ ideograms, diagrams and theories,
which we first took to CIAM 9 at Aix-en-Provence, then to La Sar-
raz, and finally to CIAM 10 at Dubrovnik.”61
Therefore, the dualism with which the Smithsons approached issues of

materiality and technology found a parallel in their approach to site,
according to which the new – a flexible abstract system – would be
formalized through interaction with the old – a predetermined field
of objects and forces – found on a particular site. The necessity for
adaptability thus justified the very particular type of non-hierarchi-
cal geometries employed by the Smithsons during the early fifties in
their “random” and “cluster” diagrams (Figure 36), which were directly
derived from informal art references through Henderson and Paolozzi.
If the existing was to be closely examined and accounted for, then the
new needed to incorporate as many degrees of freedom as necessary
for this operation to succeed.
“As Found”: A Series of Strategies

The Urban Overlay: Golden Lane, Berlin Haupstadt
and Robin Hood Gardens
These ideas and the diagrams illustrating them were translated directly
into the Smithsons’ 1952 entry for the Golden Lane Estate housing com-
petition. Faced with the problem of inserting a large amount of housing
units into a quarter of the city of London that had almost been erased
by the bombings during the Blitz, the Smithsons came up with a very
particular approach. The surface of the bombed city would remain in-
tact. Rather than building from scratch or restoring the damaged urban
tissue to its former condition, a new network of contemporary architec-
ture would be overlaid on top of the found condition, stitching it back
together with a new language of linear buildings and streets in the air.
60. A
lison Smithson and Peter Smithson “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found’” in David
Robins, ed., The Independent Group, 201-202.
61. Ibid.
81
The Golden Lane project was devised during the end of 1951 and the
beginning of 1952, precisely during the period when the Smithsons
were under the spell of their unexpected encounter with Henderson.
In the drawings illustrating the project, we can clearly read how the
dualism through which they articulated their concept of the “as found”
became operational. In a series of diagrams referred to as the “Golden
Lane Overlay” (Figure 37), the Smithsons explain how the existing
roads and the scattered surviving buildings would be preserved and
reconnected by a new network of “spatial elements.”62
Reading their enunciation of the “as found” in parallel with the draw-
ings for the Golden Lane competition, it seems evident that the two are
inextricably linked. In these drawings, the site is dealt with in terms
of a highly charged field of relationships and preexistences – the roads
and the buildings – while the new intervention becomes an abstract
diagram that specifies itself through its careful reading of the site in
an attempt to “re-energise the existing fabric.” This attitude is equally
clear in the photomontages devised for the competition (Figure 38), in
which no effort was made to amend the roughed up condition of the
area. Party walls exposed by the disappearance of buildings during the
bombings became a dominant background for the composition, and
the ground plane was left as a messy coalition of small ruins and piles
of debris, all partially covered by growing vegetation. While in these
collages the found reality of the site is represented with all its charge of
authenticity and pathos, the intervention by the Smithsons is repre-
sented in contrast as literally transparent, just a few terse lines through
which we are still allowed to see the ruins of the city.
In addition to this clear division of labor between the authentic/ma-

terial and the technologic/immaterial elements of the project, a third
element comes to the fore in these montages which decisively con-
tributes to clarify what the ultimate goal was with this particular way
to understand architecture. The people, the collaged characters that
populate the composition (Figure 39), acquire a protagonist role and
dominate the foreground as if the buildings were just the necessary
scaffolding for showcasing human activity and interaction, for foster-
ing human life, revealing how the “as found” was, more than anything
else an attempt at enunciating an architecture that would let itself be
specified by the life of its inhabitants.
Figure 37: Alison and Peter Smithson,
The Golden Lane Overlay, 1953. Despite losing the Golden Lane competition, the Smithsons incorpo-
rated the diagrams and drawings of the project to their presentation for
CIAM 9. In the final version of the grid, Henderson’s photographs act
as a provocation that sparks reflection, while the Smithsons’ drawings
for Golden Lane act as a demonstration of the architectural and urban
potential of their ideas. A proof of their faith in this potential is the
fact that the Smithsons continued to develop and refine this project for
years. In 1957, six years later, they reformulated it into a more sophisti-
cated and comprehensive urban proposal in their entry for the Berlin
62. M
any of the competition documents were reproduced in Alison Margaret Smith-
son and Peter Smithson, Ordinariness and Light. Additionally, larger reproduc-
tions of some of the documents can be found in Alison Margaret Smithson and
Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: architecture, 86-95.
63. The Charged Void: urbanism, 45-63.
82
Photomontage of proposed decks on actual site,
Golden Lane Competition, 1952.

Photomontage of street deck with a supposed
Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio
in foreground, Golden Lane Competition, 1953.
83
Haupstadt competition (Figure 40), where a whole quarter of Berlin
was reorganized through the insertion of a new network of streets-
in-the-air.63 Sadly, they did not win the Berlin competition either, but
years later in the late 1960s they finally found the opportunity to put
some of these ideas to the test.
Finished in 1972, their realized proposal for Robin Hood Gardens – a

public housing scheme in Tower Hamlets, London – consisted of two
linear housing blocks derived from those originally designed for the
Golden Lane project.64 Unfortunately, the immaterial quality with
which their “spatial structures” were supposed to operate in the city
fell prey to the heroism of Béton Brut (Figure 41). Once materialized
as 480-foot-long, ten-storey-tall buildings of reinforced concrete,
the Golden Lane proposal started to operate in a mode closer to the
giant and oppressive walls of a fortification or a prison, doing away
with the illusion of lightness and the idea of immaterial connections
suggested in the graphic representation of the original competition
entry.65 Indeed, in its failure, Robin Hood Gardens became an eloquent
demonstration of how the architectural premises put forward by the
Smithsons in the early fifties diverged in fundamental ways from other
attempts to reformulate modernism after the war, thus reinforcing our
characterization that the Smithsons’ and Le Corbusier’s brutalisms
were indeed very different animals.
A Synthetic Vernacular: Burrows Lea Farm, Close Houses,

Fold Houses, Sugden House
While Golden Lane, Berlin Haupstadt and Robin Hood Gardens repre-
sented the application of ideas derived from the “as found” attitude in
Figure 40: Alison and Peter Smithson, an urban context, there was a parallel series of projects by the Smith-
Berlin Hauptstadt diagrammatic plans, 1957.
sons in which the same concepts were tested in rural settings with a
similar degree of cohesiveness. Both Alison and Peter were from the
north of England where the rural landscape has been gradually shaped
by human intervention since time immemorial, and therefore to them
it was not only the historic city that was charged with information and
traces, but the countryside that was equally loaded as a site (Figure 42).66
The Smithsons were indeed fascinated by the land formations, mounds

and scars left in the fields of the North of England by centuries of
agriculture and human inhabitation and by how vernacular structures
aggregated, integrating seamlessly into this manmade landscape.67
Between 1954 and 1956 they tried to “read” these signs in the rural
environment and respond to them with an architectural language that
evolved through a series of projects influenced by this atavist attrac-
tion to topography. These projects were also meant to be illustrations
Figure 41: Alison and Peter Smithson, 64. The Charged Void: architecture, 296-313.
Robin Hood Gardens, 1973.
65. T he building had a difficult reception since the beginning, being heavily vandal-
ized by its own inhabitants. It is now awaiting demolition as part of a redevelop-
ment plan by Tower Hamlets Council.
66. P
eter was born in Stockton-on-Tees in northeast England, and Alison was born in
Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
67. S
ee the illustrations in Alison Margaret Smithson and Peter Smithson, Ordinari-
ness and Light, 72-73.
84
photographs of the English countryside
as featured in Ordinariness and Light.
of how the different densities of human habitation in the countryside

could be acted upon.68
While their response to working in the bombed quarters of London and

Berlin was the overlay of a new layer of technologically advanced archi-
tecture, their attitude towards working in the lower densities of the rural
environment could be described as a synthetic vernacular, a bastardized
interpretation of traditional architecture mixed with industrial materials
to be laid out responsively through a recourse to the same compositional
devices derived from their “cluster” and “random” diagrams.
68. T he projects discussed here were actually devised as illustrations for their CIAM
10 presentation, in which each of the types of settlement s in the valley section
diagram by Patrick Geddes found a suitable mechanism for densification and
expansion. The Charged Void: Architecture, 124.
85
Presentation panels for CIAM 10 with diagrams
of Burrows Lea Farm, 1956.
In the first of these projects, Bates’ Burrows Lea Farm from 1953-1955
(Figure 43), the Smithsons derived the massing strategy for an isolated
dwelling in the landscape from the earthworks found in castles and
fortifications in the north of England.69 In this project, the program for
a single-family home cantilevers from a utility core housing the car ga-
rage, toilets and laundry room. The ground level is thus protected by an
artificial mound that wraps around the house, hiding the core as if Le
Corbusier’s Villa Savoye was being swallowed back into the earth from
which it so much wished to depart. Additionally, instead of the elegant
custom-made horizontal windows of the French villa, in Burrows Lea
Farm we find a random repetition of standard size windows, the type
recently made available after the war by manufacturers such as Crittall.
Therefore, in Burrows Lea Farm, the articulation of the old and the
new happens on at least two levels. On the one hand, the land forma-
tion acts as an atavistic anchor in opposition to the floating volume.
On the other hand, in the composition of the facades – specially in the
preliminary drawings by Alison Smithson – we find the “repetition
of kind” reminiscent of Henderson’s photographs, as standard-sized
industrial windows are arranged according to an informal aesthetic in
what appears to be a coarse masonry wall made of local materials.
In the second project of this series, the Fold Houses of 1955 (Figure 44),
the Smithsons explored the possibility of inserting new constructions
into an existing tissue in order to achieve an increased density in the
loosely aggregated villages of northern England.70 This approach to ru-
ral infill was carried out through the insertion of single-family homes
– the Fold Houses – carefully placed according to the same logic used
in the growth of these villages. According to the Smithsons, in these
settlements the main houses expanded through the addition of back
houses for labor around a service yard connected to the village street
in the front and the fields in the back. Inserted in the interstices of
this arrangement, the Fold Houses sought to protect the existing open
spaces from winds and to create new connections between the different
clusters of buildings.
Again in this project, we find the articulation of old and new happen-
ing at two distinct levels. On one hand, the Fold Houses are minimal
technological constructions carefully grafted into the existing pattern

69. Ibid., 124-134.
Fold Houses, 1955.
70. The Charged Void: architecture, 135 and The Charged Void: urbanism, 24-35.
86
Four Variations of Fold Houses, 1954.

Close Houses.
of the settlement. On the other hand, at the level of the architecture,

a similar duality is reproduced. In the Fold Houses, the North and
East elevations that correspond to the prevailing winds were meant
to be almost completely solid and made of masonry reused from
abandoned constructions, while the South and West elevations were
intended to be built with light construction and generous openings in
a rational language (Figure 45).
In the third of these rural projects, the Close Houses of 1955 (Figure 46),
the Smithsons tentatively approached the problem of building new
developments in the small industrial towns of Northern England.71
Through an innovative approach to the split section, they arranged
rows of attached houses by threading them with a covered close, a pro-
tected pedestrian street that granted access to each of the volumes and
allowed views through the private yards into the landscape beyond.
Similarly to the Burrows Lea Farm and the Fold Houses, this project
was characterized by its high degree of adaptability to the contour of
the land – the rows of houses were described as “riding the landscape”
– and by the particular interpretation of the vernacular language of
71. T he Charged Void: Architecture, 136-138 and The Charged Void: Urbanism, 36-40.
87
Sugden House sketches, first version, 1955-56.

Sugden House sketches, second version, 1956.
88
pitched roofs and masonry walls, in which we again find a playful
approach to the random composition of standard-size industrial win-
dows in the elevations.
While all of the previous projects were theoretical proposals meant

to illustrate their ideas about a contextual urbanism for the British
countryside, some of these concepts actually materialized in the form
of a built project. The Sugden House (1955-1956) was a single-family
house designed for Derek Sugden, one of the engineers at Ove Arup
that closely collaborated with the Smithsons.72 The first proposal for
the project, drawn by Alison Smithson, features an interplay of sin-
gle-pitched roofs and standard-sized openings directly derived from
their rural proposals, and more precisely from their design for the
Close Houses (Figure 47).
The Sugdens were apparently appalled by the extravagant quality of the

first design prepared by Alison, which they deemed impractical, forc-
ing the Smithsons to subsequently design a simplified version in which
a single asymmetric double-pitched roof delineated a strong volume
of vernacular resonances (Figure 48).73 This strong volume rendered in
traditional stock brick was in turn challenged by the awkward informal
arrangement of standard-sized aluminum Crittall windows and the use
of other industrial products such as Marley and pvc tiles. The unstable
image of such an artifact was further underlined as its broken mon-
umentality was presented to the viewer from the elevated standpoint
provided by a geometrically shaped earth apron, again reminiscent of
the earthworks of their previous rural proposals (Figure 49).

Sugden House.
72. T he Charged Void: Architecture, 150-157. Also see Derek Sugden, “The Sugden
House,” in Pamela Johnston, Rosa Ainley and Clare Barrett eds., Architecture
Is Not Made with the Brain: The labour of Alison and Peter Smithson (London:
Architectural Association, 2005), 73-77.
73. Derek Sugden, “The Sugden House,” 73-77.
89
04. Conclusion: The Solar Pavilion
The two distinct lineages of projects corresponding to the urban and
rural applications of the “as found” can be understood as differentiated
attempts to digest the duality that the Smithsons had inherited from
Henderson. In fact, each of these projects can be characterized as a
tentative proposal for the synthesis of technology and its redemptive
role with a certain cult of authenticity, in a split that strongly resembles
Henderson’s equidistance with prewar and postwar art currents. In
this respect, both series of projects could be considered incomplete or
unbalanced in their impartiality, unless we consider them as a whole.
Nonetheless, there is one project in which the Smithsons were able
to successfully implement their ideas in a true synthesis of the exper-
iments carried out during their first decade of work in both urban
and rural settings. As with many other architects trying to push the
boundaries of the discipline only to find their efforts frustrated by
the difficulties of practicing in the real world, the Smithsons found a
window of freedom and opportunity in the design and construction of
their own house, in this case a weekend home in Fonthill, Wiltshire.74

Solar Pavilion, Aerial view from south, 1964.
In the Solar Pavilion, also known as the Upper Lawn Pavilion, de-
signed and built by the Smithsons between 1959 and 1960, we find
many of the ideas enunciated in their “as found” attitude coming
together in unexpected and haunting ways. The basic premise for the
project is derived from their overlay strategy as defined in the Golden
Lane and Berlin projects: the found condition – in this case the ruin of
a former stone cottage – is basically cauterized and preserved, while a
new construction – a minimal, technological volume clad in plywood
and aluminum – is carefully placed over it (Figure 50). This logic is
74. T he Charged Void: Architecture, 238-247.
90
underlined by the technique with which the Smithsons represent the
project, which is also derived from the Golden Lane and Berlin proj-
ects: a set of vertically stacked drawings describing the different layers
of an overlay (Figure 51).
Unlike in their urban projects, though, the fit between the old and the
new is particularly minute and complex here, as the remains of the ex-
isting walled compound are carefully scrutinized in order to attain the
maximum possible results with the minimum possible intervention.
The new construction, for instance, does not fully overlap with the
footprint of the former cottage, which means that one of the existing
windows in the perimeter wall is incorporated into the new volume,
while the other is left to communicate the interior courtyard directly
with the access road in a surreal gesture (Figure 52). In an echo of this
situation, the chimney of a former building in the compound becomes
an exterior fireplace for outdoor cooking.
Additionally, the slippage of the new volume causes it to rest partially

on the yard while a portion of the original interior flooring becomes
exposed in the exterior courtyard, further activating the already rich
patchwork composition of different surface treatments in the lot. It is
indeed difficult to overemphasize the importance allotted to surface
as inherited from Henderson in this project, if we look, for instance,
at how carefully all the different textures and flooring patterns accu-
mulated through time were redrawn and reorganized into a compre-
hensive whole by Alison Smithson in her plan drawing of the proposal
(Figure 53), or how carefully and poignantly she photographed the

Solar Pavilion diagram.

Solar Pavilion, view of the yard.

Solar Pavilion, floor plan of the compound.
91
different textures during construction (Figure 54). The extreme care
with which the Smithsons devoted themselves to the “perceptive
recognition” and reinterpretation of the surface of the site is further
exemplified by their covering of the foundation of a former construc-
tion with earth in order to provide a sheltered space for outdoor play,
resulting in a domestic and childish version of the heroic earthworks of
northern fortifications already attempted in the Burrows Lea Farm or
the Sugden House.
While the basic elements of the Fonthill project – a walled perimeter

and a pavilion – are clearly reminiscent of their design for the This is
Tomorrow exhibition, the more specific three-dimensional assemblage
of the new volume with the existing structure of the former cottage is
actually derived from their Fold Houses proposal.75 In both the Solar
Pavilion and the Fold Houses the north elevation is entrusted to a deep
masonry wall made of reused traditional materials with very few open-
Figure 54: Alison and Peter Smithson, ings, while the south elevation is built with light wood frame construc-
Solar Pavilion paving, 1963.
tion and features generous openings organized in regular horizontal
bands (Figure 55). In the specific case of the Solar Pavilion, the building
is strongly integrated into the perimeter wall, dissolving the volume into
the courtyard and enhancing the environmental quality of the project.
In the Solar Pavilion, the ideas about materiality, technology, composi-

tion and responsiveness to site derived from the Smithsons’ experience
with Henderson, first enunciated through the “as found” and then

Solar Pavilion, view from the southeast with
folding doors open for summer use, 1963.
75. B
runo Krucker, for instance is too quick in assimilating the Solar Pavilion as a di-
rect deployment of the Patio and Pavilion installation at another scale. See Bruno
Krucker, “Complex Ordinariness,” in Daidalos no. 75 (May 2000): 44.
92
Figure 56: Alison and Peter Smithson, Figure 57: Alison and Peter Smithson,
children at Solar Pavilion, 1962. Solar Pavilion, Aluminum faced doors
in alloy angle frame.
tested in a series of urban and rural projects throughout the 1950s,

finally found a successful architectural expression. If we had the old as
a repository of authenticity, and the new, which acted as a technologi-
cal structure of minimal materiality that activates the existing, the next
logical step was to then add human decoration, the signs of inhabita-
tion, in order to complete the equation for an architectural proposition
that was conceptual, anti-formal and democratic, one that called for
the participation of the user. In its oscillation between an object and
an environment, the Solar Pavilion became the perfect device through
which to explore a new way of life in contact with nature (Figure 56).
Through the years since their encounter with Henderson – and later
with Ray and Charles Eames – an intensified attention to everyday
life had become a habit for the Smithsons as they became collectors of
castaway objects and designers of myriad ephemera to celebrate their
children’s birthdays, Christmas or to indicate a change of address for
their office. Nevertheless, it was during their period inhabiting the
Solar Pavilion, from 1961 to 1982 that these casual events started to be
systematically recorded, as they became documentarians of their own
lives (Figure 57). In fact, starting in 1962 and for more than twenty
years, Alison kept a diary, both written and photographic, of their ac-
tivities during their weekend visits to the house.76 It is only fitting then
76. T he Smithsons published a whole book with the contents of this documentary
effort. See Alison Margaret Smithson and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn: Solar
Pavilion (Barcelona: Collecció Arquitectura i Urbanisme, 1986). Also, for a com-
prehensive account of the houses of the Smithsons see Max Risselada, “The
Art of Inhabitation,” in Beatriz Colomina, et al. Alison and Peter Smithson: From
the house of the future to a house of today (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004),
134-165. For a comprehensive explanation of the role of ephemeral installations
in the second half of their career see Alison Margaret Smithson and Peter Smith-
son, The Shift (London: Academy Editions, 1982).
93
that we conclude this chapter by acknowledging the relevance of this
diary (Figure 58), which echoes the one written by Judith Henderson
about a decade before. If with the Hendersons we appreciated the first
cracks in the “glass pane” separating social classes in post war England,
with the Smithsons we witness the dissolution of such barrier, as ob-
server and subject of study become one. Life in the Solar Pavilion was
itself a research project, a way to gain insight into their environment
and a means to teach themselves a new way to live.
In their design, construction and inhabitation of the Solar Pavilion,

the Smithsons culminated a process of interrogation triggered by
Henderson, as they reconsidered the values assigned to technology,
culture and nature, and enunciated an architecture that redefined the
relationships between these concepts with precision. In its oscillation
between object and environment, in its careful balance of ephemerality
and permanence, this project contains lessons for a time – ours – when
once again the irruption of new technologies forces us to question the
balance between the material and the immaterial in our lives, to ac-
knowledge the changes taking place within ourselves and the way that
we relate to the reality around us.
Figure 58: Peter Smithson, Alison reads while
the kids play in sun, Solar Pavilion, 1966.
Bibliography
– Beatriz Colomina, et al. Alison and Peter Smithson: From the House
of the Future to a house of today. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004.
– Evans, Gary. John Grierson: Trailblazer of documentary films. Mon-
tréal: XYZ Publishers, 2005.
– Frizzel, Deborah. Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes: Pho-
to-Documents, 1932-1942. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art,
1997.
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British Film Institute, 1986.
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theory. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
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tecture is not Made with the Brain: The labour of Alison and Peter
Smithson. London: Architectural Association, 2005.
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Lawn Pavilion by Alison and Peter Smithson. Zürich: Gta/ETH, 2002.
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95
Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore
vs. Robert Venturi
Chapter 2 and Denise Scott Brown
01. Introduction
– Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
– Ed Ruscha
– Stephen Shore
02. Learning from Las Vegas

– Th
e importance of
A&P Parking Lots – 1968
– The Las Vegas Studio – 1968
– The book(s) – 1972-1977
03. Learning from Levittown

– On Pop Art, Permissiveness
and Planning – 1969
– Th
e Learning from
Levittown Studio – 1970
– S igns of Life: Symbols in the City,
the Exhibition – 1976
04. Conclusions
– Exploring the Ordinary
– A Moment of Glory
– Doing Damage Control
– The Oldenburg Effect
– Inclusive Superficiality
97
Figure 1: Denise Scott Brown, South African and
American photographs from her personal archive,
1961 - 1968.
01. Introduction
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s best-known project is prob-
ably their 1972 co-authored book Learning from Las Vegas, in which
they explored the spatial configuration of the gambling city as an
extreme example of a new American commercial vernacular urban-
ism.1 The success of the book at the time of its publication was not only
due to its incisive analysis of the city and the innovative theoretical
premises derived from it, but most of all because of its groundbreaking
photographic illustrations and layout.
The graphic material for the Las Vegas book was the result of a re-
search-studio held at Yale University School of Architecture during the
fall of 1968, which heavily relied on documentary photography tech-
niques. Among the most memorable of these photographic documents
were several schedules depicting the different architectural types found
in the Las Vegas Strip as well as a continuous elevation of the famous
avenue. These photographs have become synonymous with the interest
in the ordinary built environment and pop culture that the book by
Venturi and Scott Brown ignited, starting a trend in architecture that
continues to exist and thrive to this day.
The technique of these famous photographs and the sensibility behind

them were derived to a large extent from the innovative work carried
out by the l.a. artist Ed Ruscha in a series of photography books that
he self-edited during the 1960s.2 For Venturi and Scott Brown, Ruscha
came to embody the visual paradigm of a “non-judgmental attitude,”
one that had already been developed in the arts and the humanities and
that they believed should accordingly find a parallel in architecture.3
The aim was to force the discipline of architecture to confront a series of
urban and architectural phenomena which had sprung spontaneously –
outside of modernist academia – and that architects at the time demon-
ized and refused to discuss because of their lack of formal definition.
Two years after the Las Vegas studio, Venturi and Scott Brown under-
took a similar research project devoted to analyzing yet another urban
phenomenon caused by American car culture: suburban housing. The
research-studio, undertaken from Yale University in 1970, was titled
Learning from Levittown. While it was never published in a book
format like its predecessor, its raw materials were transformed into an
exhibition for the Smithsonian Institution in 1976.4 The materials from
the exhibition, again display an emphasis on documentary photogra-
phy techniques. This time, however, the artist being appropriated and
emulated is no longer Ed Ruscha, but the photographer Stephen Shore,
known for his pioneering of color photography during the early 1970s.
Scott Brown argues that the shift in photographic reference from Las Vegas
to Levittown was due to practical reasons, since Stephen Shore was much
1R
obert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1972)
2 In the years between 1963 and 1972 Ed Ruscha’s production focused around
a series of photography books. Many of them were devoted to the study of the
commercial sprawl in the American West Coast. This subject is discussed later in
the chapter.
3D
enise Scott Brown, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning.” Journal of The
American Institute Of Planners 35, (May 1969): 184.
4 T he exhibition was titled Signs of Life: Symbols in the American city. It was held at
the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian in 1976.
99
Figure 2: The Strip seen from the desert,
with Robert Venturi’s silhouette,
photographed by Denise Scott Brown in 1966.
closer geographically and willing to work on a commission involving color

photography.5 On the other hand, we cannot help but notice a substantial
difference in the attitude with which these two artists approached the built
environment and the fact that Venturi and Scott Brown were doubtless
sensitive to such nuances. Thus, their shift in visual references when mov-
ing from one project to another will necessarily correlate with a change in
their own relationship to popular culture and its products.
With this distinction in mind, we will try to retrace Venturi and Scott
Brown’s research projects in the decade between 1965 and 1975, as they en-
gaged the issue of contemporary car urbanism and architecture through
the lens of photography from Las Vegas to Levittown. By analyzing their
use of photography in their publications and exhibitions, we will try
to develop an interpretation of the role that it played in their thinking.
Finally, we will analyze a group of projects that the architects produced in
parallel with their research during this period, in order to clarify the dif-
ferent sensibilities that the couple displayed through the years regarding
the built environment, and how those sensibilities correlated with a set of
modes of operation in their own architectural production.
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Before delving into Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s interest
in the untutored architecture of the automobile and in documentary
photography as a way to explore this reality, we should briefly point
out the diversity of lines of inquiry that intermingle in their work. In
fact, unlike Alison and Peter Smithson, who were born in the same
part of England and had studied architecture together, Robert Venturi
and Denise Scott Brown had very different backgrounds. By the time
they met, both of them were already practicing academics, each with a
distinct voice and set of interests.6
Robert Venturi (Figure 2) was born in Philadelphia and studied ar-

chitecture at Princeton under, among others, Professor Jean Labatut.
Princeton at the time was the only architecture school in America
still organized around a Beaux Arts curriculum that retained art and
5D
enise Scott Brown, in discussion with the author, May 2013.
6U
nless otherwise noted all biographical data are taken from David B. Brownlee,
“Form and Content” in Denise Scott Brown, et al. Out of the Ordinary: Robert Ven-
Figure 3: Photographs of Italy taken by turi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates. (Philadelphia, Pa.: Philadelphia Museum of
Robert Venturi between 1954 and 1956. Art; [New Haven]: In association with Yale University Press, 2001), 2-90.
100
Figure 4: The Strip seen from the desert,
with Denise Scott Brown in the foreground,
taken by Robert Venturi in 1966.
architectural history as compulsory subjects. Venturi’s graduate thesis

for Princeton was titled “Context in Architectural Composition” and
was an argument in favor of site-specificity, charged with examples from
Roman monuments and American domestic modern architecture.7
After graduation Venturi eventually moved back to Philadelphia where

Louis Kahn hired him as an assistant at the University of Pennsylva-
nia and recommended him for the Rome Prize Fellowship.8 After two
failed attempts, he finally won the prize in 1954 and took off to Italy
to study and travel for two years. Deeply affected by his Italian expe-
rience (Figure 3),9 Venturi returned to Philadelphia where he gradu-
ally started his own firm and became a professor at the University of
Pennsylvania.10 Venturi capped this formative phase of his career with
the publication of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and
the construction of his mother’s house, both projects completed in
1964.11 Already in these two works, which were concerned mainly with
a reevaluation of the role of historic architecture within the discipline,
we find a secondary interest in the generic artifacts of the domestic
environment. For Venturi, a sophisticated and contorted approach
to geometry acted as the immaterial armature that allowed these two
heterogeneous sources to be unified in an architecture project.
Denise Scott Brown (Figure 4), on the other hand, was born and raised
in South Africa, where her father was a merchant in Johannesburg.
Figure 5: Denise and Robert Scott Brown, After an initial attempt at studying architecture at the University of
photographs of Venice, 1950s.
7S
ee Robert Venturi, MFA Thesis (1950), “Epilogue” to Iconography and Electronics
upon a Generic Architecture: A view from the drafting room (Cambridge, Mass. and
London: The MIT Press, 1996), 331-374.
8A
fter graduation Venturi worked two years for Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills,
Michigan, before returning to Philadelphia.
9S
everal of Venturi’s Italian photographs have been published in Robert Venturi,
“Photographs from the American Academy in Rome, 1954-1956,” AA Files 56,
(2007): 56-63. According to Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi used to ask other
people to take pictures for him, giving instructions rather than handling the camera
himself. Denise Scott Brown, in discussion with the author, May 2013.
10 A
ccording to Martino Stierli, Venturi came into contact during that trip with figures
such as Ernesto Nathan Rogers and other Italian architects involved in neorealis-
mo, an influence in his enunciation of contextualism that Venturi never acknowl-
edged during his career. See Martino Stierli, “In the Academy’s Garden: Robert
Venturi, the Grand Tour and the Revision of Modern Architecture,” AA Files 56,
(2007): 42-55.
11 T he book was finished in 1964 but not published until 1966. Robert Venturi, Com-
plexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York, Museum of Modern Art in asso-
ciation with the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 1966)
101
Witwatersrand, she moved to England in 1952 where she eventually
completed her studies at the Architectural Association in London in
1954. During her years in London, which also involved extensive stays
in Venice, Denise and her husband Robert Scott Brown became heavily
invested in photography (Figure 5), taking large numbers of images of
quotidian subjects which were influenced by the work of Nigel Hen-
derson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Alison and Peter Smithson.12
It was precisely Peter Smithson who advised Denise and her husband
to travel to Philadelphia and study with Louis Kahn in 1958. Unluckily,
since they enrolled in the land and city planning program,13 they were
only able take one course with Kahn, who taught in the architecture
department. At that time, the urban program at Penn was split between
formal planners, coming from architecture, and social planners, com-
ing from sociology. Among the latter group was Herbert Gans. In 1958,
the same year that Scott Brown enrolled in his course, Gans moved to
the suburb of Levittown, Pennsylvania as a participant observer in or-
der to carry out the field work for his seminal book The Levittowners.14
By the time Scott Brown was finally able to take a course with Louis
Kahn, during her last semester at school, she found herself already
uninterested in form-making and more preoccupied with social ideas
and quantitative research.
Robert Scott Brown died in a car accident in 1959, leaving Denise a

young widow in Philadelphia. Soon after graduating, in 1960, Scott
Brown became a teacher at University of Pennsylvania, where she met
Robert Venturi during a faculty meeting. The two started collaborating
between 1962 and 1964, when Scott Brown took over the organization
of the seminars and workshops unfolding from Venturi’s course on
architectural theories, the contents of which course later became Com-
plexity and Contradiction in Architecture. In the spring of 1965 Scott
Brown moved to the west coast to teach at Berkeley in San Francisco.15
During her trip she stopped in Las Vegas, a city which caused a great
impression on her and which she visited and photographed intensively
again that same year. In September Scott Brown moved to Los Angeles
to teach at ucla, where she had been offered a position as co-chair of
the Urban Planning department. Part of her project for her tenure at
ucla was to conduct a research project on the city of Las Vegas, her
interest deriving from the fact that it could be considered an extreme
case of American commercial sprawl, an urban phenomenon that
bewildered architects and planners at the time as it posed a problem in
terms of the image of cities.
Upon moving to l.a. Denise Scott Brown settled in Santa Monica, and
it was precisely in the small bookstores along Santa Monica Boulevard
that she became acquainted with the photography books being edited
12 D
enise Scott Brown, in discussion with the author, May 2013. Other early influ-
ences on her approach to photography were Henri Cartier Bresson and Donald
Appleyard, who studied with her at the AA and later co-authored the book The
View from the Road with Kevin Lynch.
13 S
ince they applied in the very last minute they had no time to put together a port-
folio, which caused them to only be able to apply to the urban studies program.
14 H
erbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of life and politics in a new suburban
community (London: Penguin, 1967).
15 F or a full chronology of Venturi and Scott Brown see Diane L. Minite, “Chronolo-
gy” in Denise Scott Brown, et al. Out of the Ordinary, 244-251.
102
Figure 6: Portrait of Ed Ruscha
by Dennis Hopper, 1964.
at the time by the artist Ed Ruscha, which immediately captured her

attention.16 In a moment when new urban forms challenged former
conventions about the representation of architecture and urbanism,
Scott Brown immediately recognized a fresh perspective in Ruscha´s
approach. Already immersed in her own photographic study of this
subject matter, the discovery of Ruscha reaffirmed Scott Brown´s con-
viction that this was a topic to seriously take on and that photography
would undeniably play a role in her research.
Ed Ruscha
After spending his childhood in Oklahoma City, Ed Ruscha (Figure 6)
moved to Los Angeles in 1956, where he enrolled in the Chouinard Art
Institute.17 Following an early interest in popular culture and commer-
cial art, he enrolled in graphic design and illustration courses and soon
started freelancing as a sign painter, typesetter and pressman for an art
publisher. While Ruscha only took one photography course during his
years at Chouinard, he was exposed to some history of photography
in design classes, where he became familiar with the work of Walker
Evans and Robert Frank.18 Walker Evans shocked him with the clarity
and removed quality of his pictures, while Robert Frank impressed
him with the spare and provocative way in which he laid out his book
16 D
enise Scott Brown, in discussion with the author, May 2013. During her time in
L.A. and in later visits, Scott Brown bought at least six of the small books by Ed
Ruscha.
17 S
ylvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and Photography (New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art; Göttingen, Ger.: Steidl, 2004), 15.
18 Ibid., 17
103
Figure 7: European Photographs
by Ed Ruscha, 1961.
The Americans (Grove Press, 1959). Both of these references would later
influence the conception and design of his own photography books.19
Much like Venturi and Scott Brown, Ruscha was also shaped by his en-
counter with Europe. In 1961 he traveled to the continent and for nine
months traveled incessantly and took hundreds of pictures. Interest-
ingly enough, rather than focusing on the monuments of antiquity or
the major art works, he devoted himself to minor motifs, such as shop
windows, vernacular architecture and signs (Figure 7).20 As opposed
19 Ibid., 20.
20 F or a full account of the trip and a large selection of the photographs see Margit
Rowell, Ed Ruscha, Photographer (Göttingen: Steidl; New York: Whitney Museum
of American Art, 2006).
104
Figure 8: Ed Ruscha, cover and spread from
the book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963.
to the traditional grand tour, where the travelers imported Mediter-

ranean culture upon return to their countries, Ruscha’s trip to Europe
was transcendental to the extent that it caused him to see America
with fresh eyes and become aware of the possibilities of contemporary
American influences for his own art.21
Ed Ruscha’s early interest in commercial art and his later realization of

the potential of American material culture as the raw material for an
art practice finally came to fruition in the city of Los Angeles during
the 1960s.22 It was there and during this period that a group of artists
revolving around Ferus Gallery engaged in developing a new public
persona for the Californian artist. They sought to oppose the romantic
myth of the New York action painter and enjoyed picturing themselves
as un-preoccupied action men, roaming the city immersed in the pop-
ular culture of cars, beaches and girls, all of which became their motifs.
This group included, among others, Larry Bell, Bruce Conner, Billy Al
Bengston and Ed Ruscha.
It was within the specific context of this art scene that Ruscha published
the first of his photographic books, Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, in 1963
(Figure 8). The book is a small volume, 7x5 inches, with a white cover
featuring the title in red type. It contains 48 pages with 26 photographs
of gas stations, most of them placed on the right page, with a caption on
the left page providing the name and location of each building. The book
is a documentation of a trip from l.a. to Ruscha’s home town of Oklaho-
ma City. Most of the images were taken during the day, from across the
21 Sylvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and Photography, 89.

22 C
écile Whiting, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), 63-71. In one of the chapters of her book on the L.A. art
scene, Cécile Whiting gives a clear and compelling account of how artists like Ed
Ruscha, Larry Bell, Bruce Conner or Billy Al Bengston were clearly engaging the
stereotypes about southern California as part of the definition of their own iden-
tity. This was meant to be read as a challenge to the way that Los Angeles was
always described from New York as a city of lazy bon vivants who were unable to
produce serious art.
105
Figure 9: Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas,
1962, by Ed Ruscha in his book,
Twentysix Gasoline Stations.
road with the sun behind or to the side of the photographer (Figure 9).
Most images are off-kilter, and the night shots are shaky and burnt. The
contact sheets reveal that Ruscha took only one exposure of most of the
subjects, which indicates an automatic mode of operation, one that treats
the camera as a device to sample or survey a situation rather than as an
apparatus for the construction of visual compositions.23
Ruscha recounts having the idea for the title before taking any of the
photographs, which seems to indicate that the title was a condensed in-
struction set for the making of the book. On the other hand, the images
were selected and placed in the book regardless of their relative position
in the actual trip, based rather on his visual instinct and his experience
23 Ibid., 114.
106
Figure 10: Ruscha and
Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1964.
as a graphic designer. This intuitive placing contradicts the automatic

character insinuated by the fact that the title predates the photographs.
In order to further complicate the interpretation of the project, Ruscha
commented on the travel as a journalistic enterprise: “I had a vision that
I was being a great reporter when I did the gas stations.” 24
The design of the book was equally ambiguous, forcing us to question

the intention behind this rather small and enigmatic object. Ruscha
wanted to produce a book that was mechanically produced and cheap,
professional but unassuming. The small size of the publication was also
meant to make it a friendly object, one that he would enjoy carrying
around and giving to friends (Figure 10). While the print quality was
unremarkable, he took pride in the fact that the book featured a “profes-
sional polish, a clear-cut machine finish.”25 His first run produced 400
books and sold for 3 dollars each. The layout, format and page count
can be read as a development of Robert Frank’s The Americans and
became the basic template for most of Ruscha’s photographic books.26
Everything in Twenty Six Gasoline Stations is ambivalent and meant

to destabilize the meaning of the object.27 The title suggests objectivity
and a record of reality, but the amount of information in the pages is
clearly not enough to be considered informative in neither journalistic
nor scientific terms. Additionally, the quality of the pictures is also
misleading, with rather spontaneous and flawed, unstable framing,
but with a rich tonal range, leaving us uncertain as to whether they
24 D
avid Bourdon, “Ruscha as Publisher [or All Booked Up]”, published in ARTnews,
April 1972, 33. As quoted in Sylvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and Photography, 115.
26 Ibid., 21.
27 Ibid., 122. Ruscha described the intended effect of his books as “the ‘huh?’
factor.”
107
Figure11: Ed Ruscha, cover and spread from
the book Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965.
should be considered artistic. Finally, the binding is generic and cheap,

and the printing is not high quality, which rules out the possibility to
consider the book as either a serious photography book or a handmade
limited edition in the style of artist-books.28
Ruscha applied this modus operandi in a series of books through the

1960s, seven of which focused on architecture and urban landscape.
The next of this group, Some Los Angeles Apartments (Figure 11), was
published in 1965 and featured 34 photographs of apartment buildings
sited in Los Angeles, with photographic and layout techniques similar
to those used in Twentysix Gas Stations.29 Most of the buildings depict-
ed in the book were two-storey wooden structures, temporary lodgings
covered in stucco. Again, the unremarkable nature of both the objects
being photographed and the photographs themselves – the images
could have been taken by a real estate agent or a police officer – seem
to be at odds with the way in which they are displayed in a mono-
graphic book by an artist. Nonetheless, Rucha’s interest in this shallow
and unremarkable architectural vernacular genre became slightly more
clear and explicit in his next photographic project.
In his 1966 book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (Figure 12), Rus-
cha decided to record a whole urban section rather than a selection of
individual buildings. For this purpose, he attached a 35 mm camera
with a motor to the hood of his car and drove up and down Sunset
Boulevard shooting on a continuous roll of black and white motion
picture film.30 Once the contact prints were produced, he went back to
Sunset Boulevard and walked the street, taking note of the addresses. A
complex process of montage followed in order to prepare the mockup
for the book. The publication is formatted as a twenty-five-foot-long
accordion-like fold out of continuous images, with the south side of
28 R
uscha was influenced by the artist books produced by Wallace Berman but
decided not to replicate the manual production of Berman and instead tried to
produce something that could be read as an industrial product. See Sylvia Wolf,
Ed Ruscha and Photography, 120.
29 Ibid., 129.
30 Ibid., 139.
108
Figure 12: Ed Ruscha, unfolded spread
and detail from the book
Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966.
Sunset Boulevard running along the top, and the north side rendered
upside-down along the bottom, each building carefully captioned with
its street address. The photographs were taken around noon, with al-
most no shadows, to emphasize the flatness of the buildings. The whole
format of the book underscores the continuity of the commercial front
as the surface that defines the street and the life of l.a. Ruscha was
fascinated by this urban configuration:
“Los Angeles to me is like a series of store front planes that are all
vertical from the street. There is nothing behind them; it’s all facade
here. That’s what intrigues me about the whole city of Los Angeles.
It is the facadedness of the whole place.”31
This book deepens the conceptual character already apparent in its

predecessors, as if the whole operation for the production of the book
could actually be described in a brief and performed by another per-
son. Again, with Ruscha this impression is misleading if we consider
how precise and careful he was in every decision concerning the pho-
tography, design and production of his books, which are very specific
in their deliberate adoption of generic qualities.
31 E
d Ruscha speaking in a film on the artist Gary Conklin, produced by Mystic Fire
Video in 1981, as quoted in Ćécile Whiting, Pop L.A, 74.
109
Figure 13: Ed Ruscha, cover and spread
from the book Thirtyfour Parking Lots
in Los Angeles, 1967.
In 1967 Sol Lewitt published his essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual

Art” and used Every Building on the Sunset Strip as one of the images
to illustrate it.32 That same year, Ruscha went one step further into
a conceptual and process-driven mode of operation, producing a
book where he no longer took the photographs himself. For the book
Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (Figure 13), he hired commercial
photographer Art Alanis to take pictures and the two men took a two
and a half hour helicopter ride through downtown Los Angeles, photo-
graphing the empty parking lots on a Sunday morning.33
The resulting book was a forty-eight page volume containing thir-

ty-one pictures. The size of the book is slightly larger than the previous
ones in order to allow bigger reproductions of the images. According
to Ruscha, this is not due to the better quality of the pictures or the
higher degree of interest of the subject matter, but rather to allow the
reader to notice the differing intensities of oil droppings signaling the
most desirable parking spots in a sort of index or map of the behavior
of car society in Southern California.34
The sequence of increasing detachment in Ruscha’s early books is

indicative of his identification as an artist that uses photography for its
un-arty quality, as opposed to a photographer that sets himself to pro-
duce photography as fine art. This would contrast with the work of the
New Topographics generation – among them Stephen Shore – who a
few years later departed from Ruscha’s subjects and techniques in order
to develop a strictly disciplinary photographic project.35
During this period, Ruscha produced yet three more books in his se-
ries devoted to architectural motifs. Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken
32 L eWitt, Sol “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (1967): 79–83.

33 Ibid., 144.
34 Ibid.
35 R
uscha’s influence on many of the photographers involved in the 1975 exhibition
New Topographics is underlined in Britt Salvesen’s retrospective account of the
show. See Britt Salvesen, “New Topographics,” in Robert Adams, Britt Salvesen,
and Alison Devine Nordström, New Topographics (Tucson, AZ: Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona; Rochester, NY: George Eastman House; Göttin-
gen: Steidl, 2010), 23-29.
110
Figure 14: Ed Ruscha, cover and spread
from the book Nine Swimming Pools and
a Broken Glass, 1968.
Glass (Figure 14), from 1968, consisted of a series of photographs

depicting empty municipal and private pools preceding a picture of a
broken glass. In this case, the amount of empty pages in the book – just
ten photographs for a sixty four page volume – not only reinforced
the emptiness of the unpopulated swimming pools but also seemed to
actively test the limits of what can be called a book. In 1970, Ruscha
cruised Los Angeles photographing houses and vacant plots with ‘for
sale’ signs, subsequently producing the book titled Real Estate Oppor-
tunities, in yet another proof of his wry sense of humor. In 1971, he pro-
duced Dutch Details, a reiteration of the idea underlying Every Building
in the Sunset Strip, in which he used the zoom of the camera as a de-
vice to capture the architecture and landscape lining a Dutch canal in
a series of fragments. After 1972 Ruscha suspended the production of
books, as he considered that the surprise factor he so dearly cherished
in his first attempts had been lost, once his mode of operation became
predictable through repetition.36
This moment then becomes relevant, since it corroborates that insta-

bility of meaning was necessary to the way these objects worked, that
they depended on a certain fracture of conventions in order to force the
spectator to confront their subject matter momentarily without a script.
Therefore, the merit of Ruscha in his books is not so much to recognize
subjects worth of attention in his daily environment, but rather to con-
struct an apparatus that allows us to confront these elements without
being immediately directed towards a specific interpretation.
The difficulty in pinning down Ruscha as an artist is then further exac-

erbated when we consider the heterogeneity of his production during
the 1960s, which included not just photographic books but also collages,
drawings and, increasingly, paintings. Since the outset of his career, and
simultaneously with the production of his books, some of the objects
portrayed in his photographs became the subject matter for Ruscha’s
painting activity. Probably the most notable of these cases is Standard
111
Figure 15: Ed Ruscha,
Standard Station, Amarillo
Texas, 1963.

Burning Gas Station, 1965-66.

Untitled, 1989.
112
Gas Station in Amarillo, Texas, which was elaborated on through the
years in more than a dozen different drawings and paintings.37
Looking specifically at the first painting of the series (Figure 15), we

notice a remarkable change in the treatment of the subject as the artist
transitions from photography to painting. In order to construct the
painting, the architecture of the gas station was abstracted and cleaned
of distracting elements, and the perspective in the original photograph
was mirrored and accentuated, with the viewpoint lowered to create a
dramatic low angle view. Additionally, in the painting we are presented
with a night view, with beams of light traversing the black surface of the
sky, while the original photograph was taken during the day. The strong
diagonal composition and flat basic colors of the painting remind us of
American commercial art, but also of European avant-garde.
Most would agree that the carefully calculated ambivalence and de-
tachment of the photographic book is lost in this laudatory depiction
of the gas station, unless, of course, we consider the underlying sense
of humor in presenting an example of humble, anonymous, commer-
cial American architecture with such grandeur. As if conscious of the
dangers inherent in this beautification for his artistic project, Ruscha
Figure 18: Spreads from the tried to further complicate and obscure his attitude towards his subject
New Topographics 1975 exhibition catalog. matter through a series of repetitive versions of the painting, some
of which display the gas station vanishing in the mist, while another
shows the building on fire (Figures 16 and 17).38
As perplexing as this collision of abstraction and humor may be, it was

precisely the heterogeneity and ambiguity in Ruscha’s production that
enabled him to emerge as a truly pivotal figure in the art scene of the
sixties and seventies, becoming a significant reference for the worlds
of pop painting, conceptual art and documentary photography. In this
respect, his influence on the generation of photographers known as the
New Topographics becomes especially important to our case, since the
group included Stephen Shore, who in the mid-1970s replaced Ruscha
as the main photographic reference for Venturi and Scott Brown.
Stephen Shore
New Topographics, a loosely used term, is actually the title of an
exhibition organized in 1975 by William Jenkins for George Eastman
House in Rochester, New York (Figure 18). The full title of the show
was New Topographics: photographs of a man-altered landscape and
it comprised 168 works by ten photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis
Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nix-
on, John Schott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessell Jr. The photographs
in the exhibition, all of which focused on the built environment with
an emphasis in the cheap constructions of the sprawling American
West, were largely received as presenting the public with the challenges
posed by uncontrolled construction and the gradual consumption of
the American landscape.
37 In 1962, right after taking the picture and even before editing the book, Ruscha
had already produced a drawing titled Study for Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas,
1962. In 1963, he produced the best known of his studies on this subject, a can-
vas titled Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas. A version with the gas station on fire
dates from 1965. In 1989 he produced an untitled polymer on canvas rendition
of the building disappearing at dusk. In a 2001 piece titled Roadmaster, all that
is left of the gas station is its profile, against a red sky.
38 T his series of paintings is carefully reproduced in Sylvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and
Photography, 221-235.
113
Figure 19: Stephen Shore, photographs
from the series American Surfaces, 1972-73.
The intention behind Jenkins curatorial efforts was nonetheless unrelated

to environmental concerns but rather geared to survey the current state
of documentary photography as a genre while at the same time trying to
consolidate its autonomy as a discipline.39 In his introductory essay to the
exhibition catalog, Jenkins situated the work of this younger generation
as both indebted to and departing from the work of Ruscha. For Jenkins,
Ruscha’s photographs, regardless of their specific subject matter, built up a
conceptual argument that was about something altogether different from
gas stations or apartment buildings. In order to clarify this argument
in his text, Jenkins quoted John Schott, one of the photographers in the
exhibition, for whom Ruscha’s pictures were not “statements about the
world through art, [but] statements about art through the world.”40
39 W
illiam Jenkins in Robert Adams, et al. New Topographics: Photographs of a
man-altered landscape. (Rochester, N.Y.: International Museum of Photography at
George Eastman House, 1975), 7.
114
This thesis not only underlines the distinction between the attitude of
an artist who is using photography within a larger artistic project and a
photographer who regards photography itself as fine art, it also puts for-
ward the idea that the coincidence between “physical subject matter and
conceptual or referential subject matter” should be considered a distinc-
tive trait of documentary photography as a practice whose disciplinary
specificity lies in its being focused on the world, on seeing the world.
Taking this into account, the work of the authors in the New Topo-
graphics show could be considered part of a generational cycle ac-
cording to which a group of young photographers were trying to
re-appropriate the legacy of Ruscha for the world of photography, as
if recovering what Ruscha had stolen from Walker Evans and Robert
Frank for the world of art a decade before. Shore´s large format pho-
tographs for the exhibition are especially fitting to this interpretation,
since their extreme degree of control over perspective, focus, light and
color situates them in the opposite end of the spectrum from Ruscha’s
off kilter and spontaneous images.
Curiously enough, Stephen Shore had begun his career just a few years
before the exhibition in Rochester with a completely different approach
that was in many ways much closer to Ruscha’s unpreoccupied take on
photography. From 1965 to 1969, during his late teens, Shore lived and
worked in Andy Warhol’s Factory where he collaborated as an assistant
of sorts, documenting with his camera the daily activities in the factory.
After this formative experience, Shore´s first independent photographic
project logically took the form of a visual diary, depicting the subjective
experience of a travel through the country through a proliferation of
snapshots (Figure 19). Shore´s un-arty but systematic documentation
of life on the road situated his project within beat culture, but also as a
direct development of Ruscha’s Twenty Six Gasoline Stations. The 1972
project and exhibition titled American Surfaces – an homage to Walker
Evans’ American Photographs – was composed of hundreds of small in-
dustrially printed color photographs taken casually with a 35 mm Rollei
and displayed covering three out of four walls of a small gallery.41
Shore´s road-to-Damascus moment of conversion from the relative

chaos of his American Surfaces to the total control of the images we find
in the New Topographics show, is usually attributed to his contact with
John Szarkowski, the curator of Photography at MoMA, who at the time
was championing the recovery of the figure of Walker Evans through a
series of exhibitions and articles. Confronted with Shore´s snapshots,
Szarkowski asked him how the view-finder of the Rollei worked, a ques-
tion that the young Shore took to heart, since he interpreted it as imply-
ing that he had no control over the framing of his photographs.42 Im-
mediately switching to a large format plate camera, the following phase
in Shore’s work became a search for precision and control, producing
series of geometrically constructed images in which order was imposed
on the otherwise amorphous reality of the American landscape.
It was precisely this series of images, a project that would later come
to be known as Uncommon Places (Figure 20), that became the core
of Shore’s contribution to the New Topographics show in 1975. Shore’s
40 Ibid.
41 A
comprehensive record of this exhibition and project can be found in Stephen
Shore, American Surfaces, (London; New York, N.Y.: Phaidon, 2005).
42 Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1982), 10.
115
Figure 20: Stephen Shore, photograph from
the New Topographics exhibition, 1974.
images for the show focus exclusively on vernacular architectures,

depicting either small town streetscapes or single family houses. The
sense of humor and spontaneity that Shore´s early work inherited
from Ruscha is gone here, as the images become dominated by cool
pastel colors, and the compositions are obsessively balanced through
the careful use of perspective and framing. It was in this moment that
Shore’s work called the attention of Robert Venturi and Scott Brown.
In 1974, Shore started featuring photographs from his Uncommon Places

project at Hight Gallery in New York. In the opening of this show Shore
met Steven Izenour, a collaborator of Venturi and Scott Brown and a true
photography aficionado, and the two men immediately stroke a deep
friendship. Through Izenour, Shore started to work for the office of Ven-
turi and Scott Brown photographing their recently completed buildings.43
In 1975, the architects asked the photographer to take the photographs
for their exhibition Signs of Life in the Smithsonian Institution. This be-
came their last comprehensive attempt at a study of contemporary urban
and architectural form through photography, a line of research that had
started a decade before with their early interest in Las Vegas.
43 S
tephen Shore, in discussion with the author, December 2013. Venturi and Scott
Brown projects photographed by Shore through the years included the Tucker
House, the Faculty Club at Penn State and their installations at the Whitney Mu-
seum and Philadelphia Museum of Art among other buildings and exhibitions.
116
02. Learning from Las Vegas
The importance of A&P Parking Lots – 1968
In November 1966, during her stay at ucla, Denise Scott Brown invit-
ed Robert Venturi to join her on a visit to Las Vegas. After a four day
trip, which they spent visiting the different casinos in the Strip, they
described being alternatively “appalled and fascinated” by what they
saw.44 They subsequently co-wrote an essay titled “The importance of
a&p Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas,” which was published in
1968 using the photographs taken by Denise Scott Brown during their
trip to Nevada (Figure 21).45
In their 1968 article, Venturi and Scott Brown set out to question what
can be learnt from the commercial architecture of Las Vegas. They
speculate on how popular architecture can become a source for high
architecture in parallel to contemporary developments in the realm of
Pop Art. For this, they look at instances where architects have incor-
porated extra-disciplinary examples in order to broaden the horizon of
their vocabulary and wonder if this same operation can be applied to
Figure 21: Title page of Architectural Forum, the commercial vernacular of Las Vegas:
photograph by Denise Scott Brown, March 1968.
“To gain insight form the commonplace is nothing new: fine art
often follows folk art. Romantic architects of the 18th century
discovered an existing and conventional rustic architecture. Early
Modern architects appropriated an existing and conventional
industrial vocabulary without much adaptation. Le Corbusier loved
grain elevators and steamships; the Bauhaus looked like a factory;
Mies refined the details of American Steel factories for concrete
buildings … There is a perversity in the learning process: we look
backwards at history and tradition to go forward; we can also look
downward to go upward.”46
Departing from this premise, they explain that architects have been
Figure 22: Denise Scott Brown, narrowly focusing on “space” and that it is precisely the spatial loose-
Las Vegas, 1968.
ness and fragmentation of the commercial sprawl that has prevented
the discipline from accepting and incorporating it. In keeping with this
idea, the rest of the article becomes an explanation of how the different
urban and architectural devices at play in Las Vegas (the highway, the
sign, the parking lot, the lobby, the gambling hall and the courtyard)
interact as part of a large-scale complex in which “spatiality” is re-
placed by “communication” as the principle that achieves order and
orientation (Figure 22). They also emphasize the fact that they study
this system without judging the values involved in the economic model
that engenders it, but rather focusing on an analysis of the methods
employed, suggesting that they could be used for the “purpose of civic
and cultural enhancement.”47
Despite their lucid and concise dissection of the inner workings of this
system and the architectural innovations that it entails, it seems that
throughout the article, the question that troubles Venturi and Scott
44 Denise Scott Brown, et al. Out of the Ordinary, 248.

45 R
obert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown, “A Significance for A & P Parking Lots or
Learning from Las Vegas,” Architectural Forum 128, no. 2 (March 1968): 36-43
and 89-91.
46 Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown. “A Significance for A & P Parking Lots,” 37.
47 Ibid., 91.
117
Brown is whether the architect as an author can actually incorporate
these popular elements into his work, and for that they continuously
seek references in art and literature. The article starts with a quote from
Richard Poirier that can be understood as framing the larger question
that they try to answer in the text:
“Substance for a writer consists not merely of those realities he

thinks he discovers; it consists even more of those realities which
have been made available to him by the literature and idioms of his
own day and by the images that still have vitality in the literature
of the past. Stylistically, a writer can express his feeling about this
substance either by imitation, if it sits well with him, or by parody,
if it doesn’t.”48
Venturi and Scott Brown thus present this problem as a problem of

style, in which they, as architectural authors, have to figure out two
issues in order to establish their position. On the one hand, they need
to determine the different proportions of personal invention, contem-
porary voices and images from the past in their architecture. On the
other hand, and more importantly, they need to establish what their
attitude about these contemporary urban phenomena is, if earnest,
ironic, parodic or sublimatory.
In fact, the entire story of Venturi and Scott Brown’s involvement and
interest in popular architectures can be traced back to this twofold ques-
tion, for which they formulated a series of tentative answers along their
career. Towards the end of the 1968 article they go back to this problem
and again seek examples in art and literature, not without some anxiety:
“Pop Art has shown the value of the old cliché used in a new context
to achieve new meaning: to make the common uncommon. Rich-
ard Poirier has referred to the “de-creative impulse” in literature:
‘Eliot and Joyce display an extraordinary vulnerability … to idioms,
rhythms, artifacts associated with certain urban environments or
situations. The multitudinous styles of Ulysses are so dominated by
them that there are only intermittent sounds of Joyce in the novel
and no extended passage certifiably in his as distinguished from a
mimicked style.’”49
As they reflect on the possibility of incorporating the popular “voices”

of Las Vegas in their architectural production, they seem to be con-
flicted by the possibility that this inclusion may suffocate their own
voice in their work. This conflict seems to make sense if we consider
the context of practice within American academia, where architects are
constantly demanded to establish a distinct position, and the fact that
Venturi had already invested a great deal of energy and effort in craft-
ing a personal language – it took him five years to design his mother’s
house, which then became the seed for many of their later residential
projects. On the other hand, it comes across in the text that they are
sure that this intoxication of their architecture with popular idioms is
worth exploring, even if they are not sure about how to implement it,
and that redoing the language of modernism as a default has become
increasingly irrelevant and problematic.
48 R
ichard Poirier, “T.S. Eliot and the Literature of Waste,” The New Republic, May
20, 1967. As quoted in Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown, “A significance
for A & P parking lots,” 37.
49 Ibid., 91.
118
The Las Vegas Studio – 1968
In 1967 Venturi and Scott Brown got married in Santa Monica, and
Scott Brown quit her job at ucla and moved to New Haven as a
visiting professor to teach with Venturi.50 There, they taught three
joint studios, focusing on extra-disciplinary urban phenomena: the
New York City subway system (1967), Las Vegas (1968) and Levittown
(1970).51 These studios were heavily research-oriented, and shared a
structure that Scott Brown adopted from the studios taught by David
Crane at Penn.52 According to this model, a basic research phase was
followed by field work, a synthesis phase and finally a schematic design
was produced during the last weeks of the semester.
The Las Vegas studio was taught by Venturi, Scott Brown and Steven
Izenour, their teaching assistant at Yale and partner in their office who
later became co-author of the book.53 The course enrolled nine stu-
dents of architecture, two planning and two graphic design students,
all of them graduate students at Yale. The original title of the studio
was “Learning from Las Vegas, or Form analysis as design research,”
but during the course of the studio, the students started using a differ-
ent subtitle: “The grand proletarian cultural locomotive.”
The studio did three weeks of library research in New Haven, followed
by four days in Los Angeles and ten days in Las Vegas (Figure 23) before
returning to Yale to study, analyze and represent their findings for a
period of ten weeks. This allocation of time indicates that the studio was
geared from the beginning to produce a graphic representation of the
city, probably with the aim of using it to illustrate a prospective book.
Figure 23: Photograph from

the Las Vegas Studio, 1968-1971.
50 T he period between 1967 and 1970 represents the most intense academic collab-
oration between Venturi and Scott Brown. As their office became increasingly busy
Robert Venturi ceased to teach after 1970 and devoted exclusively to practice.
51 T hey also conducted a similar studio, as visiting professors at Rice University
in 1969. It focused on the commercial strip at Westheimer Road and was titled
Control Game.
52 Denise Scott Brown, et al. Out of the Ordinary, 46.
53 B
asic information and chronology on the Las Vegas studio, unless otherwise
noted, is taken from Martino Stierli, “Las Vegas Studio,” in Hilar Stadler, Martino
Stierli, and Peter Fischli, eds. Las Vegas Studio: Images from the archives of
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2008),
primarily 13-17.
119
With this in mind, the architects prescribed a series of themes or mod-
ules to organize the study of Las Vegas.54 “User Behavior” was meant
to map and analyze the behavior and movements of motorized users of
a commercial strip in New Haven as training for the later study of the
Las Vegas Strip. This also involved using new representational tech-
niques, such as films, and the innovative use of more standard archi-
tectural documents such as maps and diagrams. “Las Vegas Image”
sought to capitalize on the existing representations of the city in litera-
ture and art in order to craft an image of the city that would be “ap-
propriate” to the times, through experimentation in different formats.
Finally, “Graphic and other techniques of representation” addressed
the problem of how to communicate the results of the research, how
to translate them to comprehensive graphic documents. According
to Venturi and Scott Brown’s studio brief, traditional representation
techniques had become an obstacle in understanding and explaining
the new urban phenomena, and new presentation techniques were
required in order to “handle” this new reality:
“Such a study will help to define a new type of urban form emerg-
ing in America and Europe, radically different from what we have
known; one that we have been ill-equipped to deal with and that,
from ignorance, we define today as urban sprawl. An aim of this
studio will be, through open minded and non-judgmental inves-
Figure 24: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, tigation to come to understand this new form and begin to evolve
and Steven Izenour, An “Edward Ruscha”
elevation of the Strip, from
techniques for its handling.”55
Learning From Las Vegas, 1972.
Therefore, the aim was to achieve an understanding of the automo-
bile-oriented city – in particular the commercial strip and its inner work-
ings – through “open minded and non-judgmental investigation,” and to
propose an image for it for which “new techniques” needed to be evolved.
The inclusion of the automobile and film as necessary tools to under-
stand the new extended and fragmented spatiality of sprawl was clearly
influenced by a cinematic understanding of cities as enunciated by Kevin
Lynch in The Image of the City.56 Scott Brown had become acquainted
with these ideas through her long standing friendship with Donald
Appleyard, who had been her classmate in London and who co-authored
The View from the Road with Lynch in 1966.57 The other great influence
in this search for a detached vision and new representational techniques
was without a question the artist Ed Ruscha. Scott Brown had become
aware of the work of Ed Ruscha during her stay in ucla from 1965 to 1967
and she had come to associate his “deadpan” photographic style with the
non-judgmental attitude learnt from the social sciences.58
Scott Brown and the Yale group actually visited Ruscha’s studio in
l.a. during their studio trip.59 Commenting on this visit, the architect
54 Ibid.
55 R
obert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas
(Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1972), ix.
56 K
evin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press, 1960).
For a fully fleshed account of how Venturi and Scott Brown’s experiments with film
fit within the larger discourse on the representation of the city during the period
see Martino Stierli, “In Sequence: Cinematic perception in ‘Learning from Las
Vegas’,” Hunch: The Berlage Institute Report no. 12 (2009): 76-85.
57 D
enise Scott Brown in personal communication with the author. Also see Donald
Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John Randolph Myer, The View from the Road, (Cam-
bridge, MIT Press, 1966).
58 T hese ideas were fully fleshed by Scott Brown in her 1969 article “Learning from
Pop” and are further discussed later in this text.
59 M
artino Stierli, “Las Vegas Studio,” 27.
120
Figure 25: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown,
and Steven Izenour, A schedule
of Las Vegas Strip gas stations from
Learning From Las Vegas, 1972. recounts feeling disappointed with the lack of explanation regarding
his work provided by Ruscha, as the artist refused to engage in an
intellectual conversation, and decided in turn to open some beers and
throw a party for the students.60 The influence of Ruscha on the Las
Vegas studio was nonetheless palpable in the non judgmental approach
to the subject matter as expressed in the studio brief and also in a
precise set of photographic techniques that Venturi and Scott Brown
took from Ruscha in order to execute their documentation of Las
Vegas. The first and most notable of these borrowings is a continuous
photographic elevation of the Las Vegas Strip (Figure 24), which is a
step-by-step emulation of Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip,
a fact that they graciously acknowledge in the book by captioning it as
“An ‘Edward Ruscha’ elevation of the Strip.”61
It is worth noticing here that the execution of the Las Vegas piece is
more informal and less controlled than the Ruscha original, as the
individual photographs are collaged with many redundancies and
discrepancies, and they are not cropped horizontally to form bands.
Additionally, the differences in scale and configuration between Sunset
Boulevard and the Las Vegas Strip further contribute to differentiate
the final result. Where Ruscha’s piece emphasizes continuity of surface
or “facadedness,” the emulation by Venturi and Scott Brown’s students
comes across as a discontinuous collection of free standing objects
with vast spaces between them, where the billboards and signs operate
as landmarks to indicate the presence of program.
The Las Vegas Studio also produced several schedules (Figure 25) show-
casing examples of road side commercial architecture including types
as casinos, gas stations, motels, wedding chapels and street furniture.62
60 Denise Scott Brown, in discussion with the author, May 2013.

61 T his illustration occupies two spreads of the original edition of the book. See
Learning from Las Vegas, 26-29.
121
Figure 26: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown,
and Steven Izenour, Aladdin Casino and Hotel,
Las Vegas from Learning From Las Vegas, 1972.
These schedules feature photographs that, in their immediacy and

urgency, are strikingly reminiscent of Ruscha’s images of gas stations and
apartment buildings. On the other hand, the serial and mute quality of
Ruscha’s books, in which each photograph occupies a page, is lost in favor
of a subordination of the images into grids. This change is telling because
it points towards a very precise way of organizing information within the
modernist tradition, as epitomized in the grids used by architects in sup-
port of their presentations at ciam meetings. Interestingly, Venturi and
Scott Brown’s modernist education caused them to resort here to a more
standard comparative mode of analyzing visual information.
The studio also used aerial photography extensively, both appropriat-

ing existing footage and renting a helicopter to take their own pho-
tographs (Figure 26), just like Ruscha had done to prepare his book
on parking lots.63 Finally, looking at the footage from the studio that
was not used in the book, we also find numerous instances in which
Scott Brown and the Yale students took more casual photographs that
equally emulated the Californian artist, including, for instance, images
of gas stations at night (Figure 27).64
Figure 27: Photograph from In addition to photography, several films were produced by the group
the Las Vegas Studio, 1968.
that took after the experiments of Ed Ruscha as well (Figure 28). In Las
Vegas Deadpan, which is a development of Ruscha’s Every Building in
the Sunset Strip in film format, a camera mounted on the hood of a car
records a trip through the city, without human intervention, during 21
minutes and without commentaries (Figure 29). Other films made for
the studio include Las Vegas Strip LfLV Studio (Day/Night), a highly
subjective film by Dan Scully focusing on neon signs and Las Vegas
Electric, a four-minute film focusing on the electric night-time illumi-
nations in Fremont Street.65
62 Ibid., 38-39, 42-43.

63 Ibid., 30-32.
64 A
selection of this previously unpublished material is featured in Hilar Stadler,
Martino Stierli, and Peter Fischli, eds. Las Vegas Studio, 35-159. Scott Brown’s
own collection of photographs is the focus of an upcoming book to be published
during the fall of 2014 by Metropolis Books.
65 F or a detailed account of the movies produced by the students in Las Vegas
studio see Martino Stierli “Las Vegas Studio,” 15.
122
Figure 28: Las Vegas Studio Figure 29: Las Vegas Studio, Movie sequence
filming in Las Vegas, 1968. traveling north on the Strip from
Tropicana Avenue to Sahara Avenue, 1972.
The final output of the studio comprised more than eighty maps, tables
and diagrams, plus several films and slide sequences. Looking at this
body of work it becomes clear that the coincidence with Ruscha is not
merely in terms of technique but most of all in its thematic emphasis
in the surface, in its idiosyncratic facadedness. These materials were
presented in a final review on January 10, 1969, with an all-star cast of
critics including Vincent Scully (his son was a student in the studio),
the architect Morris Lapidus and the writer Tom Wolfe.66 Despite the
fact that several sources mention the artist Ed Ruscha attending the
review,67 the architects deny having contacted him again after their
brief visit to his studio in Los Angeles.68 Even though the review and
the exhibition that followed at Yale were relatively successful, Venturi
reported at the time being shocked by some of the jurors’ incapacity to
understand their deadpan approach to Las Vegas as a legitimate “poetic
way of long standing.”69
66 Ibid.
67 See for instance Britt Salvesen, “New Topographics,” 26.
69 Robert Venturi in Las Vegas Studio, 15.
123
The book(s) – 1972-1977
While the Las Vegas studio did not alter the conclusions about the
articulation and inner workings of the strip expressed in Venturi and
Scott Brown’s 1968 article, it did provide most of the necessary graph-
ic material to support a book format (Figure 30). The book, as it was
finally published in 1972, was composed of three segments: the original
1968 article illustrated with the results from the Yale studio, a second
essay previously published in 1971, and a third section showcasing the
projects by the firm.70
Within this structure, the first article, “The importance of a&p Parking
Lots or Learning from Las Vegas,” explained the urban phenomena at
place in Las Vegas. The second essay, “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture,
or the Decorated Shed,” developed the ideas of the first article into a
more comprehensive and totalizing architectural theory. Finally, the
projects in the third segment of the book, among them the Fire Station
No. 4 in Columbus Indiana or the Trubeck and Wislocki Cottages on
Nantucket Island, were meant to act as demonstrations of how that
theory could be put in to practice.
Figure 30: Cover of Learning From Las Vegas,
First Edition, 1972. “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed,” had been
published in two parts in Architectural Forum in 1971, very probably
with the idea of incorporating it to the book, which was published by
mit Press in 1972. In this text, Venturi and Scott Brown narrowed the
definition of their interest in popular architecture by labeling it with
the very specific term of the “ugly and ordinary.” They also answered
some of the questions posed in their 1968 article about how to incor-
porate popular voices into their architecture, or how to move from an
emphasis in space to an emphasis in communication. They open the
text by declaring their interest in “image,” that is, the image of build-
ings, as the way that architecture is received and processed:
“We shall emphasize image – image over process or form – in asserting

that architecture depends in its perception and creation on past expe-
rience and emotional association and that these symbolic and repre-
sentational elements may often be contradictory to the form, structure,
and program with which they combine in the same building.”71
The thesis that they develop through the text relies heavily on this
initial assumption that architecture relies on “past experience and
emotional association” in order to convey meaning, and that those
associations are established primarily through visual means. If archi-
tecture is to focus on communicating, then it will need a language to
do so, and a language is basically a convention, rooted in repetition
and consensus. With this in mind, they oppose their proposal for an
“ugly and ordinary” architecture to the “heroic and extraordinary”
style of late modernism, favoring “meaning” instead of “expression”
and “familiarity” instead of “invention.” In their famous comparative
description of their own Guild House as opposed to Paul Rudolph’s
Crawford Manor (Figure 31), they give more specific examples about
how those ideas can be implemented:
70 R
obert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown, “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the
Decorated Shed,” Part I, Architectural Forum (November 1971): 64-67; Part II,
Architectural Forum (December 1971): 48-53; Discussion, (January 1972): 12.
71 Ibid., 64.
124
Figure 31: Details of Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor
and the Guild House,
from Learning From Las Vegas, 1972.
“The windows [in Guild House] look familiar; they look like, as well
as are, windows, and in this respect their use is explicitly symbolic.
But like all effective symbolic images, they are intended to look
familiar and unfamiliar. They are the conventional element used
slightly unconventionally. Like the subject matter of Pop Art, they
are commonplace elements made uncommon through distortion in
shape (slight), change in scale (they are much bigger than normal
double-hung windows), and change in context (double-hung win-
dows in a perhaps high-fashion building).”72
Figure 32: Guild House, detail of window,

This particularly intentional curation of the conventional and ordinary
from Learning from Las Vegas, 1972. elements in their work becomes the way in which Venturi and Scott
Brown manage to integrate popular voices into their architecture with-
out losing their own voices (Figure 32). Furthermore, the over-empha-
sis on realism – there was no need to use double-hung windows in the
first place – in combination with the slight distortions and unexpected
combinations through which it is implemented becomes a way to
assert their own voices as authors while gaining for their architecture a
whole popular language built over centuries and the power to commu-
nicate that comes with it:
“The content of the explicit symbolism of Guild House is what we

call ‘ugly and ordinary.’ The technologically unadvanced brick, the
old fashioned double-hung windows, the pretty materials around
72 Ibid., 66.
125
the entrance, and the ugly antenna not hidden behind the parapet
in the accepted fashion are all distinctly conventional in image as
well as substance or, rather, ugly and ordinary […] But in Guild
House, the symbolism of the ordinary goes further than this. […]
It is [the] juxtaposition of contrasting symbols – the appliqué of
one order of symbols on another – that constitutes for us the deco-
rated shed. This is what makes Guild House an architect’s decorated
shed – not architecture without architects.”73
The problem then becomes one of distance, of how blatantly these

symbols of the ordinary are overstated, and to what extent they are
distorted and recontextualized in order to guarantee both their legi-
bility as ordinary or “real” and their capacity to direct attention to the
authorial voice in the project:47
“The double-hung window in Guild House is familiar in form but

unusually large in size and horizontal in proportion, like the big,
distorted Campbell Soup can in Andy Warhol’s painting. This typ-
ical window is also juxtaposed with a smaller window of the same
form and proportion. The exact location of the bigger window on
a parallel plane behind the smaller window tends to disturb the
habitual perception of distance through perspective; the resultant
symbolic and optical tensions are, we maintain, a means to make a
boring architecture interesting.”75
Once Venturi and Scott Brown arrive at a solution that allows them
to consider that their previous concern about authorship and style
is resolved, the text follows to present the social and political agenda
inherent in the adoption of the ugly and ordinary beyond a problem
of form. For Venturi and Scott Brown, modern architect’s disdain
and disregard for the symbolism of the residential architecture of the
American middle classes is one more sign of their blind allegiance with
the ruling elite. According to this logic, Venturi and Scott Brown’s in-
corporation of popular motifs can be read as an attempt to subvert this
hierarchy through dignifying and re-contextualizing these elements
within high design, and therefore high culture.
Just how Complexity and Contradiction finishes with a preview of the

themes to be developed in Learning from Las Vegas – “is not Main
Street almost all right?”76 – the second essay in the Las Vegas Book
anticipates what was to become their next publication, a book to be
titled Learning from Levittown. The final section of the 1971 essay, ti-
tled “Form Latourette to Levittown,” begins to frame their architectural
proposal in social and political terms, in keeping with their increasing
interest in housing.77
This increasing concern with defining the social and political agen-
da of their project was probably one of the factors that made Venturi
and Scott Brown uncomfortable with the luxurious and somewhat
73 Ibid., 70.
74 T his interpretation of the work of Venturi and Scott Brown is inspired by the ideas
of John Hill, who asserts that the over-stated realism in the films of the British
New Wave cinema from the 1960s was actually a device to assert the authorial
voice in these films. See John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British cinema 1956-
1963 (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 127-145.
75 L
earning from Las Vegas, 86.
76 R
obert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 102.
77 Ibid., 104-108.
126
Figure 33: Spread from
Learning from Las Vegas, 1972.
spectacular character that Learning from Las Vegas finally adopted

under the graphic design of Muriel Cooper for mit Press.78 Probably
due to the graphic output of the studio in large boards, the book had
become a rather large object in order to allow the reader to actually see
something when looking at the schedules of buildings, the continuous
elevation of the Strip, or the large urban plans. This layout caused the
book to become heavily graphic, with a hierarchy that favored images
over text. Additionally, the text itself was arranged in double columns,
adopting a rather awkward triple spacing that made it very hard to read.
In the end, the lush colors and expensive hard cover binding with
golden letters gave away too much of a complacent or laudatory image
of Las Vegas, which questioned Venturi and Scott Brown’s supposed
nonjudgmental or deadpan attitude towards their subject of study (Fig-
ure 33). Unhappy for all the above mentioned reasons with the original
edition and concerned about the cost of the book that made it un-
available to students, they curated a second paperback edition, which
appeared in 1977 and continues to be in print today. In this version, the
text reads much more clearly, the projects are gone, and the Las Vegas
graphic material, though reduced, is relatively well translated to this
smaller format where the essays recover their protagonism.79
78 Martino Stierli, “Las Vegas Studio,” 17.

79 R
obert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas:
The forgotten symbolism of architectural form (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977).
127
03. Learning from Levittown
On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning – 1969
The shift from Las Vegas – a problem of form – to Levittown – housing
as the most social of all architectural problems – was accompanied by
an increased focus on social and political issues. Many of these themes,
as featured in the last pages of Learning from Las Vegas, had actually
been enunciated a few years earlier by Scott Brown in an article that
can be considered the seed of the Learning from Levittown studio. Her
1969 article, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” presents the
influence of Ed Ruscha (Figure 34) in parallel with the work of sociol-
ogist Herbert Gans, in an attempt to define an architectural equivalent
of the nonjudgmental attitude in the arts and humanities.80
As previously mentioned, Scott Brown had become acquainted with

Gans at Penn in 1958, the same year that Gans moved to Levittown as
a participant observer.81 Gans’ study of Levittown, later published as a
book, was a straightforward taxonomy of the different social groups
in a new Philadelphia suburb. In its neutral and unprejudiced account
of their sub-cultures and costumes, the book became in many ways a
legitimization of the system of values of the lower middle classes.82
According to Scott Brown, the nonjudgmental attitude had started to

emerge in the field of psychiatry and had slowly expanded to other
disciplines, among them social science with Herbert Gans, literature
with Gertrude Stein and Tom Wolfe, art with Ed Ruscha, and film
with Michelangelo Antonioni.83 During a moment of social unrest in
America, Scott Brown exhorted architects and planners to incorporate
this attitude immediately:
“During the last sixty years, the nonjudgmental, non-directive

attitude has influenced the arts, the humanities, and even the social
Figure 34: Ed Ruscha, Good Year Tires, sciences. Recently, architecture and urban design have felt its im-
6610 Laurel Canyon, North Hollywood, 1967.
Denise Scott Brown used Ruscha’s photographs
pact, and professionals, impressed by upheavals in society and the
of parking lots to illustrate her 1969 article, arts, are beginning to look for new, more receptive ways of seeing
“On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning.” the environment.”84
Her article is, in synthesis, a call for a third way type of solution to the
split between formal and social planners, between architects that turn
their noses away from the mess of reality and social scientists who
rejoice in its study but are unwilling or unable to change it. If the prob-
lem for architects is a problem of taste, then the nonjudgmental atti-
tude may be the solution, as it allows postponing judgment in order to
arrive at an improved and “reaffirmed” understanding of the situation:
“This is not to abandon judgment, for planned action implies judg-

ment. Judgment is merely deferred a while in order to make it more
sensitive. Liking what you hate is exhilarating and liberating, but
80 D
enise Scott Brown, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” 184-186.
81 D
enise Scott Brown recounts having visited Gans there. See Beatriz Colomina,
“Learning from Levittown: A conversation with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown” in Andrew Blauvelt, ed. Worlds Away: new suburban landscapes (Minneap-
olis: Walker Art Center, 2008), 51.
82 H
erbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of life and politics in a new suburban
community (London: Penguin, 1967).
83 D
enise Scott Brown, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” 184-186.
84 Ibid., 184.
128
finally reaffirming for judgment… For the best thing an architect
or urban designer can offer a new society, apart from a good heart,
is his own skill, used for the society, to develop a respectful under-
standing of its cultural artifacts and a loving strategy for their de-
velopment to suit the felt needs and way of life of the people. This is
a socially responsible activity, it is, after all, what Gans and the Pop
Artists are doing.”85
This deferring of judgment, as exemplified by Gans or Ruscha, would

ultimately enable architects to engage with the needs of society and to
produce more useful and meaningful work. But where does this pop-
ulist strain of thought come from? What is it about the difference in
taste between architects and the society they serve that so profoundly
upsets Scott Brown? When questioned in a similar vein in an inter-
view with Beatriz Colomina, Scott Brown responded by enumerating
a series of experiences that had shaped this concern throughout her
life, among them her childhood in Africa, her experience in postwar
England, and her contact with the social planners at Penn.86 Accord-
ing to Scott Brown, all those instances helped her gradually realize
how “dominant” cultures impose their values on “folk” cultures. Upon
meeting Gans at Penn, it became clear for Scott Brown that architects
were in desperate need of a humbling experience. They needed to look
at and learn from the way people were actually living and the values
behind those ways of life.
Therefore, if we consider the 1969 article as a declaration of intent

or a thesis proposal of sorts for their Levittown project, we will then
have to evaluate whether, at the end of the process, Venturi and Scott
Brown finally arrived at a reaffirmed judgment about the suburban
condition and whether this effectively enabled them to engage with
the needs of society in order to produce more useful and meaningful
work. The term “reaffirmed judgment,” deserves special attention here,
since there is clearly a tension between Scott Brown’s characterization
of it in terms of being unprejudiced or unmediated, and the fact that
she implies that the original or prejudiced judgment is never totally
abandoned, just left aside to return to it once stronger evidence has
been collected. Thus, if the class barrier was in this case represented by
a difference in taste, we will need to ask if, by the end of the process,
Venturi and Scott Brown had managed to love and lovingly work with
the reality of Levittown.
The Learning from Levittown Studio – 1970

The Learning from Levittown studio, initially titled Remedial Hous-
ing for Architects, was held at Yale University in the spring of 1970.87
The studio was divided into three phases. The first phase took up four
weeks and consisted of library research on the topics of “housing econ-
omy,” “housing politics,” “housing programs and policies,” “attitudes,
85 Ibid.
86 S
ee Beatriz Colomina, “Learning from Levittown: A Conversation with Robert
Venuri and Denise Scott Brown,” 49-69, especially 51. In this fragment Scott
Brown mentions reading a famous English postwar social study on the East
End for Gans’ course. It may have been the Know your Neighbour project which
involved Judith Henderson.
87 S
ee Denise Scott Brown, “Remedial Housing for Architects Studio,” in Andreas
C Papadakis, ed., Venturi Scott Brown & Associates On Houses and Housing (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 51-57.
129
Figure 35: Details from the original boards
from the Learning from Levittown Studio.
lifestyles and social conditions” and “construction industry.” Looking

at this division and the number of students assigned to each task, it
seems evident that economic and social components were predomi-
nant in the assigned contents.
The second and central phase was the most important, taking up
six weeks, and corresponded to field research pertaining mainly to
attitudes people have towards housing. This study intended to focus on
architecture, implementing a spatial and symbolic analysis of subur-
bia similar to their 1968 study of Las Vegas. Denise Scott Brown later
declared that in their Levittown studio they were trying to produce
an “architectural counterpart to Gans’ Levittown study and his later
analyses of taste cultures.”88
The third phase was meant to produce schematic proposals or synthet-

ic ideas about how to translate the research into practice. These short
final exercises were meant to respond to four problems: the design of
a “Suburban Prototype”, the crafting of a “Regional Strategy from Low
Income Housing,” the reflection on possible “New Roles for Archi-
tects,” and finally and enigmatically what they described as “The Old-
enburg Interpretation.” The students assigned to this latter task were
asked to “do for housing what Oldenburg did for hamburgers.”89 This
entailed taking a product of low culture and generating a high culture
version of it through a series of operations involving decontextualiza-
tion and abstraction.
“Oldenburg has essentially made us look at hamburgers in anoth-

er way because he has portrayed them in an unusual way: big,
lacquered and in an art gallery. Does he hate them or love them and
88 D
enise Scott Brown, “On Housing and Houses,” in Andreas C Papadakis, ed.,
Venturi Scott Brown & Associates on Houses and Housing, 10.
89 D
enise Scott Brown, “Remedial Housing for Architects Studio,” 57.
130
Figure 36: Details from the original boards
from the Learning from Levittown Studio.
should we? Probably he feels some of both, but that does not matter
– at least not yet. The first thing is the shift in vision and under-
standing which an Oldenburg can induce, and the re-interpretation
and re-classification of our cultural artifacts which he provides.”90
Confronting the surviving studio boards (Figure 35) with the overly
ambitious program the architects had set for themselves, it is difficult
not to note that the quality and the quantity of the information pro-
duced were well below average, if we compare them with the Learning
from Las Vegas studio.91 Most of the effort seems to have been put
into the emulation of Gans’ study, either by trying to subdivide the
potential buyers in New Haven into market categories that somehow
matched sociological groups, or by trying to identify whether Gans’
sociological taxonomy (upper, middle and lower middle class and their
sub-groups) correlated to differences in home-expansions and orna-
mental features. Since no actual quantitative fieldwork was conducted
by the studio, it is uncertain to us which is the factual base behind the
information in the panels.
The final proposals were also very schematic, as they were developed just
in the last three weeks of the course. The only distinguishable designs
are blown-up single family houses that are then subdivided into smaller
units (Figure 36), providing a solution for multifamily housing with-
out disturbing the suburban landscape.92 This, if we think about it, has
become a standard real estate development practice in America, where
many gated communities and apartment complexes adopt this model.
90 Ibid.
91 T he original boards are in the Venturi & Scott Brown Archive, in the University of
Pennsylvania. In addition to a brief visit to this archive, a detailed photographic
record of the Learning from Levittown panels was kindly lent by Professor Sara K.
Stevens, who was part of the group of PhD students who researched this topic
under the guidance of Professor Beatriz Colomina for Princeton University.
92 D
enise Scott Brown explains these designs in Beatriz Colomina, “Learning from
Levittown: A Conversation with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,” 65.
131
The final review was apparently problematic as well. Venturi and Scott
Brown recount a bus-load of students from Columbia University
attending the review to try to boycott it, for its anti-modernist bias.93
They also describe Bob Stern and Vincent Scully, who had supported
them with their Las Vegas project, leaving the review early and turning
their backs on them at that point. Ironically, the review was held in a
Victorian house owned by the university, since the School of Architec-
ture had suffered a fire as part of larger riots in New Haven during the
period of time that the studio took place.94
Signs of Life: Symbols in the City, the Exhibition – 1976

The Levittown studio was also the last studio that Venturi and Scott
Brown taught together. After 1970 Venturi quit teaching and they both
focused more heavily on their firm, which at the time was starting to
build a substantial amount of work. It also seems evident, reading Ven-
turi’s prologue to Learning from Las Vegas, that their partner John Raus-
ch was more than upset with their intense dedication to the production
of the book and its disruptive effect in the dynamic of the firm.95
For all of the above reasons, the intended book based on the Levittown
studio never happened, which did not keep Venturi and Scott Brown
from revisiting the project when the Smithsonian Institution in Wash-
ington, d.c. asked them to design an exhibition about housing in 1976.
The exhibition, titled Signs of Life: Symbols in the City, was a devel-
opment of the studio that basically discarded all the sociological and
economic preoccupations in order to focus solely on the analysis of the
symbolism of terraced housing developments, commercial streets and
suburban sprawl. The following is how the architects described their
aims for the exhibition:
“Our documentation of sprawl, strip and city, in the context of one

another and of the 19th century city, was part of a broader effort to
understand American architectural tastes and define the role of the
architect in relation to them. We contend that:
— The rich pervasion of symbols and signs that existed in the
historical city continues in the city today, although in a
different form.
— The ‘ordinary’ symbols and signs of the commercial and resi-
dential environment are not acknowledged, but are significant
in our daily lives.
— In learning to understand our symbols and signs, we come to
understand better ourselves and our landscape.
— Understanding the raison d’être of the physical environment is a
necessary prelude to improving it.”96
Despite the extreme reduction in the scope and ambition of the Lev-
ittown project in moving from the studio to the exhibition format, it
can be argued that the aim of the exhibition still aligns with one of the
basic premises of the project as enunciated in the studio brief, that of
bringing middle and lower-middle class taste and symbolism to the
establishment of high culture in order to make it respectable:
93 Ibid, 51.
94 D
enise Scott Brown, in discussion with the author, May 2013.
95 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, ix.
96 R
obert Venturi, Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown, “The Home” in Andreas
C Papadakis, ed., Venturi Scott Brown & Associates on Houses and Housing, 58.
132
Figure 37: Life-sized interior suburban scene
from the Signs of Life exhibition, 1976.
Original photographs by Stephen Shore.
Figure 38: Panels from the

Signs of Life exhibition, 1976.
“The popular environment, sprawl and strip, is drastically in need of

a […] service vis-à-vis the Fine Arts Commissions and Sybil Mo-
holy-Nagy because Pop is unacceptable until it hangs in the acade-
my and only the artist can put it there. Until this happens, hardship
will be brought on people and the environment in the name of
good architecture and the fight against aesthetic ‘pollution.’”97
This ambition to render suburban symbolism respectable by presenting

it in a controlled and domesticated manner within the official institu-
tions of culture was carried out once again through a heavy reliance on
photography and graphic communication techniques. The materials
in the exhibition included life-size mockups (Figure 37) of urban and
suburban scenes with dialogue bubbles explaining the symbolism of
the different elements within and a series of panels (Figure 38) in which
97 Denise Scott Brown, “Remedial Housing for Architects Studio,” 57.
133
some of the themes of the studio were more narrowly but more clearly
laid out. The different panels addressed the following themes:
— “Levittown”: The developer house types and the cosmetic alterations

performed by users.
— “Themes and ideals of the American suburb”: The rural ideal, trans-
portation, the good life, economics, personal identity.
— “Suburban space, scale and symbols”: Spatial and communication
analysis of suburbia, a parallel to their analysis of Las Vegas of 1968.
— “Similar houses personalized over time”: Customization of Philadel-
phia town houses and Southwestern bungalows.
— “Do it yourself styling”: Press advertisements with illustrated pro-
posals for redoing interiors of suburban homes. Home improvement
subculture.
— “House styling and symbolism”: What the different styles communicate
about their owners, or what the owners communicate through styling.
When comparing the output of the studio with the materials for the ex-
hibition, it quickly becomes evident that very little of the student work
made it to the exhibition – just a couple of drawings from a total of
thirty student panels. For this occasion, a more rigorous photographic
documentation was carried out. The photographs in the panels and life-
size mockups are in color and favor frontal perspectives and soft colors.
Each of the themes in the panels is represented by one larger image and
then developed through series of smaller photographs to form a matrix
that facilitates a comparative formal analysis of the subject matter.
All life-size photographs and most of the larger images in the exhibition
panels where taken by Stephen Shore, who in order to realize this project
took one of his road trips through the country during the summer of
1975, equipped with a list of themes prepared by the architects, but other-
wise free to develop his own take on the subject matter. In addition to
the materials used by the architects in their exhibition design, the show
also included a small gallery where twelve of the photographs taken by
Shore where showcased as a photographic project in their own right.98
As we have already discussed, Ed Ruscha had had a great impact on

the 1968 Las Vegas studio and had been publicly adopted as one of the
main references and inspirations for the work of Venturi and Scott
Brown in the 1969 article, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Plan-
ning.” It is shocking, then, to notice that he was drastically replaced by
Stephen Shore when addressing Levittown. Whatever the motives to
discontinue the use of Ed Ruscha as a reference might have been, we
should also ask why precisely Stephen Shore was chosen as the new
photographer of record for Venturi and Scot Brown.
In this respect, it would be easy to argue that Shore’s greater focus on

suburban themes was the reason, but the truth is that there were many
other contemporary photographers addressing the subject at the time,
like Robert Adams or Lewis Baltz, just to mention two of the photog-
raphers featured in the New Topographics exhibition, which Venturi
and Scott Brown most likely knew through Izenour and Shore him-
self. Each of these photographers had a very distinct view of sprawl,
and all of them could have been a viable option for Venturi and Scott
Brown. While Scott Brown points out Shore’s use of color and greater
98 S
tephen Shore in communication with the author, December 2013.
134
Figure 39: Stephen Shore,
West Avenue, Great Barrington, Massachusetts,
July 12, 1974.
availability as the main reasons for their collaboration, we will argue

that interrogating the photographic vision of Stephen Shore more
closely is necessary in order to help us better understand what it was
that Venturi and Scott Brown saw in his work.
All of the photographs that Venturi and Scott Brown used for their ex-
hibition and subsequent articles belong to the period when Shore was
working on his Uncommon Places project (Figure 39).99 These images
are precise compositions in which the elements are carefully placed as
to divide the frame into geometric figures through the alignment of
details in perspective. Many of these images also feature an emphasis
on centrality and symmetry, which is somehow counterintuitive if we
consider the informal and spontaneous landscape that they portray.
We could argue that it is precisely this capacity to exert control over
the messy reality of suburbia that was the key element that brought
the work of Shore to the attention of Venturi and Scott Brown. Robert
Venturi wrote a short essay in appreciation of Shore’s work that was
featured on the dust jacket of the original edition of Uncommon Places
where we can recollect his particular interest in the work:
99 Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1982).
135
“Shore’s is the art of the deadpan - rejecting exotic composition,
artful editing, or facile simplification. He accepts the threadbare
banality of the American scene, the jerry-rigged, down-at-the-heels
seediness of our rural landscapes and the spatial looseness of our
towns, recapturing the overfamiliar, making it poignant, coherent,
and almost lovable.”100
Despite Venturi’s characterization of Shore’s photography as “deadpan,”

most would agree that in his photographs, much of the ambiguity of
Ruscha is lost, as the effort put into the beautification of the subject
matter is evident in the obsessive control of perspective, light and col-
or. In other words, there is something in the term “deadpan” that goes
beyond coolness, something that we associate with automatism, or a
certain lack of elaboration that clearly does not apply to Shore’s highly
constructed vision in his Uncommon Places project. Also, while it is
true that the two photographers share a certain dispassionate or emo-
tionless tone, with Shore, as opposed to Ruscha, it is difficult to deny
the sheer beauty of the photographs, which limits the capacity of the
work to operate as open-ended (Figure 40). We could then conclude
that Venturi and Scott Brown chose Stephen Shore precisely because of
his capacity to beautify and control a reality that they felt conflicted by,
the reality of Levittown. To put it plainly, if even through the filter of
Shore’s vision Venturi could only declare the “almost lovable” quality of
suburbia, it is because in the end he was only able to “almost” over-
come his own problem of taste.
After an early involvement with housing in the beginning of their

career – Housing for the elderly in the Gwynedd Valley of 1959-1960,
Guild House of 1961-1966, and the Brighton Beach competition of 1967
– we would think that the Learning from Levittown studio was meant
to mark the beginning of a more intense involvement with the plan-
ning and design of mass housing for Venturi and Scott Brown. On the
contrary, housing projects practically disappeared from the portfolio of
the firm during the 1970s as it gradually specialized in cultural projects
and high-end single-family homes for the wealthy. Not without some
bitterness, Scott Brown explains the reasons for this in the prologue of
Figure 40: Stephen Shore,

Ginger Shore, Causeway Inn, Tampa, Florida,
November 17, 1977.
100 R
obert Venturi in Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places, dust jacket.
136
Figure 41: Venturi and Rauch,
Trubek and Wislocki cottages
in Nantucket, 1970.
On Houses and Housing.101 In this text, she also acknowledges a certain

dichotomy in their partnership, in which she was interested in the larg-
er picture of housing and its social components, while Robert Venturi
was more involved in the design of private residences as a commission
that condensates all architectural problems into a very precise object.102
Interestingly enough, out of the all the private residences featured in

On Houses and Housing, the Trubeck and Wislocki cottages in Nan-
tucket (Figure 41) become the clear protagonists of the book, specially
the smaller and less complex Wislocki House, which Scott Brown
describes as the “ugly and ordinary” of the couple.103 This tiny wood
construction, with is awkwardly placed windows and its tension
between symmetry and asymmetry seems to hold for Scott Brown a
special significance, since it was their only design simple enough to be
considered as a prototype for housing.104
101 See Denise Scott Brown, “On Houses and Housing,” 10.
102 Ibid., 13.
103 Ibid., 43.
137
04. Conclusions
After going through the decade during which Venturi and Scott Brown
developed a more specific and intense interest in the built environment
through photography, we are now in a better position to briefly revisit
some of their projects from that period and consider them in light of the
different influences from the arts that they incorporated to their practice.
We will then isolate four moments in the early career of Venturi and
Scott Brown in which four distinct sensibilities towards the reality of
un-authored or popular architecture crystallized into precise projects.
As we have discussed already, this whole affair can be interpreted as

a matter of style, in which the relative distance imposed between the
Figure 42: Robert Venturi, subject of study and the architect determines varied degrees of detach-
Guild House, 1961. ment, abstraction and distortion of the original, which in turn result
in a set of distinct modes of design. On the other hand, the same story
can be told as a problem of taste, in which the architects challenge
themselves by confronting something that is repulsive but fascinating,
by “liking what [they] hate.” This study becomes especially relevant
then, if we consider how Venturi and Scott Brown were not passive
cultural consumers, but rather influential figures in the development of
the many nuanced ways in which art and architecture structured their
relationship with ordinary artifacts during the 1960s and 1970s.
Exploring the Ordinary

When looking at the original photographs of Guild House (Figure 42),
one of Venturi’s earliest projects, it is impossible not to see the paral-
lel with Ed Ruscha’s early photography books, especially with Some
Figure 43: Ed Ruscha, 1850 S. Thayer Ave. Los Angeles Apartments (Figure 43). Not only are the programs of
from Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965. the buildings similar – low budget transient housing and low budget
assisted living – the construction materials are also almost identical.
Even the way the building was photographed – off kilter and with the
foreground of the rather derelict environment around it – reminds us
of Ruscha’s work. It is then striking to realize that the design for Guild
House (1961) actually predates Ruscha’s Twenty Six Gas Stations (1963)
and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965).
In fact, there is little in the plans and sections of Guild House (Figure 44)
from 1961 that anticipates its later visualization in photographs from
1966. What we read in the drawings for the project is a development
Figure 44: Plans for
the Guild House, 1961. of some of the themes of Venturi’s Vanna Venturi House (Figure 45)
(1959-1964) at the scale of a larger building. In fact, just like his moth-
er’s residence, Guild House can be considered an essay on how a rein-
terpretation of classical monumentality can be achieved in a domestic
project, with cheap materials and vernacular construction.
In fact, in both projects we find a very precise and personal mix of

classical resources and elements of the American vernacular tradition,
which are then integrated through a highly elaborate and contrived
sense of composition and geometry. Examples of classical resources
are the symmetry in the plans and elevations, as well as the broken
pediment in the Vanna Venturi House or the so-called giant order of
Guild House. As Venturi puts it, these elements stand for an “ideal”
architecture, which is then contrasted by a second set of elements that
138
Figure 45: Robert Venturi, plan and elevation
for the Vanna Venturi House, 1961.
Figure 46: Robert Venturi, main facade

of the Vanna Venturi House, 1961.
Figure 48: Robert Venturi,
Guild House, 1961.
stand for a “real” architecture, such as the boards, the industrial light
fixtures, and, more emphatically, the already mentioned double-hung
windows.105
While this mix and integration of elements is similar in both the

Vanna Venturi House and Guild House, the way that the final result
Figure 47: Robert Venturi, rear view of each project is photographed and published is quite different. The
of the Vanna Venturi House, 1961.
photographs of the Vanna Venturi House (Figure 46) – finished in 1964
– are elegant and relaxed compositions with a rich tonal range of grays
(Figure 47); the photographs of Guild House – finished in 1966 – are, in
contrast, much less polished and tend to underscore the rough quality
of the surrounding neighborhood (Figure 48). In this respect, while the
photographs of the Vanna Venturi House carefully crop the image to
avoid seeing the neighboring houses, the photographs of Guild House
favor the less remarkable side elevations and shamelessly display the
chain link fence and the lower sheds and cheap residential buildings
surrounding the plot.
105 R
ead Robert Venturi “A Postscript on My Mother’s House” in Denise Scott
Brown, et al. Out of the Ordinary, 25.
139
Whether this difference in representation resulted from Venturi be-
coming acquainted with the photography of Ed Ruscha in the period
between 1964 and 1966 – Scott Brown became aware of Ruscha in 1965
–, or by the effect of the stricter budgetary constraints and rougher
environs of Guild House is not certain. On the other hand, if we look at
the project that immediately follows Guild House, the Fire Station No.
4 in Columbus, Indiana (1966-1968) it is clear that these themes became
increasingly explicit during this period. Indeed, the Fire Station (Figure
49) is featured as the opening project in the third section of the original
edition of Learning from Las Vegas, where Venturi and Scott Brown
intentionally situate it as the first project of their post-Complexity and
Contradiction period.106 Comparing this project to Guild House, we
Figure 49: Venturi and Rauch,
Fire Station No. 4, 1966. notice an emphasis on the use of constructive materials as appliqué and
an increased independence of the facade from the rest of building.
Even if the facade materials in Guild House could clearly be recognized

as veneers, they still tended to adhere to the overall organization of the
facade and, with some exceptions, the changes in material occurred in
the transition between the components of the elevation, further con-
tributing to differentiate them. On the other hand, in the facade of Fire
Station No.4, the materials become autonomous within the elevation,
with the white brick roughly indicating the center of the composition
but cutting through both the large square window on the left and the
fire truck gate on the right.
Similarly, in Guild House we notice how the facade subtly acknowledg-

es its independence from the building when it reveals its thinness in the
upper portion of the side elevations, or in the way that the glazed brick
does not turn the corner in the lower central body. This detail, already
present in the Vanna Venturi House, is further exacerbated and made
Figure 50: Venturi and Rauch, explicit in Fire Station No. 4, where the front facade is emancipated,
Fire Station No. 4, 1966.
becoming twice as tall as the actual building behind it in the west ele-
vation (Figure 50). This detail reminds us of the American towns of the
Far West, but also, inevitably, of Ruscha’s concept of “facadedness.”
We could then conclude that while Robert Venturi was already in-
terested in using contemporary American vernacular architecture as
one more element of his architecture, the influence of Ed Ruscha via
Denise Scott Brown was decisive in triggering a process in which this
trend became increasingly self conscious and articulate. We should
also acknowledge that Ruscha’s concept of “facadedness,” must have
been influential in the formulation of the theory of the “decorated
shed,” regardless of whether Venturi and Scott Brown ever heard it
explicitly from Ruscha or just absorbed it from his photographic books
in implicit from. We can also say that the works of architecture covered
here – Guild House and the Fire Station Nº 4 – and the photography
books produced by Ruscha during the 1960s represent two parallel
explorations in which Ruscha, Venturi and Scott Brown surveyed the
banal architecture of commercial and residential America in a truly
nonjudgmental mode and began to articulate a personal formal lan-
guage derived from it.
106 R
obert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las
Vegas, 111.
140
A Moment of Glory
Going beyond our comparison of Ruscha’s photographs of apartment
buildings and Venturi’s Guild House photographs, we will argue
that there are also instances of the work of the architects that start to
operate in a mode that relates to Ed Ruscha’s painting instead of his
photography. While Ruscha’s books are cool, indifferent and spare, his
paintings are highly idealized and rich in color and geometric compo-
sition (Figure 51). We have thus argued that Ruscha broke through the
calculated distance and lack of emotion of his gas station photographs
when he painted Standard Gas Station in an idealized fashion. Similar-
ly, we could say that Venturi and Scott Brown deliver a parallel opera-
tion when they depart from the popular Cape Cod cabin type for the
stylized design of their Trubeck and Wislocki Cottages on the Island of
Nantucket (Figure 52).
Figure 51: Comparison of the photographic

and pictorial versions of Standard Station,
Amarillo, Texas.
Figure 52: Comparison of the popular

Cape Cod style cabin and Venturi
and Scott Brown’s cottages on Nantucket.
141
The Cape Cod, or Cape Cod style house was one of Levittown’s four
basic models, and more generally a pervasive model for single-fam-
ily houses across America.107 In their 1970 Learning from Levittown
studio, and later in their 1976 Signs of Life exhibition, Venturi and
Scott Brown explained this type as elaborating on the symbolism of
the first settlers and, more specifically, referring to New England as the
mythic locus for the foundation of the country.108 The rich history of
this building type and its successive re-elaborations and commercial
adaptations is one that clearly fitted into Venturi’s interest in copy and
symbolism as themes for an architectural project.109
In Nantucket, this basic material extracted from the built environment

is dealt with through a recourse to abstraction that relates to but differs
from the techniques used in Guild House. While both projects display
a similar over-emphasis on the appropriation of vernacular elements,
in Guild House these elements are distorted in order to signal an
ambivalent or difficult relationship of the author with the reality that
he is manipulating. In the Nantucket cottages, on the other hand, the
windows and other vernacular constructive elements are also manipu-
lated but the extent and purpose of the manipulation is different. This
is clear for instance in the way in which the shallowness of the facade is
exposed in Nantucket, through a highly precise and crisp corner detail
that renders each of the facades as a flat independent canvas, while re-
taining a tight and simple volumetric configuration (Figure 53). While
Guild House exposes its conflicts, the Nantucket Cottages resolve
theirs. In Nantucket, Venturi’s unparalleled geometric skill is put to the
service of integrating the popular references into a crisp and polished
example of contemporary high architecture.
When comparing photographs of examples of the Cape Cod house

across America with Venturi’s version, we cannot help but recognize how
the techniques – geometric abstraction and stylization – coincide with
those present in the transformation of Ruscha’s Standard Gas Station
from its photographic to its pictorial incarnation. We could also argue
that the final aim of these transformations is parallel as well, that both
the architects and the artist, in their process of surveying anonymous
architecture non-judgmentally, involuntarily fall in love with one of their
subjects of study and through a set of formal techniques transform it
into high art or architecture, in this case without irony or ambivalence.
The question then becomes why this change of heart or sensibility hap-
pens, since as we have discussed previously Venturi and Scott Brown’s
own personal relationship with the aesthetic reality of mass-produced
suburban housing is conflicted to say the least. The answer may be then
that in Nantucket, Venturi and Scott Brown were not reinterpreting the
107 F or a full account of the different house models in Levittown and a complete
history of the alterations made by owners see Barbara M. Kelly, Expanding the
American Dream: Building and rebuilding Levittown (Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press, 1993).
108 S
ee Denise Scott Brown, “Remedial Housing for Architects Studio,” 56-58.
109 F or a truly exhaustive account of the history of the Cape Cod type and its
appropriation and reinterpretation by Venturi and Scott Brown in the Nantucket
cottages see Thomas Beeby, “Association and Dissociation: The Trubeck and
Wislocki Houses,” in Robert Venturi, Vincent Joseph Scully, and Christopher
Curtis Mead, The Architecture of Robert Venturi (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1989), 68-84.
142
Figure 53: Venturi Scott Brown and Associates,
Wislocki House, Nantucket, 1970.
“ordinary” Levittown version of the Cape Cod, but rather the original
“heroic” cabin of the first settlers, or at least its more acceptable 19th
century version.110
Doing Damage Control

While the refashioning of the Cape Cod house provided Venturi and
Scott Brown with the opportunity to approach the issue of domestic
symbolism in a sympathetic manner, we have acknowledged the fact
that this was not exactly the symbolism of middle class mass subdivi-
sion suburbs, but rather the symbolism of upper-middle class individu-
alized dwellings: the clients were a Yale professor and a related family.111
Since Venturi and Scott Brown did not do much work in the field
of mass housing or in the master planning of suburban communi-
ties – according to Scott Brown, they never got the chance – it will be
110 R
eferring to the Nantucket cottages Venturi and Scott Brown would say: “These
are 19th century Wauwinet fisherman’s cottages with Shingle style and Art Nou-
veau complexities inside.” Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in Andreas C
Papadakis, ed., Venturi Scott Brown & Associates on Houses and Housing, 43.
111 Ibid.
143
Figure 54: Stephen Shore, Union Street,
Rockport, Maine, July 23, 1974;
Levitttown schedule from On Houses
and Housing by Robert Venturi,
Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown.
difficult for us to determine what the results of such projects would
have been.112 Even the designs of their students in the Learning from
Levittown studio – of which they approved – are too underdeveloped
for us to carry the sort of formal judgments that we have carried out
with the Guild House or Nantucket cases.
On the other hand, in the prologue of On Houses and Housing, Scott

Brown clearly acknowledged that she was the one interested in housing
as a mass phenomenon and its social implications, while Venturi was
the one interested in the design of specific houses and their formal
and architectural problems.113 In this regard, the exhibition Signs of
Life condensed the overlap of the interests of the couple into a suc-
cinct thesis that can be considered the minimum denominator of their
suburban project: “the elements of architecture have symbolic meaning
and give messages about the environment that make it comprehensible
and therefore usable by people in their daily lives.”114 Photography, and
more precisely the clinical eye of Stephen Shore, then became the tool
to dissect and chart these elements allowing the architects to lay out
their diversity and make explicit their individual meaning. In con-
sciously tasking themselves with legitimizing this reality, the architects
created a tolerable representation of suburbia and then surfaced the
walls of the very respectable Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Insti-
tution with it for a few months.115
We will then argue that their transition from Ed Ruscha to Stephen

Shore as their photographer of record within the context of this exhi-
bition was related precisely with this necessity to render the aesthetic
112 D
enise Scott Brown, “On Houses and Housing,” 10.
113 Ibid., 13.
114 D
enise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, “Signs of Life: Symbols in the Amer-
ican city,” Aperture, no. 77, (1976): 49. The text is a revised version of the
exhibition catalog.
115 T he show Signs of Life: Symbols in the city ran from February 26 through Sep-
tember 30, 1976.
144
Figure 55: Venturi Scott Brown & Associates,
House in Delaware, 1978.
chaos of the suburbs digestible for the upper classes. While Ruscha’s
images were provocative and challenged the viewer openly, Shore’s
hyper-documentalism had a narcotic effect that perfectly suited the
need of the architects (Figure 54). In this regard, Shore’s control of
perspective, composition and color played the role of capturing the
“banality” of suburbia and through his photographic alchemy “making
it poignant, coherent, and almost lovable.”116
The Oldenburg Effect

While Pop Art was from the outset a clear reference for Venturi and
Scott Brown in their dealing with popular subjects, it is also true that
their initial interpretation of Pop was one closer to the conceptual and
dry vision of Ruscha than to the more tongue-in-cheek approach of
other pop artists. On the other hand, starting in the 1970s and increas-
ing throughout the years, Venturi and Scott Brown introduced some of
the more blatant and direct strategies of Pop Art into their repertoire.
In fact, we can consider an example of their later residential work, such as

the House in Delaware of 1978, as a specific realization of what they had
called the Oldenburg Interpretation (Figure 55). In this particular project,
several techniques were employed that directly derive from the work of
Oldenburg, such as the blowing up in scale of architectural elements,
the bi-dimensional translations of three-dimensional forms into cutouts
and the use of a very specific set of flat colors. Even in the interior of the
house these techniques were replicated in the production of every piece
of furniture and detail, creating an unreal and childish atmosphere.
From the beginning, the aim of Venturi and Scott Brown with their
Oldenburg scheme was to legitimize low culture by turning it into high
culture. Just like Oldenburg had done, they took an object from popular
culture and everyday life and blew it out of scale, fabricating it with alien
116 R
obert Venturi in Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places (Millerton, NY: Aperture,
1982), dust jacket.
145
Figure 56: Robert Venturi, Guild House,
side facade detail, 1961.
materials and colors to further decontextualize it. While Oldenburg le-

gitimized his subjects by “hanging them in the gallery wall,” Venturi and
Scott Brown displayed theirs in the pages of Architectural Record.
The problem then becomes that the level of detachment from and dis-
tortion of the original in these projects is so high that it becomes dif-
ficult to recognize the type of subtlety and compassion that we found,
for instance, in their use of brick and double hung windows in Guild
House (Figure 56). While Oldenburg’s objects are humorous in their
ambivalence, there is an undeniable calm quality in their stark lack of
detail. On the other hand, Venturi and Scott Brown’s later residential
designs, with their increasingly blunt clashes of classical and vernacu-
lar references become noisy and start to relate to the original through a
recourse to caricature.
When comparing these later designs with the Vanna Venturi House or
the Nantucket cottages we realize that Venturi’s exuberant and obsessive
geometric re-elaboration of the individual appropriated elements was
what integrated them into wholes and allowed them to coexist in their
early projects. Once that initial intensity of formal integration fades away
in the late 1970s, what is left is the direct confrontation of cartoon-like
versions of borrowed classical and vernacular elements in a project, with
the result that humor overpowers other readings of the work, and irony
undoes the original intent of legitimizing popular taste.
Inclusive Superficiality
Despite the rather pessimistic trajectory that can be inferred from the
four consecutive moments described above, there are decisive con-
tributions that become evident when we confront Venturi and Scott
Brown’s built projects with their interest in the contemporary city and
its artifacts during the mid-1960s and 1970s. Out of all their achieve-
ments during this period, we will highlight their consistent identifica-
tion of superficiality as a dominant theme in contemporary culture and
their original translation of this concept to the field of architecture.
146
Venturi and Scott Brown recognized in Ed Ruscha’s “facadedness”
an idea in which formal and social considerations overlapped to a
point where they became confounded. Indeed, Ruscha’s term not only
referred to the actual thinness of balloon frame construction in the
apartment buildings and commercial frontages of l.a., it also implicitly
referred to the supposed shallowness of the life-style for which they
provided a backdrop.117 Ruscha’s paper-thin architectures and empty
swimming pools are an open interrogation into the legitimacy and
desirability of service-industry capitalist society in the American West.
In this respect, Venturi and Scott Brown’s embrace of Ruscha’s superfi-

ciality finds a parallel development in Reyner Banham’s appropriation
of David Hockney’s painting in his 1971 eulogy Los Angeles, Architec-
ture of Four Ecologies (Figure 57).118 In a time of deep cultural changes
and alarm in the most conservative sectors of society, the common
position adopted by these artists and architects amounted to an exer-
cise of cultural self-acceptance. The relevance of this operation is again
that it was deployed simultaneously at two different levels. On the one
hand it explored the potential of their contemporary material culture
to generate a new canon of beauty. On the other hand, by considering
a set of unauthentic generic artifacts around them aesthetically they
were also considering a related set of marginalized or emerging ways of
life as legitimate.119
In this regard the figure of Denise Scott Brown is decisive, since her
South African upbringing and further experiences in post war Britain
Figure 57: Cover of

Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies
by Reyner Banham, 1971.
117 Ćécile Whiting, Pop L.A, 113.

118 B
anham used A Bigger Splash, a Hockney painting from 1968 for the cover of this
book, in which he also featured and discussed Ruscha prominently. Reyner Ban-
ham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Allen Lane, 1971).
119 W
e have discussed these issues regarding the Californian art scene surrounding
Ruscha and their use of heterosexual stereotypes. Something similar could be
said in the case of Hockney who portrayed the way of life of the L.A. gay commu-
nity in their copies of case study houses. See Ćécile Whiting, Pop L.A, 113.
147
Figure 58: (above) Photograph of Levittown,
New Jersey by Denise Scott Brown, 1963;
(below) photograph of tract houses
in Bayonne, N.J. by Dan Graham in 1966.
had equipped her with a unique awareness and sensibility for the
material manifestations of different subcultures and the emancipatory
effect that the legitimization of their products could play at a larger
scale. Her photography (see Figure 1) – a body of work which is now in
the process of being reappraised – can then be considered as a life-long
exploration and search for precisely those instances in the built envi-
ronment that hinted towards changes in society, as an effort to uncover
and confront the reality around her in its own terms.120
120 S
ee Jesús Vassallo, “Taking Stock: the photographs of Denise Scott Brown,”
Harvard Design Magazine 37, (2014). The article is at the time of the printing of
this dissertation still in press.
148
Figure 59: Light fixture next to the
“nowhere stair” in the Vanna Venturi House,
as compared to Dan Flavin’s,
Icon II (the mystery) (to John Reeves), 1961
In this light, Venturi and Scott Brown’s architectural exploration of
superficiality through a series of projects can be appraised as a much
deeper-reaching endeavor than originally expected. Venturi and Scott
Brown’s famous comparison of their Guild House with Paul Rudolph’s
Crawford Manor is probably one of the most effective visual/textual ar-
guments ever made, but precisely because of that effectiveness it forced
a linear reading of their architectural proposal as a dialectic opposition
to late modernism. In fact, if we are able to ignore the specific associa-
tion of Venturi and Scott Brown with the rise of American Post-Mod-
ern architecture for a second and consider their early projects in
parallel to Ruscha, Shore, Hockney and other artists dealing with the
generic during that period, we will be able to regard their early body of
work under a completely new light.
It then becomes necessary to compare Scott Brown’s own 1963 pictures of

Levittown with Dan Graham’s photographs of tract houses in his Homes
for America project of 1967 (Figure 58), or Robert Venturi’s over-exposure
of generic light fixtures in his Vanna Venturi House (1961-1964) with
Dan Flavin’s use of the exact same element in his Icons series of 1962
(Figure 59).121 Revisiting Venturi and Scott Brown’s early research and
work in this new context, we will argue that theirs was in fact a much
richer and wider consideration of the role that the acceptance of unde-
sired generic conditions was playing in the definition of contemporary
art and culture, and more specifically of the role that abstraction was
playing in that process, with all its aesthetic and ethical implications.
121 W
hen asked about these coincidences Venturi and Scott Brown denied being
aware of these works at the time.
149
Bibliography
– Adams, Robert, Britt Salvesen, and Alison Devine Nordström. New

Topographics. Tucson, AZ: Center for Creative Photography, Univer-
sity of Arizona; Rochester, NY: George Eastman House; Göttingen:
Steidl, 2010.
– Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The architecture of four ecologies. Lon-
don: Allen Lane, 1971.
– Blauvelt, Andrew. Editor. Worlds Away: New suburban landscapes.
Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2008.
– Denise Scott Brown, et al. Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi,
Denise Scott Brown and Associates. Philadelphia, Pa.: Philadelphia
Museum of Art; [New Haven]: In association with Yale University
Press, 2001.
– Eggleston, William, and John Szarkowski. William Eggleston’s Guide.
New York: Museum of Modern Art; Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1976.
– Gans, Herbert J. Making Sense of America: Sociological analyses and
essays. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
– Gans, Herbert J. The Levittowners: Ways of life and politics in a new
suburban community. London: Penguin Press, 1967.
– Graham, Dan, and Gloria Moure. Dan Graham: Works and collected
writings. Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Polígrafa; New York: d.a.p./Dis-
tributed Art Publishers, 2009.
– Hockney, David, and Nikos Stangos. David Hockney / by David
Hockney. London: Thames & Hudson, 1976.
– Kelly, Barbara M. Expanding the American Dream: Building and rebuild-
ing Levittown. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.
– LeWitt, Sol “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10
(1967): 79–83.
– Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, Mass.: Technology
Press, 1960.
– Moos, Stanislaus von. Venturi, Rauch, & Scott Brown, Buildings and
projects. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.
– Papadakis, Andreas C. Editor. Venturi Scott Brown & Associates on
Houses and Housing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
– Rowell, Margit. Ed Ruscha Photographer. Göttingen: Steidl; New
York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006.
– Scott Brown, Denise and Steven Izenour. “Signs of Life: Symbols in
the American city”. New York: Aperture, no. 77, (1976): 49-65. (Based
on the text from the exhibition catalog).
– Scott Brown, Denise. “Il ‘pop’ insegna = Learning from Pop.” Casabel-
la 35, no. 359 (December 1971): 14-23.
– Scott Brown, Denise. “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning.”
Journal of The American Institute Of Planners 35, (May 1969): 184-186.
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common Places: The complete works. New York: Aperture, 2004.
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on, 2005.
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Studio: Images from the archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
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from Las Vegas’.” Hunch: The Berlage Institute Report no. 12 (2009): 76.
– Stierli, Martino. “In the Academy’s Garden: Robert Venturi, the
Grand Tour and the revision of Modern Architecture.” AA Files, No.
56 (2007): 42-55.
– S upercrit #2: Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Learning from
Las Vegas. Edited by Hardingham, Samantha, and Kester Rattenbury.
Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2007.
– Venturi, Robert and Denise Scott Brown. “A Significance for A & P
Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas.” Architectural Forum 128,
no. 2 (March 1968): 36-43 and 89-91.
– Venturi, Robert and Denise Scott Brown. “House is More than a
Home - Symbols in the home: Renwick gallery, Washington, D.C;
exhibit.” Progressive Architecture 57, (August 1976): 62-67.
– Venturi, Robert and Denise Scott Brown. “Ugly and Ordinary Archi-
tecture, or The decorated shed,” Part I, Architectural Forum (Novem-
ber 1971): 64-67; Part II, Architectural Forum (December 1971): 48-53;
Discussion, (January 1972): 12.
– Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Victoria Carroll “Styling or
‘These houses are exactly the same. They lust look different.’” Lotus 9,
(February 1975): 234-235.
– Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning
from Las Vegas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972.
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from Las Vegas: The forgotten symbolism of architectural form. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977.
– Venturi, Robert, Vincent Joseph Scully, and Christopher Curtis
Mead. The Architecture of Robert Venturi. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1989.
– Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New
York: Museum of Modern Art; Boston, 1977.
– Venturi, Robert. “Photographs from the American Academy in
Rome, 1954-1956.” AA Files, No. 56 (2007): 56-63.
– Whiting, Ćécile. Pop L.A.: Art and the city in the 1960s. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006.
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151
Chapter 3 Italian Neorealism
01. Introduction
02. The Emergence of Neorealism
03. The Canonical Works
04. Late Neorealism
05. A
Coda: Michelangelo Antonioni
vs. Aldo Rossi
– The Crisis of Neorealism
– Michelangelo Antonioni
· The Documentaries
· The Trilogy
· Abstraction and Autonomy
– Aldo Rossi
· The Architecture of the City
· Analogous Architecture
· A Scientific Autobiography
06. Conclusions
153
Figure 1: Guiseppe Pagano,
Sardinia, vol. 57, n.° 20, ca. 1936.
01. Introduction
Across genres and generations, a whole history of Italian culture could
be told through the evolution of realism as a concept and a style after
the Second World War and moving forward. This dominance of real-
ism is probably most notorious in the case of cinema, with neorealism
being Italy’s most decisive contribution to the history of film making,
but a similar argument can be made regarding photography – which
during this period was deeply influenced by parallel developments in
cinema – or about architecture, which too developed its own neoreal-
ist language. In the particular case of architecture, the emergence and
evolution of neorealism can be easily followed in the pages of Casabella
magazine, whose successive editors – Giuseppe Pagano, Ernesto Na-
than Rogers and Aldo Rossi – were protagonists of these events.
In 1960, two years after taking over the editorship of Casabella, Aldo
Rossi and Francesco Tentori ran a retrospective article in which they
surveyed the fifteen years of the magazine since the end of the war.1
In this extended and richly illustrated article, the editors presented a
selection of architectural projects paired with paintings and stills from
Italian neorealist films (See Figure 2 in next page). In the first spread of
the article, we find among others a photograph of actress Anna Magnani
in her role in Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945) paired with a
photograph of Ignazio Gardella’s famous residence Casa del Viticultore
(1944-47). A few pages later we find Alida Valli as featured in Luchino-
Visconti’s Senso (1954), paired with Ernesto Nathan Rogers’ Torre Velas-
ca in Milan (1958) and Gardella’s Casa alle Zattere in Venice (1957). In the
last of these spreads, we find Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s
L’avventura (1960) paired with Carlo Scarpa’s Casa Veritti (1960).
Across the pages of this retrospective article, and through the subtext
formed by its carefully curated images, we can read a parallel evolution
of Italian cinema and architecture, one in which increasing lyricism and
abstraction gradually take over from a more austere and direct under-
standing of realism in the immediate postwar years. The present chapter
seeks to briefly lay out a plausible account of such a transition through
a series of moments for which the history of Casabella magazine and
its editors becomes the guiding thread. Beginning with the figure of Gi-
useppe Pagano in the early thirties and following with Ernesto Nathan
Rogers and Aldo Rossi after the war, we will propose a structure that
explains the evolution of Italian architectural neorealism in three stages.
We will signal the period between the early 1930s and the end of World
War II as encompassing the emergence of neorealism in both cinema
and architecture in an embryonic state. In this very early phase an
abstract idea of realism tried to find a proper materialization through
borrowing from existing forms, primarily from rationalism and the
vernacular tradition. This period was characterized by the tentative
and unstable accord of discrete ideas and forms that came together in
order to put forward a first approximation of a realist architecture, as
exemplified in the editorial and curatorial work of Giuseppe Pagano
and in the early buildings of Ignazio Gardella.
1. Francesco Tentori, “Quindici anni di archittettura,” Casabella-Continuità 251,

(1960): 57-65.
155
Figure 2: Three spreads from issue 251
of Casabella, featuring the retrospective article
by Aldo Rossi and Francesco Tentori, 1960.
156
The second moment of Italian neorealism occurred between the years
of 1945 and 1958 and was characterized by a high level of consensus in
the architectural scene during the years of the reconstruction of the
country, in which vernacular references became the source for a uni-
versal architectural language. During this period, in order to achieve a
stronger alignment of idea and form, the concept of realism was fur-
ther defined, or restricted, and a specific formal language followed suit.
Evidence of this short-lived equilibrium of form and content can be
found in the early built work of Ignazio Gardella, and most clearly in
the selection of canonical architectural projects carried out by Ernesto
Nathan Rogers during his first years as editor of Casabella.
A third phase in the development of Italian neorealism emerged in

1958, the year that Rogers and his colleagues in studio bbpr completed
their Torre Velasca in Milan. The process leading up to this moment
was characterized by the gradual introduction of historic references
and the displacement of vernacular sources as the basis of Italian neo-
realism, which in turn became increasingly complex and subjective.
This development is palpable not only in Roger’s built work but also in
the increasing diversity and autonomy that photographs acquired in
the pages of Casabella, where the images of the vernacular slowly lost
ground to the monuments of antiquity and ancient non-western sourc-
es. As the urgency of the reconstruction faded away and the industrial
north of Italy experienced unprecedented economic growth, architec-
ture shifted its focus from rural to urban settings and from the needs
of the working classes to those of the urban bourgeoisie.
While neorealism reached a point of exhaustion somewhere during the

early 1960s, we will contend that in fact, the work of Aldo Rossi can be
interpreted as a late development of neorealism, one that transcends it
but cannot be explained independently from it. In order to develop this
idea, we will draw a parallel with film maker Michelangelo Antonioni,
who Rossi deeply admired, 2 presenting the two figures as represen-
tatives of a late generation of neorealism in architecture and film that
was confronted with a deep cultural and ideological crisis, and whose
response to that crisis had a profound effect in their disciplines and
within European culture at large. Therefore, this chapter attempts to ar-
ticulate and outline a short history of neorealism in Italian architecture
through the architects’ engagement with images, a history that then
becomes a lens with which to revisit and reassess the work of Rossi,
thus resituating his work within that context.
2. Aldo Rossi famously referenced neorealist films in many of his articles and
interviews. He was especially influenced by Antonioni, going as far as naming one
of his projects after Professione: Reporter (The Passenger), Antonioni’s 1970 film
starring Jack Nicholson. See Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 41. For more of Rossi’s comments on Italian Neorealis-
mo see “Un’educacione realista” in Aldo Rossi, and Alberto Ferlenga, Aldo Rossi,
Architetture, 1959-1987 (Milano: Electa, 1987), 71.
157
The notion of architectural neorealism that we propose here is an
expanded one, both geographically and chronologically.3 The term
neorealism started to be used retroactively in architecture during the
mid-1950s, referring to the work built during the preceding decade.4
We will nonetheless adopt the use of the term in contemporary film
and photography criticism, which finds the origins of this trend in the
interwar period as well as contends that many works from the 1ate 1950s
and early 1960s can still be considered late manifestations of the style.
Similarly, while some authors tend to emphasize the importance of
Rome over Milan or vice versa, we will contend that neorealism was a
national phenomenon in terms of its production, highlighting the Mila-
nese group of architects with Pagano, Rogers and Rossi as responsible to
a higher degree for the formulation and evolution of these ideas.
02. The Emergence of Neorealism

Recent developments in the criticism and historic appreciation of
Italian neorealism in both cinema and photography tend to acknowl-
edge the fact that the movement emerged, at least in an embryonary
form, during the years of Mussolini’s fascist regime.5 In fact, the early
neorealist films of directors such as Luchino Visconti (Ossesione – 1942),
or Michelangelo Antonioni (Gente del Po – 1943) were shot before the
end of the war. In addition to this chronologic argument, some critics
like Giuseppe Pinna argue that nerorealism as a style would have been
impossible without the base provided by the film industry and visual
language that Mussolini carefully fostered in order to sustain his appa-
ratus of propaganda.6 According to this view, the shift from fascist visu-
al production to postwar neorealism is mainly of topics and ideology, as
Figure 3: Fedele Toscani, Il Duce Reviews the
Results of the Demographic Campaign, 1938.
both movements rely equally on the scientific neutrality inherent in the
media of photography and film in order to put forward an illusion of
reality and to create a national image with which people can identify.
In fact, Italy was one of the first countries in the world to develop a
fully-fleshed audiovisual industry. In the 1920s the country was greatly
fragmented, with hundreds of dialects and strong regional identities.
Additionally, a large percentage of the population was still illiterate. In
this context, Mussolini was quick to realize the power of film and pho-
tography in the creation of public opinion, founding in 1925 the Istituto
3. T here are three main essays that touch on neorealism in Italian architecture, but
Figure 4: Istituto Luce, Il Duce Inaugurates none of them is a comprehensive critical summary. Manfredo Tafuri, “Archittetu-
the Imperial Aqueduct March IX, Lascio, 1940. ra e realismo,” in L’Avventura delle idee nell’archittetura 1750-1980, in Vittorio
Magnano Lampugnani ed., (Milan: Electa, 1985). Bruno Reichlin, “Figures du
néoréalisme dans l’architecture italienne,” Les Cahiers du MNAM 69 (1999): 109.
Maristella Casciato, “Neorealism in Italian Architecture”, in Sarah Goldhagen and
Réjean Legault eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in postwar architec-
tural culture, (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2000). While the current text does not undertake the task to become such
missing historically comprehensive piece, it does seize the opportunity to put
forward an alternative account of the events.
4. T he term was coined by Carlo Aymonimo and quickly adopted in the architectural
debate, becoming common in Casabella by the end of the 1950s. See Maristella
Casciato, “Neorealism in Italian Architecture,” 46.
5. A
good representation of this current exploring the deeper roots of Italian neoreal-
ism can be found in the essays by Giuseppe Pinna, Gian Piero Brunetta and Bruno
Falcetto contained in Enrica Viganò, ed., Neorealismo: La nueva imagen en Italia,
1932-1960 (Madrid: La Fábrica, 2007).
6. G
iuseppe Pina, “Italia, Realismo, Neorrealismo, La comunicación visual en la nueva
sociedad multimedia” in Enrica Viganò, ed., Neorealismo, 19-39.
158
Figure 5: Comparison of two images by the
Instituto Luce from 1934. The first one,
El Duce en Foggia, portrays an official fascist
rally, while the second, Sabaudia, Blessing from
the Campanile, portrays a spontaneous religious
celebration. While the formal language remains
the same, the images of the country that are put
Nazionale luce (L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa) (Figure 3). This
forward diverge.
public entity was geared towards the production of film and photog-
raphy and the orchestration of their use by a comprehensive network
of mass media.7 Operating under the powerful Ministry of Popular
Culture, this institution was entrusted with the task of creating the
image of progress and modernity fostered by the regime, an image of a
new people and a new country, homogenous and united in reclaiming
its glorious Roman past.8
The realism adopted by the fascist regime as a visual language in

photography and film was thus a direct development of the need to
convince the people that this projective image of Italy was not only
real, but indeed more real than the experience of their daily lives.9
Nevertheless, the realist drive in the film and photography industry
would prove to be a dangerous one for the regime, since its techniques
and mechanisms could easily be subverted by merely turning the lens
away from the inaugurations of civil engineering works and industrial
facilities (Figure 4) and towards the reality that the regime was trying
to erase, namely the heterogeneity, poverty and backwardness of the
rural regions and the working class quarters (Figure 5).
This problem became an increasing concern for the regime after 1936
following the invasion of Ethiopia when Italy became subject to inter-
national sanctions that slowed the economy and dramatically increased
the gap between the image of progress and prosperity put forward
by the regime and the actual existence of the Italian people – a series
of events which triggered a wave of increasingly flat propaganda and
ideological repression. At this moment, during the second half of the
1930s as the initial heterogeneity and consensus within the fascist party
7. Ibid., 32.
8. Ibid, 33.
9. Ibid., 34.
159
was being replaced by a single-minded and extreme reactionary thrust,
there were several desperate attempts to redirect the politics of the
regime from within.10
In this light we can better understand the work of photographers and

filmmakers working within the structure of the Istituto luce who
used the realism of the new audio-visual industry to portray the life
of Italians in all its crude and appalling actuality. People like Giacomo
Pozzi-Bellini, whose documentary film Il pianto delle zitelle (1939)
was censured for showing the actual living conditions of the people
participating in the pilgrimage to the Vallepietra sanctuary, or Luchi-
no Visconti, with his 1942 film Ossessione, who was equally censored
for insinuating the possibility of vice and corruption in the idealized
Italian countryside.11
These subversive efforts in the field of cinema find a parallel in archi-

tecture through the figure of Giuseppe Pagano (1896-1945) (Figure 6),
a young fascist architect with a strong interest and talent for photog-
Figure 6: Portrait of Giuseppe Pagano, 1919.
raphy who in 1931 was entrusted with the editorship of the magazine
Casabella.12 As an active member of the Fascist party and a supporter
of its left wing, led by Giuseppe Bottai, Pagano’s role in Casabella
(which he co-edited with Eduardo Persico between 1931 and 1941) fo-
cused on the introduction of vernacular architecture as a reference for
the elaboration of a specifically Italian strain of rationalism in architec-
ture. During the 1930s, several factions or styles competed to become
the predominant architectural language of the fascist regime, among
them the bombastic historicism of Marcello Piacentini’s Romanitá, the
streamlined futurism of Gruppo Toscano, and the rhetorical purism
defended from the pages of Quadrante magazine and epitomized by
Figure 7: Installation view, Guiseppe Pagano and

Werner Daniel, Architectura rurale italiana, 1936.
10. F or a general account of Italian politics before and during the war see Philip Mor-
gan, The fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians, and the Second World War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
11. G
iuseppe Pina, “Italia, realismo, neorrealismo,” 34.
12. B
iographic data on Giuseppe Pagano are taken from Annalisa Avon, Pagano,
Giuseppe (1896 - 1945), architect, writer (Oxford University Press, 1996), Grove
Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.ezproxy.rice.edu/subscriber/article/
grove/art/T064583?
160
Figure 8: Guiseppe Pagano, image from the
Architectura rurale italiana exhibition, 1936.
the work of Giuseppe Terragni. Within these factions, Pagano’s Casa-

bella represented a current of socially-minded northern architects who
defended a pragmatic take on modernism.13
Pagano had received his education in the Regio Politecnico di Torino,

where he graduated in 1924. Architectural education in the north of
Italy during the interwar years was based on a mix of engineering and
architecture, with an emphasis on the practicalities and economies of
construction and mass housing. Coming from this background, Paga-
no’s adoption of vernacular architectures as a source for a new architec-
ture resulted from a simultaneous interest in the economy of means of
these constructions and in their naïve and unmediated plastic ingenuity.
During the interwar period, Pagano’s most decisive contribution to

Italian architectural discourse was the 1936 exhibition Archittetura
rurale italiana (Figure 7), which he co-curated with Werner Daniel as
part of the VI Milan Triennale. In preparation of this exhibition, Pagano
traveled the country photographing vernacular architectures across the
different Italian regions. His documentary photography of small rural
buildings, is a testament to his capacity to discern formal inventiveness
and abstraction in these rather humble and utilitarian buildings (Figure
8). In 1935, describing the efforts leading to the exhibition, he wrote:
“The repertory of rural architecture reveals an immense encyclo-

pedia of abstract forms and creative expressions with obvious
connections to the land, climate, ecology and technology. As
13. F or a full account of the different factions competing within the Mussolini regime in
the enunciation of an Italian fascist modernity and Pagano’s role in this scene see
Michelangelo Sabatino, Pride in Modesty: Modernist architecture and the vernacular
tradition in Italy (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 128-165.
161
Figure 9: Guiseppe Pagano and Werner Daniel,
spread of the Architectura rurale italiana
catalogue, 1936.
such, an examination of rural architecture, conducted with these

above mentioned criteria in mind, is useful and necessary to
understand the causal relationships that the stylistic analysis of
architecture has led us to forget. Rural architecture represents the
first and immediate victory of man extracting sustenance form
the land. Although it is a victory dictated by necessity, it is not
devoid of artistic achievements.”14
Pagano’s photographs, elegantly organized in groups of twelve images

and mounted on black boards, became the dominant and virtually
sole content of the exhibition, which presented a full survey of vernac-
ular architecture across the Italian regions in which the diversity of
types and constructive techniques were presented simultaneously. It is
important here to notice that the material was presented unmediated
by historical or other commentary and was organized by constructive
type rather than chronology (Figure 9). This presentation underscored
the actuality of the buildings as belonging to a constructive tradition
that was still alive, as opposed to a glorious historic past.15
The goal was to present vernacular architecture as a repository of

solutions, implying an understanding of rationalism as a responsive-
ness to particular economic, topographic, technological and climatic
conditions (Figure 10). Within this context, beauty was derived from
the directness of the architectural responses to specific problems, from
the freedom with which personal expression was handled within these
constraints, and from a certain ideological bias towards austerity and
“modesty,” a term that Pagano employed consistently in his writings. In
positioning his proposal against the competing currents of Terragni or
Piacentini, he would underscore the realist drive of his approach:
“Pursuing this analysis [of rural architecture] is like undergoing

detoxification from eating decadent pastry with the help of simple
food, or the act of distinguishing between banal clichés and reality.”16
The exhibition marked the watershed of Pagano’s influence in the

Italian milieu. The following years would be marked by an increase
14. G
iuseppe Pagano “Documenti di architettura rurale,” Casabella 8, no. 95 (1935):
18-25. Quoted from the full English translation of the article by Michelangelo
Sabatino, “Documenting Rural Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education
63, no. 2 (March 2010): 92.
15. M
ichelangelo Sabatino, Pride in Modesty, 132.
16. Ibid.
162
Figure10: Photographs of Italian rural vernacular
architecture by Guiseppe Pagano for the
Architectura rurale italiana exhibition, 1936.
163
in the combative tone of his writings and a progressive acknowledge-
ment that his attempts to influence the cultural politics of the regime
regarding architecture were not succeeding. In fact, after 1936 and the
VI Milan Triennale, references to classical architecture became increas-
ingly associated with fascism, while vernacular references became
subtly identified with anti-fascist culture. Interestingly enough, this
defeat positioned Pagano’s vernacular material to become the dom-
inant influence for the wave of neorealist or populist architecture of
the early postwar years.17 Beginning in 1936, as Pagano’s voice became
more disruptive of the official discourse coming from Rome, he be-
came increasingly marginalized until 1942, when he resigned from the
Fascist Party and joined the resistance. During the war, Pagano was
captured and deported to the Mathausen Camp in Austria, where he
died on April 22, 1945.
In the years between the Milan exhibition and his crossing over to the
resistance, Pagano managed to realize the first project that was aimed
at materializing his ideas about vernacular architecture: a small week-
end house in Viggiù near Milan (Figure 11). The project, developed be-
tween 1936 and 1942, featured a simple and strong volume clad in wood
sitting on a terrace with an exterior porch protected by a stone mason-
ry wall. In the few published photographs and drawings of the project
Figure11: Giuseppe Pagano,
weekend house project, 1936-1942.
we find a direct deployment of simple geometries and traditional
construction materials hinting towards Pagano’s vision of vernacular
architecture and its potential for generating a new architecture of his
time, if only in a provisional and somehow unresolved manner.
Unfortunately, Pagano passed away before being able to further digest

and enunciate his ideas beyond this tentative project. Nevertheless,
his legacy continued to influence Italian architecture after the war.
This influence was felt primarily through the built work of his friend
and disciple Ignazio Gardella and through the writings and projects of
Ernesto Nathan Rogers, who had collaborated with Pagano in Casabel-
la during the 1930s and who, upon becoming editor of the magazine in
1953, reintroduced many of the themes initiated by Pagano, allowing
them to gain widespread exposure and support.
Pagano’s use of rural architectures, emphasizing their diversity, austere

ingenuity and lack of rhetoric or style, parallels the introduction and
treatment of rural themes in early neorealist films produced during the
last years of the Mussolini regime with a similar destabilizing effect.
While in the case of Pagano the assimilation of these themes into the
formation of an Italian-specific, reality-driven strain of rationalism is
incipient, we will argue that his influence was decisive during the years
immediately following the war, and allowed these ideas to crystallize
into fully-defined forms.
17. T he terms neorealist and populist are explicitly used by contemporary Italian
historians regarding the early phase of reconstruction architecture after the war.
See Stefano Guidarini, and Ignazio Gardella, Ignazio Gardella nell’architettura
italiana: opere 1929-1999 (Milano: Skira, 2002), 47.
164
03. The Canonical Works
Ignazio Gardella (Figure 12) (1905- 1999) studied civil engineering in
the Milan Politecnico, graduating in 1931, the same year that Giuseppe
Pagano moved into the city to become editor of Casabella. Gardella
was immediately drawn to the circle of young architects that converged
around Pagano, which included figures like Albini, Palanti and Rog-
ers, and that gradually became identified with a cultural and political
opposition to the fascist regime. Pagano and Gardella soon became
friends, sharing multiple study trips, including a prolonged trip travel-
ing through Scandinavia where they participated in several symposia
and conferences in 1939.18
Gardella’s take on Pagano’s interest in vernacular architecture was relat-

ed to the fact that rationalism – the term that Italians preferred to use
when referring to modern architecture – was a concept imported from
Northern Europe. This acknowledgement implied the assumption
that a certain degree of acculturation was necessary before this alien
movement could be absorbed and implemented in the Italian context.
Additionally, for Gardella, the notion of historic and trans-generational
continuity – an emphasis that clearly sets Mediterranean cultures apart
from Northern European ones – prevented Italian architects from
Figure 12: Portrait of Ignazio Gardella, 1936
implementing rationalism without a previous consideration of the role
that tradition could play in it. Towards the end of his career, Gardella
elaborated on this period and his understanding of the past as neces-
sary for a progressive architecture:
“To be in a better position to choose, knowledge of the past may be

useful, […] as long as we never lose sight of the fact that the past
experience is not a winning post but only a starting point from
which to go forward. History, memory, tradition, consistency,
continuity do not mean static immobility but, on the contrary, they
are the dynamic ‘continuum’ like the flowing waters of a river – if
the water stops flowing, the river - the architecture - stagnates and
becomes a bog.”19
In addition to this innate proclivity for continuity, Gardella considered

that there were at least two additional aspects of Italian idiosyncrasy that
further contributed to explain the reason why Italian rationalism retained
a considerable degree of independence from parallel developments in
the rest of Europe. Gardella would identify these traits of character as
anti-dogmatism and classicism. Regarding the former he would write:
“The Italian People are fundamentally skeptical. They love the

rituals, the ceremonies, they even believe in superstitions, but they
are wary of dogma. […] Perhaps due to this national mentality
and, perhaps, because the Modern Movement was imported from
foreign parts and was, so to speak, already packaged, that the
young Italian architects of the thirties regarded it with the same
transport of a ‘novice’ before a ‘revelation’ and yet, at the same time,
with a slight skepticism for its ‘immortal principles.’ Those young
18. Ignazio Gardella, Fabio Nonis, and Sergio Boidi, Ignazio Gardella (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Milano: Electa Spa,
1986), 20.
19. Ibid., 9.
165
architects of the thirties were ready to swear to the validity of the
rationalist dogma as it was summarized, for example, in the slogan
‘everything that is useful is beautiful.’ They were also ready to
betray it in favor of a formal research that did not deterministically
bind form to function, or which at least considered poetic commu-
nication and artisticity among the necessary functions.”20
The second of these Italian-specific traits of character was classicism,

but in keeping with the anti-dogmatic attitude described above, Gar-
della’s definition of classicism was an expanded one, going beyond the
Roman cliché, and delineating a wider and more abstract notion of
classicisity as a search for timeless order and simplicity.
“[T]he classicisity to which I refer is not limited to the historical

scholastic definition: the Golden Age in Greece, the Renaissance,
Neoclassicism, even if they are the epochs of a past in which we sink
our roots and from which we still draw suggestions and evocations.
[…] The Classicisity I refer to is beyond time and outside every hier-
archical chronology, like the diffuse, continuous, constant desire,
like the continuous and constant will to discover an order, a mea-
sure, a modulation that will make the architectural organisms clear-
ly perceptible under the cruel light of the Mediterranean sun – with
their full bodied forms which can either be olympically static or
dynamically articulated, but which never melt away into the mist.”21
Figure 13: Ignazio Gardella, South elevation,

anti-tuberculosis dispensary, Alessandria,
1936-38.
20. Ibid., 10.
166
Figure 14: Comparison of fienili brick screens with
Gardella’s façade for the anti-tuberculosis dispensary.
These factors – a search for cultural continuity, a heterodox or skep-

tical approach to rationalism, and a search for simplicity – became
the guiding principles in Gardella’s early work. In keeping with these
principles,which were inspired by Pagano’s ideas, Gardella would soon
try to integrate elements of vernacular architecture into a rationalist
program. A first approximation to this architectural problem is found
in Gardella’s best-known interwar project: the Anti-tuberculosis Dis-
pensary in Alessandria (Figure 13) (1936-1938). In this stark, modern
volume rendered in plaster Gardella juxtaposed distinctly rationalist
elements, such as horizontal windows and glass brick surfaces, with
a brick trellis, an element directly taken from the rural constructive
tradition of Lombardy. While in the original Lombard fienili (Figure
14) these brick screens were used to guarantee the proper conditions
for the drying and preservation of orchard produce, In Gardella’s Dis-
pensary this device was used to visually shelter the terrace where the
in-patients sunbathed while still allowing for ventilation.22
Figure 15: Ignazio Gardella, second and first

floor plans of anti-tuberculosis dispensary,
Alessandria, 1936-38.
21. Ibid., 11.

22. F or a full account of the different versions of the project and its significance in
the Italian interwar period see Stefano Guidarini , “Razionalismo e tabù ad Ales-
sandria” in Stefano Guidarini, and Ignazio Gardella, Ignazio Gardella nell’architet-
tura italiana, 32-45.
167
In addition to the introduction of a vernacular material and construc-
tion technique, the plan of the Dispensary (Figure 15) is also subtly
indebted to the agrarian constructions of Lombardy, where the party
walls were structural and built in stone, the interior organized with a
linear structure of wooden pillars and beams, and the front façade rela-
tively freed of loads in order to allow for the introduction of the porous
brick screen. We could then argue that in the plan of the Dispensary,
the scientific logic of rationalism and the straightforward planning
of vernacular layouts are reduced to a common denominator, in an
interpretation of Pagano’s drive for rural austerity. The fact that Pagano
was supportive of Gardella’s materialization of his ideas is clear in the
strong endorsement that the Dispensary project received in the pages
of Casabella, where it was featured twice and where Pagano himself
wrote a praise of Gardella’s exemplary use of the brick trellis and his
overall sense of modesty.23
While the hybridization of rationalism and vernacular construction

implicit in the Alessandria project was still tentative, we will argue
that it departs form Pagano’s earlier attempts in that it manages to
set into place a number of compositional devices that further bring
together the still distinct elements of the composition. This composi-
tional method was further developed and sophisticated by Gardella
in a series of constructions immediately after the war, starting with
the Barbieri House (1945-1946), also known as Casa del viticultore
(Figure 16), a small residence in Castana in the region of Pavia. Just as
the Dispensary was one of the most influential Italian buildings of the
thirties, the Barbieri House decisively contributed to set the realist tone
of the Ricostruzione years, inaugurating what we have described as the
canonical moment of Italian neorealism.
Figure 16: Ignazio Gardella, Barbieri House

or “Casa del Viticultore,” Castana (Pavia), 945-46.
23. T he Project was published at least twice in the magazine, first as a project and
then when it was completed. See Ignazio Gardella, “Dispensario antitubercolare,”
Casabella 88, (1935):30 and Ricardo Gioli, “Il Dispensario antitubercolari di
Alessandria,” Casabella-Costruzioni 128, (1938): 4-9. Additionally Pagano himself
wrote a defense of Gardella’s use of vernacular materials and simple geome-
tries. Giuseppe Pagano, “Una lezione di modestia,” Casabella 111, (1937):2-5.
168
Figure 17: Three urban housing projects
by Ignazio Gardella, 1940s-1950s.
While the methodological approach of the Dispensary was based on a

hybridization of the rational and the vernacular in which the individ-
ual components retained their discrete identity, in the Barberi House
the process is one of abstracting the image of vernacular architecture
through its elements – the vertical window, the pitched roof, the
balcony – and then using modern geometric composition as a way to
revitalize and present them in a new light. We could then say that this
approach departs from an image of the rural, operating through ab-
straction and geometry in order to devise a contemporary version, an
operation that was implicit already in Pagano’s highly curated photo-
graphic vision of Italian vernacular architecture.
This highly restrained yet formally ingenious approach to design was

to be developed and perfected through a series of housing projects,
among which we should single out three urban projects starting with
Casa al Parco (Milan, 1947), following with Casa per Impiegati Bor-
salino (Alessandria, 1952) and Casa in Via Marchiondi (Milan, 1953)
(Figure 17). In this bourgeois trilogy, like Gardella called it, we find a
progressive assimilation of the language of rural Italy into a proposal
for the reconstruction of Italian cities after the war, one where the
compact volumes and the materials of vernacular architectures are
updated through geometry and the introduction of contemporary
construction techniques.24
Interestingly enough, the transfer of rural themes to an urban setting

parallels contemporary developments in Italian film, which also depart-
ed from the study of the rural environment (Visconti – Ossesione, 1943)
to gradually move to urban settings (De Sica – Ladri di biciclette, 1948)
just as the peasant population moved en masse to the booming industri-
al towns of the north during the second half of the 1940s. In the field of
architecture, these ideas would soon become embraced by a whole gen-
eration, as the period immediately following the end of the war became
marked by an energetic pragmatism and a sense of shared destination.
In fact, Gardella’s efforts found a parallel in Ludovico Quaroni’s

contemporary housing projects, like the Quartiere Tiburtino (1949),
24. F or a full account of these trilogy of housing projects see Stefano Guidarini,
“Trilogia Borghese” in Ignazio Gardella nell’architettura italiana, 91-113.
169
Figure 18: Ludovico Quaroni,
Borgo La Martella, 1951.
an urban housing proposal in Rome that closely resembles Gardella’s

urban experiments of the time. Similarly, Quaroni’s, Borgo La Martel-
la (1951-1954), a built proposal for a new village in Matera, became at
the time the most visible realization of neorealist ideals, materializing
many of the ideas enunciated by Pagano before the war. In fact, in
this latter project, the photographs of Quaroni’s volumes (Figure 18)
uncannily resemble those taken by Pagano fifteen years earlier for his
exhibition in the Milan Triennale.
While the relevance of individual figures like Gardella or Quaroni

should not be underestimated, as they became central to the Mila-
nese and Roman scenes respectively, the overall Italian scene of the
late 1940s and early 1950s was most of all a collective effort. This is
especially true if we acknowledge the level of consensus with which a
generation of architects converged around the urgency of reconstruc-
tion, generating in the process an incredibly cohesive body of work.
The emergence and consecration of this scene became increasingly
palpable after 1953, when Ernesto Nathan Rogers took over Casabella
magazine, turning it into the sounding box for the realist spirit of the
moment. Even his renaming of the magazine to Casabella-continuità
resonated with Gardella’s idea of continuity while turning it into a
motto for a whole generation.
Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969) had studied architecture in the

Milan Politecnico, graduating in 1932, the same year in which he
founded the bbpr studio together with his colleagues Gian Luigi Banfi,
170
Ludovico Belgiojoso and Enrico Peressutti (Figure 19). The group,
which had initially embraced fascism, soon became critical of the
regime and crossed over to the resistance in 1938, the year that Mus-
solini’s racial laws were passed. During the war and after being arrested
several times, Rogers was forced to exile in Switzerland due to his Jew-
ish origin. In 1944 Banfi and Belgiojoso were deported to the Mathau-
sen Camp, were Banfi died in 1945. After the war, the three surviving
bbpr members reunited in Milan and resumed their collaboration,
quickly becoming involved in the reconstruction project.
In addition to his design activities, Rogers was involved in publications

Figure 19: Enrico Peressutti, Lodovico Belgiojoso, from the beginning of his career. Besides his early collaboration with
Ernesto N. Rogers, Gian Luigi Banfi of bbpr. Pagano, he contributed to Quadrante between 1936 and 1939, and took
over the editorship of Domus between 1946 and 1947. However, his
most influential stint in the editorial world was his period at the helm
of Casabella-continuità between 1953 and 1964. Browsing through the
pages of the magazine during this period, we recognize a theoretical
project that gradually sophisticates and complicates the ideas of Pagano
and Gardella as it tries to reengage rationalism with a notion of tradi-
tion, expanding the idea of tradition itself by starting with vernacular
architectures and gradually including historic and non-western sources.
The first years of Rogers in Casabella, however, were clearly devoted

to crystallizing and bringing the new architecture of reconstruction
into sharp focus. This becomes most evident in two of his seminal
editorials, “Le Responsabilità verso la tradizione”25 and “La tradizione
dell’archittetura moderna italiana”26, in which he explicitly refers to
Pagano, rehabilitating his figure and adopting his ideas for the maga-
zine’s editorial stance. During these initial issues, Rogers also curated
a careful selection of architects and works that exemplified this newly
gained neorealist consensus in Italian architecture. Among them we
find many relizations by relevant architects like Ludovico Quaroni and
Franco Albini, as well as lesser known figures such Enea Manfredini
with his Asilo di Aiola (1953), Ezio Sgrelli with his Villaggio per mina-
tori a Forni di Gavorrano (Figure 20) (1953), Luigi Caccia Dominioni
Figure 20: Enea Manfredini,

Asilo ad Aiola in Emilia, 1953.
25. E
rnesto Nathan Rogers, “Le responsabilità verso la tradizione,” Casabella 202,
(1954), 1-3.
26. E
rnesto Nathan Rogers, “La tradizione dell’archittetura moderna italiana,” Casa-
bella 206, (1955), 1-7.
171
Figure 21: Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Figure 22: Roberto Menghi,
Orfanotrofio e convento in Milan, 1953. Poliambulanza di una fabbrica a pisa, 1955.
Figure 23: bbpr, Complesso di edifici

d’abitazione per la industria siderurgica
a Sesto San Giovanni, 1957.
with his Orfanotrofio e convento in Milan (1953) (Figure 21), or Rober-

to Menghi, with his Poliambulanza di una fabbrica a Pisa (Figure 22)
(1955), just to name a few.
As a group, these projects represent a re-elaboration of vernacular

types and constructive elements where geometry and abstraction
serve the purpose of updating and transforming the original vernacu-
lar subject matter into more contemporary and expressive proposals.
The gradual development of this geometric language of restrained cre-
ativity is evident if we consider the arch of projects dealt with in these
pages, departing from Gardella’s Casa del viticulture, and leading up
to bbpr’s own Complesso di edifici d’abitazione per la industria sider-
urgica a Sesto San Giovanni (Figure 23) (1957), where the freedom of
vernacular aggregations is abstracted into a system of non-orthogonal
geometries in plan and then applied to solve the problem of repetition
inherent in mass housing.
172
04. Late Neorealism
Once the system for the assimilation of vernacular sources was estab-
lished through the dissemination of the above-mentioned projects in
the pages of Casabella, and once the urgency of the first reconstruction
efforts was left behind, Rogers turned his attention from the necessity
for continuity and tradition to the progressive expansion and sophisti-
cation of the concept of tradition itself. This idea of an expanded field
of references, already discussed regarding Gardella’s account of an aug-
mented classicisity, does not necessarily follow a strict chronological or
geographic lineage, but rather seeks to complicate that historical vision
in favor of a universalizing approach.
Rogers pursued this ambition by gradually increasing the diversity of

his sources, slowly introducing in the pages of the magazine images of
the Acropolis, Pisa’s Campo dei Miracoli, Incaic fortifications and Hin-
du astronomical observatories. This was deliberately carried forward
through a very precise and intentional use of photography in the layout
Figure 24: Photographs by Werner Bischof of the magazine, where photographs started to formalize an inde-
featured in Casabella 205, 1955. pendent subtext, one that complemented the written pieces without
directly illustrating them.27
This personal system for the selection and deployment of photographs

was further advanced in 1958, with the publication of Esperienza dell’ar-
chitettura, a book where Rogers curated a selection of his published
articles together with his most recurring and enigmatic photographic
fetishes in a sort of condensed and intensified retrospective account of
his personal project.28 For this publication, Rogers relied heavily on the
work of photographer Werner Bischof, who in his travels throughout
the world had provided much of the material used to illustrate Rogers’
essentialist and eclectic agenda for Casabella (Figure 24).29 The images
in the book attained an unprecedented autonomy from the texts, a fact
that is underlined by a layout where full page illustrations in the right
page have their captions on the following page, forcing the viewer to
interrogate the image before actually knowing its origin.
The publication of Esperienza dell’architettura in 1958 marked a tipping

point in Rogers’ career, as it represented the culmination of a process in
which history had slowly replaced reality as the main source of inspira-
tion for his architecture. In fact, as we progress through the numbers of
Casabella spanning the mid-1950s – and Bischof ’s images become more
dominant – we notice how the initial realist drive of Rogers’ project is
slowly diluted as his field of references is enlarged. This process, accord-
ing to which historic references gradually increase in importance and
displace vernacular or rural sources echoes the introduction of historic
themes in Italian neorealist cinema during this period, as exemplified
most poignantly in the films of Luchino Visconti, such as Senso (1954),
again pointing towards a general trend in neorealism.
27. F or an account of Roger’s particular use of photographic images in Casabella

and in his books see Orsina Simona Pierini, “Imágenes por palabras,” Circo 181,
(2012): 1-10.
28. Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Esperienza dell’architettura (Torino: Enaudi, 1958).
29. B
ischof and Rogers were also friends as comes across in Rogers panegyric to
Bischof. See “Archittetura e fotografia: Nota in memoria di Werner Bischof,” in
Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Esperienza dell’architettura,114-115.
173
Figure 25: bbpr,
Torre Velasca, 1958.
The year 1958 was also the year that bbpr completed their Torre Velasca
in Milan – Gardella had finished his Casa al Zattere in Venice in 1957 –
marking for Rogers the translation of the discourse on historic influenc-
es from a purely theoretical endeavor to the production of built artifacts
in the city.30 Torre Velasca (Figure 25) had been commissioned ten years
before, and was the result of a long process of design during which
several options were developed. Out of these options one proposal was
finally chosen and extensively evolved and refined. The different schemes
that the architects elaborated for Torre Velasca (Figure 26) include a low-
rise solution and several high-rise solutions in steel preceding the final
built version in reinforced concrete. Reviewing these projects today
offers us a panorama of the evolution of studio bbpr that parallels the
progress of Rogers as critic in the pages of Casabella.
The final project for Torre Velasca was a free standing tower, 27 storeys
tall, with a lower body formed by 17 levels of small offices, a transition
floor housing installations and lodgings for the service personnel, an
upper body comprising seven levels of apartments and a figural crown
housing additional apartments split in two levels. The tower stands
isolated in its block against the backdrop of lower linear structures
across the street at the edge of Milan’s historic quarters. It immediately
became one of the most visible landmarks in the city.
Figure 26: bbpr,
Torre Velasca, 1958. The iconic profile of the tower is derived from the fact that the upper
volume devoted to apartment units projects beyond the footprint of the
offices below, a fact that is underlined in the last version of the project by
a linear concrete structure which unifies the facades of the two volumes
through an elaborate deployment of tie-beams and struts. The crowning
was equally mutated in the last phases of the project, changing from a
flat terrace to a pitched roof with hipped angles, with a couple of strong
tapering stacks correlating with the position of the cores in plan.
According to the architects, the bigger decisions regarding the massing

of the project were based on the surface requirements of the differ-
ent programs – the apartments needing a bigger footprint than the
30. F or a full account of the design and construction of Torre Velasca see BBPR,
BBPR, la Torre Velasca: Disegni e progetto della Torre Velasca (Milano: Ed. Abitare
Segesta, 1982).
174
offices – and the fact that the base of the tower was constrained by the
proximity of the neighboring lower buildings, while its top was free
to expand.31 Once the basic massing of the Tower was decided upon, a
number of modifications were made when transitioning from the steel
to the concrete structure solution in order to enable the building to
respond to its particular context. The architects explained the further
delineation of the profile of the tower in the later phases of the project
as an effort to “recall the traditional towers” of Milan.32 As part of this
contextual effort, they adopted a series of “basic elements of Milanese
architecture,” among them the size and proportion of the windows, the
use of rough plaster and the choice of colors.33
Despite the efforts of bbpr to present their project as the result of

practical considerations and contextual sensibility, the fact is that the
amount and complexity of references in the project goes well beyond
the simplicity of their explanation calling for a more careful consider-
ation of their role in the project. In fact, as Francesco Tentori noted in
Figure 27: Palazzo Vecchio, Florence,
his introduction to the 1982 monograph on Torre Velasca, the particu-
as featured in Ernesto Nathan Rogers lar profile of the Milanese high-rise has nothing to do with the “tradi-
Esperienza dell’architettura, 1958. tional towers” of Milan and the surrounding area. On the other hand,
the type of vertical projection used in Torre Velasca is featured in me-
dieval housing types found in the Po Valley and other Italian regions.34
While this interpretation seems plausible – the architects themselves

admitted referencing the hipped roof typical of the Po valley for the
design of the crown of the tower – we will rather suggest here the Pala-
zzo Vecchio in Florence as a more accurate and revealing reference for
both the unexpected proportions of Torre Velasca and its crenellations
(Figure 27). In looking at how the game of proportions between the
lower and upper bodies is played out twice at the Florentian palace –
once at the main volume and then again in its tower – one cannot help
but imagine Torre Velasca as an echo of this highly specific move. In
addition to the already discussed medieval or Romanesque references,
Figure 28: bbpr, Torre Velasca, with the design of Torre Velasca is further complicated by the undoubtedly
the Gothic Cathedral in the backdrop, 1958.
gothic character of the concrete structure, with its deflecting tie-beams
acting as a sort of inverted flying buttresses, a fact that is most striking-
ly visible in the images that feature the tower in its urban context with
the gothic Cathedral in the backdrop (Figure 28).
While the discussion on the sources for Torre Velasca could become
a dissertation in its own right, and therefore falls beyond the scope
of this chapter, what seems to be proven here is that the amount,
sophistication and degree of manipulation of historical references in
the project clearly invalidates the innocent or rational explanation of
the architects, who when pushed to further comment on this entan-
gled web of historic layers in the project admitted that their efforts to
achieve “environmental continuity” within an expanded geographical
and historic context corresponded more to “subconscious actions”
than to an “intentional approach.”35
31. L odovico Barbariano di Belgiojoso, in “Velasca Tower Interview,” BBPR, la Torre

Velasca, 28.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Francesco Tentori, “For the future of Milan,” BBPR, la Torre Velasca, 35.
35. L odovico Barbariano di Belgiojoso, in “Velasca Tower Interview,” BBPR, la Torre
Velasca, 28.
175
It would not be too farfetched to say then that, just like in Rogers’
book, the text of the tower – its program and basic massing – and
its subtext – the nuanced medieval and gothic images overlaid onto
it – were in fact operating in two parallel modes: explicit or conscious
in the case of the former and implicit or unconscious in the latter.
Perhaps because of this ambiguity or lack of explanation, and despite
Rogers’ preeminent position in the architectural scene, Torre Velasca
had a mixed reception, encountering strong criticism in sections of the
media and the population.
After the completion of Torre Velasca, Rogers withdrew to some extent

from the public scene, adopting also a more secondary role at Casa-
bella.36 While he remained nominally as director, in 1958 he promoted
the young Aldo Rossi and Francesco Tentori as chief editors of the
magazine, thus the next generation of architects who were to further
exacerbate and complicate his intellectual inheritance, thus testing its
limits and questioning its continuity.
Figure 29: Comparison of aerial views

of historic cities as seen in Antonioni’s film
L’Eclisse and Rossi’s text Architecture of the City.
36. Ibid., 30. During construction and upon completion and publication of the
project, Torre Velasca was subject to widespread criticism. Interestingly enough,
the project was criticized by some for being a disruption of the traditional fabric
caused by barbaric real estate speculation, while others denounced it for rep-
resenting an act of heresy against rationalism and modern architecture and a
surrender to tradition.
176
05. A Coda: Michelangelo Antonioni
vs. Aldo Rossi
The Crisis of Neorealism
The 1960s represented for all European societies a moment of deep
cultural crisis. In the Italian case, this moment of doubt was marked
by a problem of identity related to the convoluted history of the
country during the first half of the century. The Mussolini regime in
the thirties, followed by the war in the forties and the wild industrial
development of the fifties had, like successive tsunamis, confused and
erased the tracks of former realities and traditions, while on the other
hand, the Italian people had not yet found a way to embrace their new
condition as a capitalist industrialized nation.37
In this larger cultural context, Michelangelo Antonioni and Aldo Rossi

represent a late generation of neorealism within the disciplines of film
and architecture that was responsible for challenging and transforming
the language developed by previous generations in order to tackle the
specific conflicts of their time (Figure 29). In the early 1960s, the notion
of neorealism that had been developing in the country for thirty years
Figure 30: Aldo Rossi, had become increasingly complex and was facing a breaking point.
Le cabine dell’Elba, 1975. Both Antonioni – taking form Visconti, Rossellini or De Sica – and
Rossi – taking from Pagano, Gardella and Rogers – accounted for this
crisis of form and content in their work and responded to the challenge
with equal energy and resolution.
As we have discussed already, approaching the 1960s, neorealism had

become diluted in an expanded field of references and complicated
by an increasing level of subjectivity, as exemplified in the transition
from reality to history as a repository of solutions for architecture. We
will then argue that this increase in subjectivity was embraced and
exponentially augmented by the next generation represented by Rossi
and Antonioni, who internalized the realist project shifting from an
emphasis in social to individual conflicts, attaining in the process an
unprecedented level of freedom and autonomy.
In addition to their parallel generational roles, there are many other

lesser echoes between the figures of Antonioni and Rossi. Both share,
for instance, a northern background – Rossi was from Milan and
Antonioni from Ferrara – and their longing for the River Po and its
Figure 31: Aldo Rossi, valley, a theme that resurfaced again and again in their work and their
La casa dello studente di Chieti, 1976.
writings. Additionally, the younger Rossi was an admirer of Anton-
ioni, whose films he discussed in many of his writings and interviews,
going as far as crediting him with the inspiration for his drawing The
Cabins of Elba (Figure 30), which was later developed into the project
for Student Housing in Chieti (Figure 31).38 Despite these coincidences
37. M
ichelangelo Antonioni, “A Talk with Michelangelo Antonioni on his Work.” Film
Culture 24. (Spring 1962): 45-46.
38. “ Each place is remembered to the extent that it becomes a place of affection,
or that we identify with it. I think of Antonioni’s film Professione: Reporter (The
Passenger) and of a place particularly dear to me in the Island of Elba to which
we gave the same name, although there is no apparent resemblance between
the place and the film apart from the light and the sun. Yet the association is
also appropriate because this place was connected with a loss of identity, as
was Antonioni’s film. This place was one of my projects.” Aldo Rossi, A Scientific
Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 41.
177
and the acknowledgement of an undeniable shared sensibility, it is not
the aim of this text to demonstrate a direct influence or collaboration
between the two figures, but rather to confront their responses to the
context of crisis and the exhaustion of neorealism, with the aim of
better understanding their role in the shifting Italian cultural scene of
the 1960s and 1970s.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni (Figure 32), born in the city of Ferrara in 1912,
had begun writing plays and film scripts and collaborating as a critic
in several periodicals during his college years in Bologna.39 During
the war, on and off duty, he collaborated on French and Italian films,
among them Un Pilota ritorna (1942) by Rossellini. In 1943, when Mus-
solini was rescued by the Nazis, he deserted and returned to Rome,
where he joined the resistance. That same year, he began to work in
his first film, the documentary Gente del Po (1943-1947), for which he
adopted the thematic of rural austerity already described as inherent in
the anti-fascist genesis of neorealism.
The Documentaries
Gente del Po (Figure 33) describes the lives of the inhabitants of the Po
Valley as well as those who lived in the large barges that populated it,
transporting goods up and down the stream. Despite the fact that much
Figure 32: Portrait of Michelangelo Antonioni. of the footage was damaged during the war, in 1947 Antonioni was
able to assemble a 7-minute piece with the material that he was able to
recover. The story in Gente del Po is one of hardship, almost despera-
tion, but already in this first film Antonioni differentiates himself from
the canonic and calamitous neorealism of Rossellini. Instead of focusing
on the relationships between the characters or their role in a socio-eco-
nomic context through narration, the camera seems to zoom in on the
characters one at a time – the old man, the lovers by the river, the young
girl in the barge – as if challenging us to put ourselves in their skin and
leaving us wondering about their life once the camera withdraws. This
dry yet ambiguous narrative style is constructed through a very cool
and detached approach to montage, and is aided by the fact that the
characters do not speak for themselves, but rather the beautiful and
dispassionate voice of Monica Vitti narrates the sparse action.40
In his second documentary film, N.U. (Figure 34) (1948), Antonioni

describes the daily routine of the street cleaners of the city of Rome.
The title acronym stands for Netezza Urbana, the name of the cleaning
service of the city. In this film, like in Gente del Po, the subject matter
39. B
asic biographic information on Michelangelo Antonioni taken from Seymour
Chatman, Michelangelo Antonioni: Filmografía completa. Paul Duncan ed. (Köhln:
Taschen, 2008).
40. F or a full account of the circumstances surrounding this film and a critical
analysis see Quaresima, Leonardo, “Making Love on the Shores of the River Po:
Antonioni’s documentaries” in Rascaroli, Laura, and John David Rhodes eds.,
Antonioni: Centenary essays (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 115-133.
178
remains the same as in classical neorealist films, but a set of formal and
narrative devices emerge that will later characterize the work of An-
tonioni. We find, for instance, urban scenes shot from afar that are flat-
tened by the use of the telephoto lens, causing the characters to appear
as small ants in an abstract composition, a technique that Antonioni
would continue to perfect during his career. All along N.U., this and
other extreme cinematographic choices uncover a struggle between the
authorial voice of Antonioni and the set of conventions that defined
neorealist cinema as a collective endeavor.
Figure 33: Michelangelo Antonioni,

still from the film Gente del Po, 1947.

still from the film N.U., 1948.
179
The Trilogy
After his first attempts in the documentary genre, Antonioni direct-

ed several fiction films with very modest success, only to emerge as
a respected and admired filmmaker with a trilogy of films produced
during the early 1960s (Figure 35). L’Avventura, the first of these titles,
was released in 1960, causing a great commotion in the Cannes
International Film Festival that year. The harsh reaction that the film
received from part of the public and the critics triggered a strong wave
of support from the intellectual elite of European cinema – Rossellini
and thirty-six more writers, artists and intellectuals published a letter
of support to Antonioni – leading up to the concession of a special jury
prize to the film for its “remarkable contribution toward the search for
a new cinematic language.”
Energized by this unexpected success, Antonioni astonishingly

released La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962), formalizing in just three
years one of the most coherent and influential bodies of work ever pro-
duced by a modern filmmaker. In this trilogy Antonioni not only crys-
tallized a thematic and a formal language, but also broke away from
previous narrative conventions in a way that profoundly challenged
and expanded the notions of neorealism and filmmaking at large.
Despite their high impact, the plots of the films in this trilogy are sim-
ple to the extent that very little happens on the screen. In L’Avventura,
a young woman gets lost during a sailing trip and her best friend and
boyfriend look for her, eventually falling in love and forgetting about
the disappearance; we never find out what happened to the missing
person. In La Notte, we get a glimpse of the life of a middle-aged
marriage going through a crisis in the space of twenty-four hours. In
L’Eclisse, in a similarly reduced period of time, a young girl quits a
relationship and begins an uncertain affair with a younger man, but we
never learn what becomes of them. This intentional lack of information
in the scripts, in addition to the sheer beauty of the visual language,
has caused Antonioni’s to be labeled on many occasions as superficially
aesthetic. We will argue, on the contrary, that the films of Antonioni
do not ignore content in favor of form, but rather re-imagine both
elements and, more importantly, the relationship between them at the
service of a new conception of cinema that was directly linked to a
realization of changes in culture and society.
As we have discussed already, one of Antonioni’s first decisions regard-

ing the thematic of his films is to move away from the political and so-
cial drive of earlier neorealism in order to focus on the internal conflicts
of his characters. This shift was coincident with his abandonment of
themes related to the working class to focus on the upper-middle classes,
as he moved from a focus on the group to the individual, from a social
realism to a psychological one. In 1961, after the release of La Notte he
commented on this decision to abandon canonical neorealist themes:
“A film such as Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thiefs, Vittorio De Sica

(1948)], for example, where the main character was a labourer who
lost his job because someone had stolen his bicycle, and whose ev-
ery motivation stemmed from that specific fact, and that fact alone
[…] this, I say, was the type of film necessary and appropriate for its
180
stills from the films L’Avventura, La Notte
and L’Eclisse, 1960s.
time. […] It really wasn’t necessary to know the protagonist’s inner

thoughts, his personality, or the intimate relationship between him
and his wife; all this could be very well be ignored. The important
thing was to establish his relationship with society. That was the
primary concern of the neorealist films made at that time.” 41
While Antonioni clearly sanctions early neorealist cinema and acknowl-

edges it as his very own lineage as a director, at this point he decides
that he can no longer ignore a series of changes in his environment that
render some of the aims and strategies of such a style as obsolete:
41. M
ichelangelo Antonioni, “A Talk with Michelangelo Antonioni on his Work.” Film
Culture 24. (Spring 1962): 45-46.
181
“When I started making films, things were somewhat different, and
my approach therefore was also different. I had arrived a little late
in the scene, at the time when that first flowering of films, though
still valid, was already beginning to show signs of exhaustion.
Consequently I was forced to stop and consider what subject matter
was worth examining […]. And it seemed to me that perhaps it was
no longer as important, as I said before, to examine the relationship
between the individual and the environment as it was to examine
the individual himself, to look inside the individual and see, after
all he had been through […] what remained inside the individual,
to see, I won’t say the transformation of our psychological and emo-
tional attitudes, but at least the symptoms of such restlessness and
such behavior which began to outline the changes and transitions
that later came about in our psychology, our feelings, and perhaps
even morality.”42
This shift from socially-minded stories that were meant to be easily

comprehended – operating almost as socialist fables – to stories where
the very subject matter itself is the lack of definition and resolution
in the inner life of the characters immediately demanded profound
changes in cinematic language. Antonioni approached this problem
through a subversion of some of the narrative conventions of cinema.
The previously discussed frugality of action and dialog, for instance,
allowed him to add prolonged silences, therefore introducing an “extra
time” in the scenes that enabled the spectator to project himself into
the film and react to whatever was happening in it.
Abstraction and Autonomy
This responsive projection of the spectator in the film was further en-
hanced as Antonioni also removed many of the clues that filmmakers
use to underline and convey the meaning of an action to the audi-
ence in a clearer way. When something occurs in one of Antonioni’s
movies, the action is not followed by an expressive face from one of the
protagonists in order to indicate to us what their reaction is or what is
going through their minds. On the contrary, we are usually faced with
an inexpressive actress or actor (Figure 36), and it becomes our job to
question what our own feelings are, to fill in the gap of the missing
elements. By opening the plot to interpretation, Antonioni is granting
a new degree of autonomy to the viewer while simultaneously gaining
a new degree of autonomy for himself as an author.
Antonioni went as far as not explaining to his actors what the ultimate
meaning of a given scene was, but rather, he would ask them to con-
front the scene with a fresh attitude and try to react to it. In this search
for authenticity, he would sometimes shoot actors without their being
aware, or he would systematically hold the camera in place and keep
shooting after a scene was over in order to catch the expressions of the
actors in that special moment when they were “returning” from their
interpretation so he could read the effects that it had had on them.43
These subterfuges can be read in the context of a search for more
realism – as denouncing the artificialities of the conventions previously
used to narrate realist stories – but they can also be considered part of
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 48-49.
182
still from L’Avventura, 1960.
a connected search for a greater degree of authenticity, medium-spec-

ificity and abstraction for cinema. In this light, the inward focus in
Antonioni’s characters correlates with a parallel inward interrogation
of cinema itself as a form of art:
“I think it is important at this time for cinema to turn toward this
internal form of filmmaking, toward ways of expression that are
absolutely free, as free as those of literature, as free as those of
painting which has reached abstraction. Perhaps one day cinema
will also achieve the heights of abstraction; perhaps cinema will
even construct a poetry […] Today this may seem absolutely un-
thinkable, and yet, little by little, perhaps even the public will come
to accept this kind of cinema.”44
In order to attain abstraction, Antonioni envisioned a way of mak-

ing films in which the different elements were first considered inde-
pendently as discrete entities and later in their combination as a whole,
stressing the capacity of the director to modify the nature of each of
these elements as well as the relationships between them in the scene:
“Inasmuch as I consider an actor as being only one element in a giv-

en scene, I regard him as I regard a tree, a wall or a cloud, that is, as
just one element in the overall scene […] And the same applies to
intonation, which is primarily a sound and only secondarily a line
in a piece of dialogue. It is a sound that should be made to integrate
with the other sounds accompanying a given image, and at that
44. Ibid., 47-48.
183
moment, when the actor speaks his line, all the sounds, including
his delivery of that line, that combine to make up the total sound
pattern appropriate to that image or sequence are not there yet.”45
As we can gather from his words, for Antonioni, the freedom to con-
struct a scene out of discrete elements permeated the whole process of
making films, starting with the exterior settings – where he would add
or remove trees at will or paint the grass if he did not like its natural
color – and continuing most decisively in the editing room with a wide
and deep catalogue of montage techniques that included the use of dis-
connected sound and image, as in the sequence of La Notte that takes
place in the streets of the center of Milan, in which the images of cars
and the sounds overlaid on them do not correspond.46
Antonioni would continue to exacerbate this and other filmic tech-

niques through the sixties and until the mid 1970s, when he abruptly
discontinued his career after shooting The Passenger in 1975. While it is
beyond the scope of this chapter to produce a full account of his work
as a filmmaker, what we have learnt already is enough to characterize
Antonioni’s turn in terms that that will help us to better understand
the figure of Aldo Rossi as performing a similar role in the context of
Italian architectural neorealism.
We can then say that Antonioni’s response to the crisis of neorealism in

Italian film began with a thematic shift from the social to the indi-
vidual, which implied a parallel shift from political to psychological
preoccupations. This shift then had the effect of transforming neore-
alism from an engaged form of filmmaking to an autonomous one, as
the inward focus of the characters translated to the discipline itself that
became increasingly concerned with medium specificity and freedom.
Finally, Antonioni devised a series of means to attain this newly de-
sired freedom for filmmaking and for himself as an author. This set of
techniques heavily relied on the idea of cinematic abstraction, achieved
through a realization of the discreteness of the elements in a scene and
Figure 37: Michelangelo Antonioni, an expanded understanding of how montage brings them together
stills from the closing sequence of L’Eclisse, 1962.
(Figure 37), shattering narrative conventions.
Antonioni’s abstraction, in combination with the intentional deficit

of content in his films, has the effect of opening up their meaning,
consequently becoming devices that interrogate the viewer, forcing us
to question what we see and how we feel about it. In Antonioni, the use
of fragments and the amount of space between them in his unfinished
narratives have the effect of turning the film into a projective artifact
in the sense that it embodies the potential of many different devel-
opments, which we proceed to reconstruct in our imagination, in an
additional level of engagement with the film.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
184
Aldo Rossi
Aldo Rossi (Figure 38) was born in Milan in 1931. After a brief period
in Lake Como, Switzerland, where his family took refuge during the
war, he returned to Milan, where he started his architectural studies in
1949. During his years at architecture school, Rossi quickly became en-
gaged with the lineage of Milanese architects discussed in this chapter,
through his interaction with Ignazio Gardella, for whom he worked
briefly, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers, who convinced him to start writ-
ing for Casabella-Continuità in 1955 when he was still an architecture
student. In 1958, Rossi became joint editor of Casabella, gradually
defining his own voice during the following years as he began to teach,
first with Ludovico Quaroni in Arezzo, then with Carlo Aymonimo in
Venice. This formative period came to an end in 1965, when Casabel-
la-Continuità was discontinued and Rossi became professor in Milan.
One year later, in 1966, Rossi published his first book, The Architecture
of the City (Figure 39), emerging as one of the most influential thinkers
in European architectural discourse.47
Figure 38: Portrait of Aldo Rossi, ca. 1987.
The Architecture of the City
1966 was also the year that Robert Venturi published Complexity
and Contradiction in Architecture, a fact that tied the fate of these
two books together as they became, as a couple, synonymous with
the emergence of postmodernism in architecture and with a global
reassessment of the modern movement informed by history. While for
Venturi the emphasis was placed on the architectural object, for Rossi
the city became the protagonist as it contained the traces of different
time periods and thus became the vehicle for architects to reengage
with the past. Rossi’s book is written in the manner of a Renaissance
treatise, and the tone of the book is scientific with a systematic struc-
ture, corresponding to Rossi’s ambition to devise a fully fleshed theory
for the architecture of his time.48
Figure 39: Images from Aldo Rossi’s

Architecture of the City, 1966.
47. A
ldo Rossi, L’Architettura della città (Marsilio, Padova: Quodlibet, 1966). Quotes
in this text are taken from the 1982 English edition. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture
of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982).
48. In many ways we could consider The Architecture of the City as an attempt to ar-
ticulate the interest in history and the city that had emerged during his collabora-
tion in Casabella, an effort to go beyond the lyrical and diffuse explanations that
Rogers had put forward in order to justify his engagement with history.
185
In order to construct a systematic approach to the city as his subject of
study, Rossi borrowed from the French theorists of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, most notably from Quatremère de Quincy, whose
definition of the term “typology” he adopted as his own.49 Out of his
typological analysis emerged a view of the city as a collective work of art
devised through centuries, the ultimate physical evidence of the exis-
tence of a given civilization. The idea of type itself implies a certain de-
gree of cultural consensus and continuity, and for Rossi the larger-than-
life temporal scale that the city provided enabled exactly such continuity.
If we are to accept Rossi’s biological metaphor, the city is made up of a

Figure 40: Canaletto, Capriccio Palladiano, 1742.
“skeleton” that is formed by “permanences” – monuments and infra-
structures – and softer tissues or “residential districts,” which adhere
to the former like the “flesh” to the bone. While “permanences” tend to
remain the same, “residential districts” are prone to change, but at such
a slow rate – one house at a time – that it renders them as stable. For
Rossi, the definition of the city that ensues from this vision is not mere-
ly a record of history, but even more importantly a repository for the
collective memory of the people that made it. As we will see later on,
this soft transition from history to memory in the pages of the book will
play out an increasingly relevant role in Rossi’s career as the years go by.
Analogous Architecture
We could then argue that in many ways. Rossi’s comprehensive theory

can be interpreted as an attempt to systematize the use of historic ref-
erences as brought up by the generation of Rogers, thus bringing some
order and definition back to the then diluted field of neorealist archi-
tecture. Nevertheless, Rossi’s theory for the city, despite the brilliance
of his arguments and the success of the book, was not a proactive
one, and it did not offer him many clues as to how to start a career as
a practicing architect. On the other hand, implicit in the concepts of
“typology” and “urban artifacts” was a system to isolate and describe a
set of discrete elements and combinatory rules that could in turn form
the base of a design method. Confronted with this realization, Rossi
decided to revisit and integrate his concepts into a more proactive the-
ory that he then baptized as the “analogous city” (Figure 40):
“After I wrote [The Architecture of the City] and from the concepts I
postulated in it, I outlined the hypothesis of the analogous city […].
In particular I elaborated a compositional procedure that is based
on certain fundamental artifacts in the urban reality around which
other artifacts are constituted within the framework of an analo-
gous system. To illustrate this concept I gave the example of Cana-
letto’s fantasy view of Venice, a capriccio in which Palladio’s projects
for the Ponte di Rialto, the Basilica di Vicenza and the Palazzo
Chiericati are set next to each other and described as if the painter
were rendering an urban scene he had actually observed. These
three Palladian monuments, none of which are actually in Venice
(one is a project; the other two are in Vicenza), nevertheless con-
stitute an analogous Venice formed of specific elements associated
49. A
ldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 40.
186
Figure 41: Aldo Rossi,
Analogous City, 1976.
with the history of both architecture and the city. […] This example
enabled me to demonstrate how a logical-formal operation could
be translated into a design method and then into a hypothesis for a
theory of architectural design in which the elements were preestab-
lished and formally defined, but where the significance that sprung
forth at the end of the operation was the authentic, unforeseen, and
original meaning of the work.”50
For Rossi, this mode of operation became his design method, and the
blank sheet of paper the neutral territory where these “preestablished”
elements could be manipulated and reassembled in an endless number
of compositions (Figure 41). In the infinite and a-temporal space of
Rossi’s drawings, pure architectural forms are continuously being rear-
ranged according to formal logics in order to generate ever-mutating
architectural objects. It is difficult in reading Rossi’s description of his
analogous method not to notice a striking resemblance with Anton-
ioni’s own description of filmmaking as a combination of discrete ele-
ments in a scene. While for Antonioni actors, backdrops, speech and
sounds were synthetically combined in the darkness of the montage
room, for Rossi, it was the vacuum of his own drawings that allowed
him to combine abstracted forms in compositions whose “unforeseen”
result was known to him only. As discussed already with Antonioni,
this highly internalized understanding of the process of creation would
yield as a result a transformation of the discipline resulting in an in-
creased degree of autonomy.
50. T his text is taken from the preface to the second Italian edition, later included in
the English version. The Architecture of the City, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1982), 166.
187
Figure 42: Aldo Rossi, Unità d’abitazione
al quartiere Gallaratesse, Milano, 1969-70.
The projects that best exemplify this period of Rossi’s work in which
the analogous method is formalized are the Residential Complex in
the Gallaratese District of Milan (1969-70) (Figure 42), the San Cat-
aldo Cemetery in Modena (1971-78) (Figure 43) and the School in
Fagnano-Olona (1972) (Figure 44). These projects share a language of
recognizable elements or parts that are combined into cohesive wholes
through relentless serial repetition and emphatic symmetry. As with
Antonioni’s films, the utter simplicity of the forms and the composi-
tions – the information that has been lost in the process of abstraction
of the originals – has the effect of turning the buildings into proactive
artifacts that constantly interrogate the viewer and challenge us to fill
in the gaps. This feature of Rossi’s work becomes almost literal in the
emphatic use of large empty spaces – the colonnade in Gallaratese and
Modena or the courtyards in Fagnano-Olona – which are systematical-
ly photographed devoid of human activity.
Despite Rossi’s use of recognizable architectural types and forms,

little is left in his projects of the social and pragmatic drive of earlier
manifestations of Italian realism. While with Pagano, Gardella and
even Rogers the considerations about architecture itself were kept in
check by a responsible attitude towards the needs of society, in the
case of Rossi all that matters was architecture and architecture only.
This drive towards autonomy is equally pervasive in the representation
of the projects, from the sketches that borrow from de Chirico to the
stark and merciless technical drawings or the dramatic black and white
photography with which the buildings were depicted. Everything in
Rossi’s representation is geared towards underlining the purity and
autonomy of his architecture, which through its extreme formal drive
detaches itself from historic or rationalist models in order to become a
personal language.51
51. It is not surprising then how Rossi became to some extent co-opted during the
1970s by Peter Eisenman and his Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies,
who introduced him to the American audience as an example of autonomous
architecture. Rossi taught at Cornell and the Cooper Union during 1976 and at
the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies during 1978.
188
San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena,
1971-78.

Elementary School, Fagnano Olona,
1972.
189
A Scientific Autobiography
We will then affirm that there was a break between Rossi’s declaration
of intent for a career as enunciated in The Architecture of the City and
the production that ensued from it in the years following its publica-
tion. In fact, as Rossi’s works were built and disseminated it became
increasingly difficult to sustain his claim for a rational project for the
city and for architecture based on rigorous analysis. In fact, by 1981,
the year of the publication of A Scientific Autobiography, little was left
of the scientific alibi that Rossi had built for himself in 1966.52 In a
context of criticism of his work as subjective or theatrical, A Scientific
Autobiography became a coming out for Rossi, a personal confession
on his personal motivations and fears regarding his work and life and
a justification of his career as an architect. In a maneuver that allows
us to understand the plasticity of his system of values and his capacity
to reinvent himself, he produced this book to act as a foil, a perfect
opposite to his seminal work on the city.
A Scientific Autobiography is an endless stream of thought that re-

curs in cycles, in which Rossi revisits his own concepts and ideas,
acknowledging his failures on many occasions, but fiercely defending
his freedom as an architect. Throughout the text, Rossi acknowledges
repeatedly how history was replaced by memory as a source material
in the transition from his written to his built work, and how the actual
characters that reappear in his designs are not absolute distillations
of historic types, but rather personal sublimations of the objects and
buildings of his childhood:
“A confusion of courtyards, suburban houses, roofs, gas storage

drums […] the bourgeois world of villas by lakes, the corridors of
the boarding school, the huge kitchens in country houses – these
were memories. […] I searched for it in history and translated it
into my own history.”53
This transition from history to memory had the effect of completely

transforming the meaning and scope of Rossi’s project as an architect.
Once memory usurped the place of history, his initial longing for in-
novation and progress was replaced by the inevitability of repetition, in
what can be considered a very pessimistic statement about the discipline
of architecture, trapped between the failures of modernism and the
impossibility to reengage with history.54 The disappearance of the historic
alibi also signaled a shift from collective problems to personal concerns
and psychological introspection, a current that became so dominant in
Rossi’s thinking and writing that by the end of his career, it virtually dis-
abled him to communicate in an intelligible way. When objectivity was
lost, Rossi found himself in an endgame. Just like his admired Antonioni,
who quit film making shortly after completing his best known works, all
that was left for Rossi at this point was to “forget architecture.”55
Despite the seemingly pessimistic and somber tone of most of A Scien-

tific Autobiography, in its pages Rossi was also able to find moments of
relief and to hint towards an exit to the maze that he had constructed
52. A
ldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981)
53. Ibid., 16.
54. “ To what then could I have aspired in my craft? Certainly to small things, having
seen that the possibility of great ones was historically precluded.” Ibid., 23.
55. Ibid., 49.
190
Figure 45: Luigi Ghirri, photographs
of the Modena Cemetary, Housing
in Pegognaga and Centro Torri projects
by Aldo Rossi, ca. 1987.
191
Figure 46: Images from Aldo Rossi’s
collection of Polaroids.
192
for himself. A revelation occurred when he saw his own built works
age and decay, in a process where life ate away the purity of his perfect
images and the real light of the sun constantly reinterpreted the colors
and volumes of his architecture. First, elements were extracted from
his memory to be rearranged in the ether of the drawing board, with
a light infinitely hard and distant. Perfect images were created, almost
pure signs. Then, when the buildings were erected, they became part of
life, and as such part of the experience and memories of others, there-
fore freeing the author from the burden of the excessive authorship
previously attained through his highly internalized design method.
Melancholy – as exemplified by his emphasis on decay and the ruin

– became a pervasive yet positive force that impregnates A Scientific
Autobiography, and consequently Rossi’s late work and thought. One
way to understand this liberating effect of melancholy is to examine
the images taken by Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri of the work of
Aldo Rossi in the early 1980s (Figure 45).56 In these photographs, a
poetry of silence and decay gradually erodes the absolute character of
the buildings, revealing their pathos and bringing them again closer to
life and to nature, making them available to be experienced in their sad
and vibrant beauty.
An additional and symmetrical piece of evidence of the world’s ca-

pacity to absorb the work and transform it is Aldo Rossi’s collection
of Polaroids (Figure 46), where the buildings he built become mixed
with impressions of the world around him. In these images, which are
shockingly similar to Ghirri’s – the two men had indeed keen sensibili-
ties – fragments of Rossi’s world, built or inhabited, are presented to us
wrapped in silence, like small riddles, or like Ghirri said, “puzzles to be
solved with the heart.”57
06. Conclusions
The unlikely excess of emotion in Rossi’s later work – as exemplified in
the photographic rendition of his buildings by Ghirri – (Figures 47 to
54) calls for further consideration and clarification of his architecture
project in the context of this text. We have sustained that his initial
intentions regarding the creation of a comprehensive theory for his
architecture as described in The Architecture of the City were never
fulfilled, and that his later attempts at an explanation in A Scientific
Autobiography are not a comprehensive account of his work either, but
rather a smoke-screen with isolated moments of personal confession.
We are then pushed to look for a different interpretation of Rossi’s
work, a task that becomes especially challenging if we truly consider
it as a corollary of the development of Italian neorealism – like we
propose in this chapter.
Quiet counter-intuitively, the level of abstraction and formal reduction

in Rossis’s architecture seems to be directly proportional to a certain
emotional intensity in the projects and the writing. This correlates to the
56. P
aolo Costantini, Luigi Ghirri, and Aldo Rossi, Luigi Ghirri - Aldo Rossi: Things
which are only themselves (Montréal: CCA; Milano: Electa, 1996).
57. G
hirri customarily used this expression by philosopher Giordano Bruno to refer
to photography, but also to architecture and any form of art. See Luigi Ghirri,
“The Impossible Landscape,” in Ghirri, Luigi. It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It (New York:
Aperture, 2008), 131.
193
film-making of Michelangelo Antonioni in that the deficit of content
in the films – the long silences and inexpressive actors – are devices to
create a vacuum in the film which in turn gets filled with the spectator’s
emotional outpour. Similarly, in Rossi’s architecture, the hieratic charac-
ter of the isolated figural volumes or the relentless repetition of abstract-
ed elements around an empty space serve a similar purpose, by building
up a level of coldness and indifference so unbearable as to require the
emotional involvement of the viewer. In other words, the neorealism of
Rossi – and for that matter of Antonioni – is so reduced, emphatic and
relentless in its inhuman character that it transcends reality.
Paul Schrader has written extensively about this transcendental quality

Figure 47: Photograph by Luigi Ghirri, regarding the films of several directors, among them Michelangelo
Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena,
general view, 1987. Antonioni.58 His theories become relevant to us to the extent that they
attempt to partially decipher the relationship between abstraction and
realism, and we will discuss them in more detail later. However, what
becomes crucial now, is that the characterization of Rossi’s work as for-
mally indifferent and spiritually transcendent sets us up for an inter-
pretation of his work as “romantic” in the Hegelian sense and therefore
calls for a reinterpretation of the evolution of neorealism according to
Hegel’s theory of the particular forms of art.59
While laying out an account of Italian neorealism according to Hegel’s

thought would doubtlessly merit becoming a dissertation altogether
– and is therefore beyond the scope of this text – it is almost impossi-
ble now that we have seen this connection to resist the temptation to
briefly or tentatively revisit the work covered in this chapter with the
template provided by Hegel’s theory and see to what extent our account
of the facts corresponds to the categories described in it, namely the
“symbolic”, “classical” and “romantic”, understood as successive stages
in the development of neorealism as an artistic expression. In other
words, let us briefly entertain the idea that the development of Italian
neorealism in architecture starts with a “symbolic” phase in the inter-
war period, followed by a “classical” moment immediately after the
war, and concludes with the emergence of a “romantic” realism some-
where the late 1950s, a hypothesis that will force us to further question
Rossi’s role in this scheme of things.
According to Hegel, the “symbolic” as an art-form is characterized by a

certain idea or concept that, while still in the process of being defined
or clarified, starts to seek a proper expression in art. This is achieved by
borrowing from previously existing forms, a process that is carried out
not without arbitrariness and a certain “falsification” or “corruption” of
such found forms. For Hegel, in this first moment, content and form
can only reach a sort of truce – an “accord” – or at best an unstable
equilibrium – an “abstract harmony” – in which they still remain dis-
crete and different to each other.
In confronting this description with the early manifestations of

neorealism, we will argue that Hegel’s definition of the “symbolic”
58. P
aul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, (Berkeley:
University of California Presss, 1972).
59. T he most succinct explanation of Hegel’s theory of the particular forms of art
can be found in the introduction to the second part of his Lectures on Fine Art,
and this is the version that we have adopted to make our condensed argument.
See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on fine art, (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), 299-302.
194
Figure 48: Photograph by Luigi Ghirri,
Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, interior
of one of the perimeter buildings, 1987.
provides a legitimate structure that allows us to better understand

premature manifestations of neorealism before the war, as embodied
in the though and work of Pagano and the early buildings of Ignazio
Gardella. With Pagano, despite his extended writings and ideological
positioning, neorealism had not been fully enunciated yet – the term
was in fact not used for architecture during his time. Furthermore, his
intuitive attraction towards realism is rather an incomplete conflation
of several other themes in the process of being synthesized, among
them a drive towards constructive rigor and economy, a longing for an
autochthonous culture, and a moral imperative towards austerity.
In his weekend house in Viggiù, the only one of his built projects
ascribable to neorealism, we find a struggle to find a proper material-
ization for these ideas through borrowing from existing forms, primar-
ily from rationalism and the Italian vernacular tradition. We will then
contend that in this project, the excessive simplicity of its elements –
the stone terrace, the main volume, the freestanding masonry wall – in
addition to a certain lack of articulation amongst them are telling of a
tentative and unstable “accord” of incomplete ideas and discrete forms
as they strive for a momentary equilibrium.
195
Town Hall, Borgoricco, exterior fountain
under construction, 1987.
Similarly, in Gardella’s Anti-tuberculosis Dispensary in Alessandria,

the elements derived from rationalism – the elongated windows or
the glass brick – and those derived from the vernacular tradition – the
brick trellis – remain distinctly recognizable but this time they achieve
a higher degree of integration through an ingenious interpretation of
rationalist tectonics that allows the project to be reduced to a series
of frames that can then in turn be filled completely by the different
elements, employed as all-over surface treatments. In addition to this
strategy, in Alessandria, the logic of the rationalist plan is over-simpli-
fied, in order to match the straightforward layout of spaces in agrarian
constructions. This is an act of “falsification” to the extent that the plan
of the building emulates a Lombard fielini, with its load-bearing party
walls and wooden posts and beams, but is indeed a modern concrete
structure that responds almost exactly to the Dom-ino diagram. This
subterfuge, however, allows the project to achieve a somehow fictitious
but definitely less precarious harmony that in Viggiù.
If the Hegelian “symbolic” moment is marked by the discreteness

and exclusiveness of idea and form, the “classical” moment is con-
versely dependent on their perfect overlapping or coincidence. This
196
coincidence, or “harmonious unity” however, does not happen without
a necessary restriction of the content that gives up many of its former
potentials, and a further individuation of the form through a precise
language. Therefore, in Hegel’s “classical” form, inner meaning and
external shape are inextricable and their identification is exposed.
In the case of Italian neorealism, we will argue that a “classical” period

is inaugurated after the war, characterized by a very high level of
consensus in the architectural scene during the years of the reconstruc-
tion of the country, in which vernacular references became the source
for a universal architectural language. During this period, in order to
achieve a stronger alignment of idea and form, the concept of neoreal-
Figure 50: Photograph by Luigi Ghirri, ism was further defined, or “restricted,” and a specific formal language
Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, interior, 1987. was developed accordingly. Evidence of this short-lived equilibrium of
form and content can be found most clearly in the selection of archi-
tectural projects carried out by Ernesto Nathan Rogers during his first
years as editor of Casabella.
This “classical” moment is visible for the first time in Gardella’s Casa
del Viticultore, completed in 1946 in Castana. While the Dispensa-
ry was still conceived as a rationalist building to which vernacular
elements were applied, in Castana Gardella chooses to approach the
vernacular source directly and depart from it through formal abstrac-
tion. In Casa del Viticulture, the elements and constructive techniques
remain those of the vernacular tradition, but they are transfigured and
updated through the use of contemporary geometry.
The short spans and cellular nature of the layout of a domestic project
allowed Gardella to devise an architecture of walls and rooms that
was nonetheless rational in its spatiality and organization, therefore
achieving a synthesis of rationalist and vernacular influences. It is not
a coincidence then, that houses and housing became the main realiza-
tion of this canonical period of neorealism. The problem of housing,
through its many material limitations and its precise intersection of so-
cial, economic and identity concerns provided the necessary reduction
of the idea of neorealism, as well as the possibility of a precise language
to be developed to specifically address it.
In this chapter, we have pointed towards Gardella’s urban projects in the

North – Casa al Parco, Casa per Impiegati Borsalino and Casa in Via
Marcondi – and Quaroni’s developments in or near Rome – Quartiere
Tiburtino and Borgo La Martella – as probably the most notable works
of the period, but we have also noted the degree of consistency between
these projects and the myriad minor realizations which as a whole attest
to the generalization of the “classical” form in the postwar years. Among
these lesser known projects, bbpr’s housing project in Sesto San Giovan-
ni stands out as probably the most succinct and explicit manifestation of
an architecture in which modern geometry transfigures the substance of
traditional constructions to put forward a minimal yet optimistic image
in which necessity and desire walk hand in hand.
If necessity was the driver and enabler of the “classical” period of

neorealism, it makes sense then that once the urgency of the recon-
struction faded away, and as the country advanced towards becoming
an industrial nation, the unity of form and content achieved during
the “classical” moment of neorealism was brought to a crisis. This
dissolution of the unity inherent in the “classical” is evident in Roger’s
197
proliferation of images of historic and non-western sources and in
the underlying essentialism and spiritual search that pervades his late
writing. In this respect, Torre Velasca becomes the project that clearly
announces exhaustion of the “classical” and begins to signal towards
the emergence of a “romantic” moment.
The Hegelian “romantic” form is characterized by an emancipation of the

content that occurs when the original idea is comprehended as “absolut
spirit,” a development that is only possible through the previously attained
unity of content and form and its contemplation, but which can only be
resolved by transcending such unity in order to attain a higher degree of
spirituality. In this moment, the form becomes externally “indifferent” as
Figure 51: Photograph by Luigi Ghirri, the idea leaves it behind in its flight into the realm of the spirit.
Secondary School, Broni, interior, 1987.
Considering this characterization, Torre Velasca seems to respond to
many of the characteristics of the “romantic.” Its enigmatic and unex-
pected massing, for instance, is literally indifferent, with the proportions
of its two stacked volumes being brutally awkward to each other and
to the city. As a result of this, the massing and the site strategy result in
a building that becomes a hieratic figure which stands ignorant of the
urban field from which it rises, staring at the horizon, almost a religious
icon. We will argue nonetheless, that the multiplicity of voices in the
project and its lyrical tone – what we have described as a second layer of
references – prevents it from fully embodying the “romantic” form. In
other words, in all their efforts for providing “environmental continuity”
by echoing the neighboring gothic cathedral and adopting colors and
window arrangements that bow to the context, the architects of bbpr
partially cancelled out the original indifference of their initial scheme.60
Since Rogers retreated from activity right after Torre Velasca, it is diffi-
cult to tell how his architecture would have evolved from there, but it is
our intuition that it would have gradually advanced towards a greater
degree of identification with the “romantic.” Interestingly enough, his
disciple Rossi started his own career with a statement of purpose – The
Architecture of the City – that seemed to run counter to this trend. If
Rogers had expanded the field of neorealism, problematizing it and
diluting it, Rossi seemed to attempt with his first book to rebuild it and
bring it back to focus through producing a comprehensive and rational
explanation of how history could be incorporated into its inner work-
ings in a systematic way.
Quiet contrarily, our interpretation of Rossi’s built trajectory contends

that the increasing “inwardness” and “indifference” of his projects point
towards a drive towards transcendence, positioning him as the true
representative of the “symbolic” form of Italian neorealism. We con-
tend here, that Rossi’s departure from the vocabulary and references of
neorealism through their abstraction and exacerbation is precisely the
device through which he attains a transcendental quality for his archi-
tecture. In order to understand this, it may be useful to return to the
comparison with film, more precisely to Schrader’s explanation of the
transcendental style, as applied to the films of Michelangelo Antonioni.
60. T his interpretation of the project becomes ironic if we remember how the
architects characterized the massing as being the direct outcome of objective
economies and its stylization as an almost involuntary or unconscious act.
198
Secondary School, Broni, interior
of the octagonal building, 1987.
Antonioni’s realism is of a very particular kind, in that it is emphatic

in its denial of any emotion, or drama, in its “indifference” or coldness.
Think for instance of his depiction of the street sweepers in his early
documentary N.U., as compared to similar characters in the canonical
neorealist films by the directors of the first generation of neorealism.
In De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette, for instance, the people working in the
streets are given a voice – literally they are given lines in the film – and
their lives are portrayed with a sense of theatricality and drama, even if
there is a documentary tone to the film as a whole. In Antonioni’s N.U.,
however, the routine of the street sweepers is exacerbated, slowing
it down and underlining its repetitious nature, while the characters
themselves are literally flattened by the use of distant shots, and denied
the possibility to tell their own story, which is in turn sparely outlined
by a dispassionate omniscient narrator. Even in his first films, Anton-
ioni departs from the language of neorealism by taking its documenta-
ry and dry nature to an extreme.
Paul Schrader characterizes this lack of emotion or coldness as a radi-

calized strain of realism, and labels it as the “everyday.”61 According to
his view, Antonioni’s films are not merely realistic, they actively seek to
strip life of all its expression, to reduce it to a minimum and “celebrate
the bare threshold of existence.” For Schrader the “everyday” is more
than a style, it becomes a technique, as it systematically evacuates life
of exception or melodrama. According to this view, the relentlessness
of the “everyday” generates a “disparity,” between the characters and
their environment, between their inner emotions and the absolute
coldness around them, culminating in a moment of climax in which
such disparity is not necessarily resolved but transcended.62
61. S
chrader describes the everyday as “a meticulous representation of the dull,
banal commonplaces of everyday living,” and says: “in the everyday nothing is
expressive, all is coldness.” Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, 39.
62. “ Disparity: an actual or potential disunity between man and his environment
which culminates in a decisive action.” Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in
Film, 42.
199
Single-Family Housing, Pegognaga,
housing blocks and porticos, 1987.
200
If we are to trace back these features in the work of Rossi, we will then
assert that his extreme abstraction of existing types into schematic vol-
umes, his rote repetition of architectural elements into sequences and
the exaggerated emptiness in the depiction of the projects are devices
that operate analogously to the lack of expression in Antonioni’s actors,
the extreme slowness of his tempo or the prolonged silences in his
scenes. These features turn Rossi’s neorealism into an exploration on
the everyday, one that is meant to gradually sink in with the experience
of the viewer, eventually hinting towards a disparity that cannot be rec-
onciled but that rather calls for the acknowledgement of the presence
of something else, for a moment of transcendence.
According to Schrader, in transcendental film-making, a “decisive

moment” or climax is followed by “stasis,”63 a moment of quiet in which
disparity is again considered in the context of reality, of nature, which
now appears transfigured in our eyes after the climactic moment. All
three films from Antonioni’s’ trilogy finish with such static shots of the
everyday. Again in all cases, the conflicts of the characters remain unre-
solved, but rather are frozen into stasis and presented as part of nature. It
is precisely in accepting or surrendering ourselves to nature – which in
its irrationality is divine, Schrader argues – that we transcend ourselves.
In the case of Rossi, this resolution is less explicit and harder to find than
with Antonioni, since architecture lacks the capacity of film-making to
introduce a moment of decisive action. We will argue nonetheless, that
Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography, with its unbearable density and relent-
lessness, is in fact full of such decisive moments and that it suffices us to
read this book, to hear him describe how mist or the slowly changing
light of the sun transforms his architecture, in order to contemplate his
built work with new eyes. This is precisely the transfigured vision of
Rossi’s work that we find in the photographs of Luigi Ghirri, images of
stasis in which pathos and decay make their way into the built work,
slowly bringing it back to nature. In these photographs of jarring beauty,
the conflicts of Rossi’s architecture – its inherent trauma and muteness
– are not resolved but rather cauterized and presented to us as one with
nature, with life, allowing Rossi to thus make peace himself, although
“not without sadness.”64
63. “ Stasis: a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends
it.” Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, 49.
64. Ibid.
201
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203
Chapter 4 German Objectivity
01. Introduction
02. P
aul Schultze-Naumburg and the
Emergence of Modern Architecture
– Kulturarbeiten
– “ Um 1800” and Progressive Realism
Before the War
– Th e Radicalization of the Debate
–R eactionary Coda
03. New Objectivity and Walter Benjamin

– Albert Renger-Patzsch
–A ugust Sander
–K arl Blossfeldt
04. Bernd and Hilla Becher on Typology

– Th e Early Work
–A nonymous Sculptures
– Typologies
05. O
swald Matthias Ungers and the
Morphological Transformation Project
06. H
ans Kollhoff and the Reduction
of the Morphological Project
– Th e Block and the Slab
– Th e Megaform
– Th e Urban Facade
– Th e ETH Years: A Reactionary Coda,
Once Again
07. Conclusions
205
Figure 1: Bernd and Hilla Becher,
Gravel Plants, from the book Typologies, 2004.
01. Introduction
If we were allowed for a second to make a wild generalization about

Germany, we could say that one of the things that makes it unique as a
country is that it harbors at the core of its national identity a profound
dichotomy between a progressive faith in science and progress and a
profoundly conservative vision of society and tradition. In the follow-
ing pages we will argue that this dichotomy pervades both documen-
tary photography and architecture in Germany, starting at the dawn of
the twentieth century and progressing towards our day. We will then
proceed to outline a particular lineage within German photography
and architecture as particularly marked by such oscillation between the
conceptual and the nostalgic.
The search for the root of this dichotomy starts in the figure of Paul
Schultze-Naumburg, a painter, critic and architect who before turning
into one of the main ideologues of the Nazi party decisively contrib-
uted to set the stage for the arrival of modern architecture. He did this
mostly through publications, among them his Kulturarbeiten series, in
which he extensively used documentary photography. Just like Pagano
in the Italian case, Schultze-Naumburg will prove to be a necessary
figure to understand the use of photography by German architects and
how it played a major role in the increasingly heated ideological debate
around architecture in the years leading to the Nazi rule.
In this context of polarized political discussion and propaganda, we

will then analyze three examples of German documentary photog-
raphy belonging to New Objectivity, all of them directly linked to
architecture. The three photography books in question are Die Welt ist
schön (1928) by Albert Renger Patzsch, Antlitz der zeit (1929) by August
Sander and Urformen der kunst (1928) by Karl Blossfeldt. These three
works were reviewed vehemently by Walter Benjamin, who applied to
them his highly politicized view of the world and assigned to each of
them a verdict, which varied strongly in tone according to his reading
of the work as progressive or conservative. In looking at these works
in the larger context of the careers of their authors, we will question
Benjamin’s black-or-white value judgments and will seek to build a
more nuanced understanding of the photographs and the elements that
characterize them as being alternatively – and many times simultane-
ously – groundbreaking and backward-looking.
With this newly formulated interpretation of the ideological under-

tones of objectivity both in architecture and documentary photography
in Germany during the first third of the twentieth century, we will
approach the postwar photographic work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
We will start with an examination of their early work in the late 1950s
and will then progress to the 1970s when their matrixes of photographs
of industrial buildings became synonymous with the emergence of
documentary photography as a force in the contemporary art scene
and its associated market.
It will be precisely during the 1970s that photography and architec-

ture will be brought closer than ever, as both disciplines participated
decisively in the emergence of conceptual and process-based work in
the arts in general. At this particular moment in history, the emphatic
use of the series and of morphology seemed for a moment to embody
a common idiom across the arts, enabling an understanding of the
project of the Bechers as sharing many features with the sculpture of
207
Sol LeWitt or the architecture of Oswald Matthias Ungers. In fact we
could say that in different ways these three projects revolve around
a consideration of architectural typology through the series. Ungers’
morphological project of the 1970s was a system for the progressive
assimilation of context into the materials for a new architecture. As
such, it had profound impact on the discipline, not only through his
own work, but also as it was adopted to different degrees by Ungers’
disciples in Germany and abroad.
In this regard, it becomes specially fitting to our case to study the

transformation of Unger’s project undertaken by Hans Kolloff, who
first radicalized Ungers’ project turning it into a system for the produc-
tion of sculptural megaforms in the derelict landscape of Berlin, only
to later reduce it to a repetitive and compulsive method of composition
geared towards the reconstruction of its nineteenth century urban fa-
cades. The chapter will then conclude with an examination of his years
as a professor at Zurich eth, where we will be able to most clearly read
how his architectural project took on a conservative derive that almost
identically reproduced Schultze-Naumburg’s descent into a reactionary
nationalistic fantasy, exactly one hundred years later.
02. Paul Schultze-Naumburg and the Emergence

of Modern Architecture
Kulturarbeiten
German architectural debate during the last years of the nineteenth
century was marked by a rejection of eclecticism and a search for a
modern German architecture. This ambition was fueled by a growing
economy and a cultural wave of romantic nationalism. In this context,
eclecticism – which had become conspicuous in the years of economic
boom following the unification of the country in 1871 – was identified
as inadequate because of its foreign origin and also because of its asso-
ciation with recent speculative construction of substandard quality.1
Establishing a precedent for Pagano’s efforts of the 1930s, many Ger-

man architects of the turn of the century resorted to local building
traditions in search for an honest architecture that could be used as a
base for the evolution of a modern language. Among this generation,
Paul Schultze-Naumburg (1869-1949) (Figure 2) was undoubtedly the
most energetic and influential in his rallying for a modern and “objec-
Figure 2: Portrait of tive” German architecture based on local vernacular construction.2 A
Paul Schultze-Naumburg, ca. 1915. painter, critic and architect, Schultze-Naumburg was deeply invested
in the efforts for cultural reform taking place in Germany in the early
years of the twentieth century. He was an active founding member of
1. F or a larger contextualization of the emergence of modern architecture in the

German political context, see Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in
Germany, 1918-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
2. T he most comprehensive text on Schultze-Naumburg is the monograph by Norbert
Borrmann, Paul Schultze-Naumburg 1869-1949: Maler, publizist, architekt: vom
kulturreformer der jahrhundertwende zum kulturpolitiker im Dritten Reich (Es-
sen: R. Bacht, 1989). More recently Kai K. Gutschow has produced abundant
scholarship on this figure. Particularly relevant to the subject of this dissertation
is his essay “The Anti-Mediterranean in the Literature of Modern Architecture:
Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s Kulturarbeiten,” published in Jean-François Lejeune,
and Michelangelo Sabatino eds., Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean:
Vernacular dialogues and contested identities (London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge,
2010), 149-175.
208
the Deutsche Werkbund and also contributed to the founding of several
architecture and landscape preservation groups, thus establishing very
early on a web of organizations that circulated and amplified his ideas.3
In fact, Schultze-Naumburg’s greatest contribution to architecture

was as a propagandist, more specifically through his influential series
of books titled Kulturarbeiten (See Figure 3 in next page), which he
published from 1901 to 1917. This publication marked a breakthrough
in terms of architecture’s relationship with the media, as it did not
respond to the previously existing formats of the treatise or the historic
essay, but rather adopted the newly available and inexpensive picture
book as a model. This innovation allowed Schultze-Naumburg to
target a much wider audience through the use of a simple language
and the systematic deployment of photography as a visual aid. He thus
achieved an immediate popular success while in the process revolu-
tionizing the world of architectural publications. In fact, architects
such as Hermann Muthesius and Le Corbusier, among others, would
later acknowledge being greatly influenced by the Kulturarbeiten in
their own attitude towards publishing.4
Schultze-Naumburg was a pioneer in the use of documentary photog-

raphy as well. In fact, he was one of the first people to own a Leica – the
first portable camera supporting 35 mm film developed by Zeiss – which
he used to build up an encyclopedic collection of German vernacular
architecture.5 In his publications he arranged his own photographs
systematically in pairs, across the spreads of the book, establishing a very
effective system of visual comparison.
According to this system, inspired by Heinrich Wölfflin’s compara-

tive studies,6 the first image on the left page would usually be a cor-
rect or desirable “beispiel” (example) of honest German vernacular,
while the second image on the right page would normally feature a
“gegenbeispiel” (counterexample) of abject and cluttered historicism.
This basic presentation also allowed Schultze-Naumburg to compare
urban and rural examples or different construction systems in a highly
didactic manner and to address issues as diverse as housing, landscape
or clothing in a truly comprehensive attempt of cultural reform and
taste-making. Additionally, the consistent repetition of this simple
structure of coupled images and its lean visual language across each
of the volumes served to reinforce his writing and lent the books an
impression of objectivity. In describing his method he wrote in the
preface of each of his books:
“Kunstwart-Verlag is publishing a book series entitled ‘Kultur-

arbeiten,’ which is meant to counteract our country’s appalling
devastation in all fields of visible culture. By means of a repeated
3. He was also a founder among other organizations of the Dürerbund, the Heimat-
schutzbund, the Munich Secession and the Deutsche Gartenstadt Gesellschaft,
and acted as chief editor of Der Kunswart magazine. Gutschow, “The Anti-Mediter-
ranean in the Literature of Modern Architecture,” 168.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 169.
6. Gutschow traces the origin of this comparative method to Pugin’s book Contrasts
(1836) and to the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, who in his Renaissance und
Barok (1888) was already developing a method for historical research based on
the comparative analysis of form. Gutschow, “The Anti-Mediterranean in the Litera-
ture of Modern Architecture,” 170.
209
Figure 3: Paul Schultze-Naumburg,
spreads from Kulturarbeiten, Volume I, 1902.
210
juxtaposition of good and bad examples of identical (or similar)
tasks, the books are intended to compel even the most untrained
eyes to compare and to think; furthermore, they are supposed
to create awareness for the good works accomplished before the
mid-nineteenth century, and thereby help to re-integrate the work-
ing methods that are rooted in tradition.”7
The “good works” that Schultze-Naumburg refers to here and through-

out his books are not just any building tradition, but a particular
German late baroque vernacular dating from the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. This particular style, known as Um 1800
(Around 1800), or Biedermeir, represented for Schultze-Naumburg an
autochthonous, un-ornamented architecture of rational layout, sound
construction and honest expression. In political terms, it embodied
the old German bourgeois culture that Schultze-Naumburg feared was
under threat in the dawn of the new century.
“Um 1800” and Progressive Realism before the War

Schultze-Naumburg’s campaign in favor of this stout classicism suc-
ceeded, to the point where the reference to Um 1800 as a model for
contemporary German architecture became commonplace in architec-
tural publications. Among the architects who joined Shutze-Naumburg
in support of this German tradition were Hermann Muthesius, Paul
Mebes and Heinrich Tessenow.8 In the decade of the 1910s, the modern
classicism sponsored by these authors briefly became a common idiom
across Germany for such different architects as Peter Behrens, Paul
Schmitthenner, Bruno Taut and Mies van der Rohe.
This short-lived consensus among wildly different characters was pos-

sible due to the fact that Schultze-Naumburg’s discourse catered both
to the desire for a spare and realistic modern architecture and to the
nationalistic search for a foundational myth for German architecture.
In fact, Schultze-Naumburg was – at least in his early writings – careful
to place emphasis on the approach and spirit of the architecture from
around 1800, as opposed to its particular form or style. For him the po-
tential of this architecture was that it represented a type that had been
refined and perfected through generations, providing an evolutionary
model that both supported tradition in its continuity and pragmatical-
ly adapted to changes in technology, consistently underplaying novelty
or style in favor of consensus and type.9
It was precisely in his search for a more perfect type in which to base his
proposal for a new architecture that Schultze-Naumburg came to define
7. “Unter dem Gesamttitel “Kulturarbeiten” erscheint im Kunstwart-Verlag eine Folge

von Büchern, deren Zweck es ist, der entsetzlichen Verheerung unseres Landes
auf allen Gebieten sichtbarer Kultur entgegenzuarbeiten. Sie sollen auch die un-
geübtesten Augen durch stetig wiederholte Gegenüberstellung guter und schlech-
ter Lösungen gleicher (oder ähnlicher) Aufgaben zum Vergleich und damit zum
Nachdenken zwingen; ferner sollen sie auf die guten Arbeiten bis zur Mitte des
neunzehnten Jahrhunderts aufmerksam machen und so die Tradition, das heisst
die unmittelbar fortgepflanzte Arbeitsüberlieferung wieder anknüpfen helfen.” Paul
Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten. Band. 1: Hausbau (München, G. D. W. Callwey,
1902), preface. Translation by Professor Reto Geiser.
8. Muthesius published Style-Architecture and Building Art in 1902, Mebes published
a book of architectural illustrations titled Um 1800 in 1908 and Tessenow, who
had been a disciple of Schultze-Naumburg published his popular Der Wohnhaus-
bau in 1909.
9. Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 17.
211
the “German farmhouse” (Figure 4) as the “seed” for the future develop-
ment of German architecture.10 For Schultze-Naumburg, this prototype,
which he also referred to as the “Ur-haus,” was a rural, free standing,
half-timber structure with no ornament. This building type, of un-
matched simplicity in its organization and refined constructive solutions,
embodied for Schultze-Naumburg both a proto-functionalism and – in
its repetition – the essence or basic identity of the Heimat lanscape.
The Radicalization of the Debate

This understanding of the house as the basic unit of the national
landscape – which Schultze-Naumburg conceived as a semi-rural built
continuum – explains why it became the main ideological battlefield
in German architectural discourse once the initial consensus around
the Um 1800 exploded in the 1920s. During the years of the Weimar re-
public Schultze-Naumburg felt his influence gradually fade, and as the
gap between progressive and conservative architects grew, he quickly
picked his side with the nationalist front.11 For Schultze-Naumburg, the
quickly growing tendency towards “Neues Bauen” (New Building) in
Figure 4: Paul Schultze-Naumburg, the interwar years represented not only an intolerable break with tra-
page from Kulturarbeiten, Volume III, 1908. dition, but most of all a recourse back to style. He perceived this new
architecture as re-enacting Judgenstil in its pure invention of a debased
and formalistic language.
Within this controversy, Schultze-Naumburg’s mastery of propagan-

da in the printed media quickly turned him into the spokesman for a
conservative faction of German architects, as we understand from the
fact that he was called upon in 1926 to confront Walter Gropius in a
public debate held in the pages of the populist journal Der Uhu.12 The
article, titled “Who is right? Traditional Building Art or Building in
New Forms,” was illustrated in the manner of Schultze-Naumburg with
photographs of his own projects for aristocratic country residences
pitted against examples of houses from Gropius, Mies van der Rohe or
Le Corbusier. A similar comparison technique was also used by Paul
Schmitthenner, who in his 1932 book, Baugestaltung: Erste folge, com-
pared Hans Scharoun’s house at the Weisenhoffsiedlung with Goethe’s
Gartenhaus, which for the nationalist architects had come to embody
the epitome of Biedermeir simplicity and dignity.
Reactionary Coda
In fact, in the second half of the 1920s and increasingly after the 1928
Weissenhof Exhibition, the two camps became highly polarized, adopt-
ing Schultze-Naumburg’s propagandistic techniques for their mutual
attacks. The discussion also became increasingly racist, as Schultze-Na-
umburg and his colleagues attacked the architects of the Neues Bauen
10. P
aul Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten. Band. 3: Dorfer und kolonien (G. D. W.
Callwey, 1908), 16-19.
11. D
espite his emphasis in the house as a theme and his direct targeting of low
and middle class audiences in his publications, Schultze-Naumburg never
confronted the issue of mass housing in his career as an architect. In fact, he
quickly became specialized in the design and construction of residences for the
aristocracy – many of his large scale residences were referred to with the word
Schloss.
12. P
aul Schultze-Naumburg and Walter Gropius, “Wer hat recht? Traditionelle
baukunst oder bauen in neuen formen,” Der Uhu, vol. 2, (1926): 30-36.
212
Figure 5: Comparison of original photograph
of the Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition with racist
photomontage used on a postcard ca. 1932.
Figure 6: Paul Schultze-Naumburg,

spread from the book Kunst und rasse, 1928.
for abandoning their Nordic heritage and surrendering to oriental and

southern influences (Figure 5). Schultze-Naumburg in particular would
take this xenophobic vein to the extreme in his writings, formulating
many ideas that would later be adopted by the Nazi party for its cultur-
al policy and gradually integrating into its propaganda apparatus (Fig-
ure 6).13 During this period, Schultze-Naumburg became fixated with
the German half-timbered house as the only appropriate expression of
Teutonic culture and race, contributing to its adoption as the prototype
for many of the buildings erected by the Nazi government, among
13. H
is best known text of this late phase characterized by extreme racism and
nationalism is Kunst und rasse, published in Munich in 1928. He also published
frequently in the official Nazi pamphlet Kampf und die kunst. During this period
he also developed close personal relationships with Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg and
other ideologues of the party. See Gutschow, “The Anti-Mediterranean in the
Literature of Modern Architecture,” 172.
213
Figure 7: Siedlung Heddernheim,
Frankfurt am Main, 1930s.
them public housing (Figure 7), youth hostels and worker’s clubs, espe-
cially those commissioned by the Hitler Youth and the Labor Front.14
Despite the escalation in the aggressive tone of the debate and the
painful extremes of racist derangement reached by Schultze-Naum-
burg late in his career, the fact is that his early and strategic positioning
of the Um 1800 as a proto-modern German architecture was accepted
and used by both fronts for different reasons. While the conservatives
were drawn to the romantic and nationalistic aspects of Schultze-Na-
umburg’s writings and to the idea of a tradition of high quality hand-
crafted construction, the progressive architects saw in it the simple and
functional volumes, the lack of ornament and the idea of an intelligent
vernacular that was able to evolve and adapt to changes in technology
and society. It is precisely this duality – the idea that architecture can
both represent a social consensus and a tradition while operating as
an abstract and objective model that allows and fosters change – that
places the Kulturarbeiten series at the center of the dichotomy that we
will continue to explore through the rest of this chapter.
14. B
arbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 198-200.
214
03. New Objectivity and Walter Benjamin
As we have noticed already when discussing the development of the

architectural debate in Germany during the first third of the twentieth
century, the interwar period was marked by a diversification and rad-
icalization of political and cultural views that translated into a highly
confrontational climate between left and right. Within this larger peri-
od, the years between 1927 and 1929 marked a climax of intensity in a
cultural debate that had become increasingly politicized.
In the field of architecture, this was epitomized by the polemic linked

to the inauguration of the Weissenhofsiedlung housing exhibition
in Stuttgart in 1927. The exhibition, curated by Mies van der Rohe,
featured an international cast of avant-garde architects that includ-
ed Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Hans Scharoun and Mies himself
and marked the crystallization of a fully formed New Building. The
response of conservative architects was remarkably strong, with Schul-
tze-Naumburg fiercely attacking the show in the media and Schmit-
thenner and Bonatz designing and building a counterproposal nearby
in traditional style, the Kochenhofsiedlung (Figure 8).
In the field of photography and also in the city of Stuttgart, a similar

moment of condensation took place in 1929 with the Film und Foto
exhibition.15 The dominant figure of the show was László Moholy-Nagy
with his New Vision, a term that clearly paralleled Gropius’ New Build-
ing. Moholy-Nagy not only curated the introductory section of the
exhibition, but also exhibited his work in a monographic show featur-
ing more than 100 images in a clear demonstration of his predominant
position within German photography at the time.16
The New Vision had begun its popularization in 1925, with the pub-
lication of Moholy-Nagy’s book Malerei Fotografie Film, and by 1929
its proliferation of bird’s eye views, micro and macro photography,
photograms and x-rays had become the trademark of a new strain of
avant-garde photography. In fact, the exaggerated degree of exposure
and popularity achieved by Moholy-Nagy and his accolades, combined
with the extreme formal nature of their photographic language, had
all but reached a point of saturation with critics starting to talk of a
“Photo-Inflation.”17
Figure 8: Images of the Kochenhofsiedlung,

by Paul Schmitthenner and Paul Bonatz, 1933.
15. B
oth the Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition and the Film und Foto show were orga-
nized by the local branch of the Werkbund.
16. O
livier Lugon, El estilo documental: De August Sander a Walker Evans, 1920-1945
(Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2010), 43-46.
17. Ibid. 46.
215
Figure 9: László Moholy-Nagy,
View from the Radio Tower, Berlin, 1928.
Within this context of exhaustion of the project of the New Vision,

the Film und Foto exhibition became the stage for the emergence of a
new movement in photography that was called to counter the dramatic
contrasts and exhilarating perspectives of Moholy-Nagy’s compositions
(Figure 9) with a factual and dry approach to photography. This new
photographic project was fittingly labeled New Objectivity and focused
on the capacity of photography to produce objective and accurate
records of the world.
The parallel between the Stuttgart architectural and photographic

exhibitions that we just established fosters an understanding of New
Objectivity as a reactionary response to the progressive position of the
New Vision. The project of the New Objectivity was clearly focused on
realism and the specificity of photography as a technique and as such,
its criticism of the New Vision for its excessive formalism echoes Schul-
tze-Naumburg’s dismissal of New Building as a style focused on form
and unrelated to construction. On the other hand, the fact is that New
Objectivity was a term imported from painting, were it had begun to
216
be used in order to designate a transition from expressionism to a more
engaged and factual approach to art. In fact, the social and political em-
phasis of some of the photographers of the New Objectivity, especially
August Sander, proved to be sharply progressive, a fact that Walter Ben-
jamin aptly acknowledged in his contemporary criticism of the work.
In the following pages we will approach the work of the main represen-
tatives of the New Objectivity – Albert Renger-Pazsch (Figure 10), Au-
gust Sander and Karl Blossfeldt – and with the help of texts by Walter
Benjamin, we will try to arrive at an understanding of their work and
its deeper significance in the cultural and political debate of the period.
Albert Renger-Patzsch
Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897 – 1966) was born in Würzburg, Germany,
the son of a musician who owned a music and book store. His father’s
wide range of interests happened to include photography, a passion
that he was quick to inculcate in the young Renger-Patzch, who by the
age of fourteen was already proficient in all the major photograph-
ic and printing processes.18 He would later continue to advance his
formidable technical ability through his studies in chemistry and his
professional experience with printing, through the world of publishing
and reproductions.19
At an equally early age and also through his father, Renger-Patzch had
been introduced to the work of the main international photographers,
including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Clarence H. White and
Gertrude Käsebier. Despite his deep knowledge of the photographic
scene and its connections with the larger world of art, Renger-Patzch
Figure10: Portrait of
Albert Renger-Patzsch, 1938. remained throughout his career unconvinced of photography’s inte-
gration into wider movements in art, actively avoiding his association
with Dadaism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Social Realism or even the
New Objectivity, a current that he is still credited for founding.
Influenced by his technical approach and his mistrust of critics,

Renger-Patzch did not envision photography as art, but rather as a
category of its own, one that was still to be fully developed according
to the specific capacities and nature of the medium.20 His approach
to photography thus became inartistic and politically ambiguous,
as he strived for total precision and impersonality. By putting all his
attention in the object, he sought to disappear as an author and render
visible the unique nature of things, their radical differences.
In addition, Renger-Patzsch customarily accepted commissions from

industrialists, architects and publishers, which he indifferently alter-
nated in his exhibitions with more personal investigations, a fact that
made his work difficult to criticize.21 Renger-Patzch finally came into
18. U
nless otherwise noted, biographic information on Albert Renger-Patzch is taken
from Albert Renger-Patzsch, and Donald B. Kuspit, Albert Renger-Patzsch: Joy
before the object (Santa Monica, CA: Aperture in association with the J. Paul
Getty Museum, 1993).
19. H
e was the technical director of the Folkwang und Auriga publishing house in
Hagen between 1922 and 1925, overviewing reproduction of images in publica-
tions and taking many of the photographs for the books himself, especially two
books on plants, titled Orchids and Crassula.
20. Ibid.,4.
21. A
full list of his clients along his career can be found in Albert Renger-Patzsch,
and Donald B. Kuspit. Albert Renger-Patzsch, 6.
217
the spotlight in 1928 with the publication of his book, Die Welt ist
schön (The World is Beautiful), which contained a collection of imag-
es of plants, animals, industrial objects and architectures (Figure 11).
These photographs, most of which were produced under commission,
featured close-up views of the subjects, which in many occasions ex-
ceeded the picture frame, and were rendered with remarkable sharp-
ness and detail. The book was received with critical acclaim and was
read as an alternative to the aggressive perspectives and strong con-
trasts of Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus work.
While Moholy-Nagy wanted to transcend photographic reproduction

and turn the camera and the darkroom into one more tool for the pro-
duction of images, Renger-Patzch focused all of his professional might
and technical knowledge towards the humble craft of portraying the
world. The closeness and detail of his photographs allowed the viewer
to engage with the objects in ways that are not possible in daily life, a
fact that was applauded by some as allowing an enhanced awareness
of the world. Others, contrarily, argued that the removal of the object
from its context – especially in the case of the industrially produced
object – disabled a political reading of the work and was in itself an act
of beautification.22 This was precisely the point made by critic Walter
Benjamin, who denounced Renger-Patzch for helping to perpetuate
the current conditions of production and social oppression:
“[photography] could no longer depict a tenement block or a refuse

heap without transfiguring it. It goes without saying that photogra-
phy is unable to convey anything about a power station or a cable
factory other than, ‘What a beautiful world!’ The World is Beautiful
– that is the title of the well known picture anthology by Renger-
Patzch, in which we see New Objective photography at its peak. For
it has succeeded in transforming even abject poverty – by recording
it in a fashionably perfected manner – into an object of enjoyment.”23
It is evident here how offensive the title of the book was for Benja-
min, as it meant an attack on everything that he believed about the
social and political role of art. Quite interestingly, Renger-Patzsch had
intended to call the book Die Dinge (Things), and only surrendered to
the petition of the editor, Kurt Wolff, for a more commercial title at the
very last second.24 Renger-Patzch later resented this decision and the
inevitable banalization of the work that came with it, but the machin-
ery of leftist criticism was already in motion and it was too late to stop
it. To add more salt to the wound, in 1927 Renger-Patzch had, even
before the publication of his book, moved to Essen, where he became
heavily involved in depicting the effect that industrial development was
having in the Ruhr Valley. In this series of photographs, taken between
22. F or a detailed account of the critical reception of Renger-Patzch early work in the
German press, see Olivier Lugon, El estilo documental, 56-69.
23. W
alter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” quoted from The Work of Art in the
Age of its Technological Reproducibility, And other writings on media. Edited by
Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2008), 86-87.
24. A
lbert Renger-Patzsch, and Donald B. Kuspit. Albert Renger-Patzsch, 7.
218
Figure 11: Photographs
by Albert Renger-Patzsch,
1920s.
219
Figure 12: Photographs by Albert Renger-Patzsch
depicting industrial developments around Essen, 1929-30.
220
1927 and 1932, the overdevelopment of the industry in the region is
juxtaposed with the rural existence that it is obliterating (Figure 12).
In Renger-Patzsch’s uncanny Essen images, soaked in mist and devoid

of human presence, we find a prefiguration of not only the industrial
photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, but also of the non-sites of
Robert Smithson or the cult of the terrain vague that both architects
and photographers would come to share during the late 1980s and ear-
ly 1990s.25 It is by looking at these pictures, which Renger-Patzsch tried
by all means to disseminate as a foil of his previous work, that we can
understand how painful it must have been for him to witness the mis-
reading of his early work by socialist critics, a fact that most likely con-
tributed to his voluntary retreat from public life after the mid 1930s. In
fact, for the rest of his career Renger-Patzch limited himself to working
on commissions, and when he initiated his own work he would always
focus on nature, mostly rocks and trees, as a return to “things” and
away from the possibility of social or political commentary.
August Sander
August Sander (1876 –1964) (Figure 13) was born in Herdorf, near
Siegen in the heart of a mining country.26 He learned photography by
assisting a photographer who worked for his father’s mining compa-
ny and later by assisting a military photographer during his military
service. After establishing a reputation as a photographer in Linz,
Austria, he moved back to Germany in 1910, establishing his business
in Cologne. During this period, Sander started taking photographs of
weddings, baptisms and portraits on commission not only in Cologne,
but also in his originary Westerwald region, even when that involved
travelling around the county with his full equipment. It was precise-
ly during one of those trips, around 1911, that Sander started to take
non-commissioned photographs of ordinary people (Figure 14). What
started with an impulse towards a sociological interest soon became a
large-scale project aimed to portray the totality of German population
through a set of samples of random individuals.
Figure 13: Self-portrait of August Sander Sander’s project was further defined and made explicit during the early
in the Siebengebirge, ca. 1941. twenties, when he came in contact with the group of Marxist artists
known as The Cologne Progressives. Through his involvement with
this group, Sander’s project became politically charged. What had
started as a loose compilation, mixing commissioned and self-initiated
work, soon transformed into an articulate attempt to register social
structure through a photographic language of neutrality and objec-
tivity. In fact, it was during this period that Sander finally put a name
to his project – Men of the XXth Century – and enunciated it as an
attempt to create a “section” of German society with the aid of a “clear,”
“pure” and “absolute” photography.27
25. T his trend is later discussed in this text. See Ignasi De Solà-Morales, “Terrain
vague,” Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme, no. 214 (1996): 164-171.
26. U
nless otherwise noted basic biographic data on Sander are taken from August
Sander, and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, August Sander: Seeing, observing, thinking:
photographs (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel; Cologne: Photographische Sammlung /
Figure 14: August Sander, Stiftung Kultur; Paris: Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, 2009).
Young Farmers, 1914. 27. Olivier Lugon, El estilo documental, 74.
221
Figure 15: Portraits by
August Sander, ca. 1925-30.
In keeping with this ambition, Sander’s study was consequently or-

ganized according to the different trades and social strata existing in
Germany at the time, therefore rendering visible the classes and the
implicit relationships of power among them. He conceived his work as
an archival project that would have two parts, the first focusing on the
people and the second on their natural and built environment. Partial
results of the first section of his research were published in 1929 under
the title Antlitz der zeit (Face of our Time), containing sixty portraits
organized according to Sander’s social classification (Figure 15). The
book, published by Kurt Wolff – the editor of Renger-Patzsch’s Die
Welt ist schön – received an immediate critical acclaim, including a
decided endorsement by Walter Bejamin.
“August Sander has compiled a series of faces […] and he has done
it from a scientific viewpoint. ‘Sander starts off with the peasant, the
earthbound man, takes the observer through every social stratum
and every walk of life up to the highest representatives of civilization,
and then goes back down all the way to the idiot.’ The photographer
did not approach this enormous undertaking as a scholar, or with the
advice of the ethnographers or sociologists, but, as the publisher says,
‘from direct observation.’ It was assuredly a very impartial, indeed
bold sort of observation, but delicate too, very much in the spirit of
Goethe’s remark: ‘There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately
involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.’”28
Benjamin did not only appreciate Sander’s intuition and authentic-

ity as a documentalist. For him, Sander’s work, under its Marxist
28. W
alter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” quoted from The Work of Art in
the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, And other writings on media, 287.
222
formulation, had a greater signification in that it offered a glimpse of
what he would later define as photography’s possible “use value.” More
precisely, the concept of human “type” explicitly used by Sander reso-
nated with Benjamin’s own ideas about social determinism:
“So it was quite in order for an observer like Döblin to have hit on
precisely the scientific aspects of this work, commenting: ‘just as
there is comparative anatomy, which helps us to understand the na-
ture and history of organs, so this photographer is doing compara-
tive photography, adopting a scientific standpoint superior to that of
the photographer of detail.’ […] Work like Sander’s could overnight
assume unlooked-for topicality. Sudden shifts of power such as are
now overdue in our society can make the ability to read facial types
a matter of vital importance. Whether one is of the Left or the Right,
one will have to get used to being looked at in terms of one’s prov-
enance. And one will have to look at others the same way. Sander’s
work is more than a picture book. It is a training manual.”29
This physiognomic reading of Sander’s work, as repulsive as it may

seem today, was indeed encouraged by Sander’s own presentation of
his work and resonated with a larger interest in physiognomy and
eugenics, which at the time was not an exclusive patrimony of the far
right.30 In this text, originally written in 1931, Benjamin offers us one
more clue about the extremely heated political climate of a period
when ideological cleansing was an increasingly palpable possibility in
the horizon. Indeed, Sander himself became a victim of such cleans-
ing; with the advent of the Nazi party, his book was seized and his son
Erich was incarcerated for his involvement with the socialist party,
subsequently dying in prison before the end of the war. Sanders then
retreated to Kuchhausen, in the Westerwald countryside, where he
devoted himself to landscape photography for the rest of his career.31
While this later phase in Sander’s career has been traditionally inter-
preted as a retreat from political life, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl point-
edly reminds us that landscape photography was from the beginning
a part – in fact one half – of Sander’s total project.32 Indeed, if we read
Sander’s own declaration of intent, we understand that his landscape
photography should be read alongside his portrait work as a parallel
attempt to describe a physiognomy of the German landscape.33
29. Ibid.
30. “ Consider for example, the parties in a nation’s parliament; if we start with the
right-wingers and move gradually towards those furthest to the left, we already
have a partial physiognomic image of the country.” August Sander, “Photography
as Universal Language,” in August Sander, and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, August
Sander: Seeing, observing, thinking, 29.
31. F or an extensive account on Sander’s landscape photography see August Sander
and Olivier Lugon. August Sander: Landschaften. München: Schirmer/Mosel,
1999.
32. G
abriele Conrath-Scholl, “Perspectives – notes on the work of August Sander,”
in August Sander, and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, August Sander: Seeing, observing,
thinking , 19.
33. “ Let’s start with the landscape. Here too humans leave their mark through their
Works […] In landscapes, too, we recognize again the spirit of a time, and this
can be captured with the help of a camera. The story is similar in architecture
and industry as well as with human creations large or small. Landscape as
delimited by a common language conveys the physiognomic portrait of a nation
in time.” August Sander, “Photography as Universal Language,” 30.
223
Figure 16: August Sander, landscape
photography, ca. 1934.
Among this body of work, his series on the Siebengebirge region,

mostly produced between 1929 and 1935, represents the closest Sander
ever got to enunciating his larger project on the German landscape. In
Sanders’ Siebengebirne photographs we find small, picturesque towns
made up of clusters of half-timber houses and romantic landscapes
punctuated by ruins of castles (Figure 16). Even mines and quarries
are depicted in a way that transfigures them into images of the sub-
lime (Figure 17). Quite surprisingly, Sander’s landscape photography
confronts us once again with the pervasive national romanticism
epitomized by Goethe that seems to have sustained the basic cultural
consensus of German society before the 1920s.34 While it may be ar-
gued that this is a confusion produced by the fact that some of Sander’s
landscape work was done under commission for tourism guides and
postcards, the fact is that his portrait work featured a similar mix of
commissioned and un-commissioned images, but produced a very
different political reading.
In fact, the impression we get when confronting this little-known

landscape work by Sander is a depiction of the German landscape that
in many occasions resembles Schultze-Naumburg’s characterization
of the Heimat in his Kulturarbeiten, to a point where the two projects
could be confused, was it not for Sander’s greater talent and mastery of
photography.35 It is difficult, then, not to wonder what Benjamin would
have written if he had been able to access and compare the work of
Renger-Patzsch in the Ruhr and that of Sander in the Siebengebirge,
both realized during the 1930s, and if this would not have necessarily
produced a reevaluation of his original criticism of the works.
Figure 17: August Sander,
landscape photography, quarries, ca. 1934.
34. G
oethe appears to be Sander’s favorite author, as it happened with Schultze-Na-
umburg. Ibid., 16.
35. S
chultze Naumburg devoted the ninth volume of his Kulturarbeiten to theorize
on the German landscape as a product of the action of man, and its perception.
It is in this volume where the strongest similarities with the landscape work of
Sander emerge. Paul Schultze- Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten. Band. 9: Die gestaltung
der lanschaft durch den menschen. München, G. D. W. Callwey, 1917.
36. U
nless otherwise noted, basic biographical information on Karl Blossfeldt is tak-
en from Jürgen Wilde, “Karl Blossfeldt, A Photographer’s Life,” in Karl Blossfeldt,
Ann Wilde, and Jürgen Wilde. Karl Blossfeldt, Photography (Ostfildern: Cantz; New
York, N.Y.: D.A.P., 1997), 5-21.
224
Karl Blossfeldt
Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) (Figure 18) was born to a very humble fami-
ly in the rural area of Shielo, in the Harz Mountains.36 In 1881 he left his
family home to become an apprentice in a cast iron foundry devoted
to the production of decorative cast iron items in Mägdesprung. His
gift for drafting and modeling decorative forms in railings and gates
impressed his supervisors, who, in contact with the Pastor in Schielo,
managed to get him a scholarship in the Academy of the Royal Muse-
um of Arts and Crafts in Berlin.
It was there that Blossfeldt came into contact with Professor Moritz
Meurer, who advocated designing ornament directly from plant-life,
without relying on copying historical models.37 After becoming Meur-
er’s assistant, Blossfeldt eventually was entrusted with teaching a course
on modelling for ornament. It was precisely during his years as a teach-
er that Blossfeldt developed the photographic work that propelled him
to posterity. In fact, his recourse to photography was derived from his
Figure 18: Portrait of
teaching and emerged mainly for practical reasons.
Karl Blossfeldt, ca. 1895.
Initially Blossfeldt used live specimens for his lessons, a fact that forced
him to take daily trips to the fields in the outskirts of Berlin to secure
fresh plants for his students. As opposed to live plants, photographs
lasted indefinitely, could be enlarged and were easy to store, taking up
less space than actual plants or plaster models. Blossfeldt subsequently
started to photograph plants systematically for his students as teaching
aids. For this purpose, he used a homemade plate camera and three
sizes of negatives. He photographed the specimens frontally, with a
neutral background (either white or grey) and used mild natural light
either from above or from the side (Figure 19). He continued to use
this rudimentary system without alteration for over 32 years, the entire
duration of his teaching career.
Figure 19: Undated photographs

of plant specimens by Karl Blossfeldt.
37. In 1890 Meurer got a commission from the Prussian Ministry for Science, Art
and Education to put together a catalogue of natural forms for its use in the
Academy. He immediately took to Rome with six assistants, including Blossfeldt,
and for four years the team traveled across Italy, Greece and North Africa col-
lecting vegetal specimens. Upon his return to Berlin in 1898, Meurer, who had
become very fond of Blossfeldt as his most productive and loyal collaborator,
secured for him a teaching position in the Academy where he would teach a new
course on Live Plant Modeling.
225
Figure 20: Undated photographs of arrayed plant
specimens by Karl Blossfeldt.
Blossfeldt was not a botanist, pursuing a scientific study or classifi-

cation of plants, nor was he an artist after the enunciation of a new
aesthetic statement. His goal was to create a catalogue of examples of
forms found in the natural world that could become the basis for the
development of ornamental patterns. With this in mind, he kept the
photographs centered on the subject and as clear and legible as possi-
ble. He did not hesitate to manipulate his objects of study – by array-
ing them in repetitive patterns or by cutting away parts of the plants
and exposing others that are usually concealed – in order to show the
formal richness of these specimens as a model for the composition of
ornament (Figure 20).
By 1926, the Academy had merged with the Hochschule der bilden-
den Künste (College of Visual Arts), a more academic institution, to
form the United State Academies of Free and Applied Arts under the
directorship of Bruno Paul. At this point, Blossfeldt had come to be
regarded as a relic of the past, and his ideas about art, heavily reliant on
Meurer and geared towards the creation of Judgenstil ornament, were
completely outmoded (Figure 21).
It was precisely at this point that the gallery owner Karl Nierendorf,
wandering through the new school, ran into a classroom full of
Blossfeldt’s photographs and spontaneously decided to exhibit them
in a turn of events for Blossfeldt, who from then on would come to be
known primarily as a photographer.38 The exhibition proved a great
success, and it was widely covered by the daily newspapers in Berlin,
38. J ürgen Wilde, “Karl Blossfeldt,” 8.
226
Figure 21: Karl Blossfeldt,
designs for a nutcracker, 1905.
which featured its images in a series of richly illustrated articles. Subse-

quently, and with the help of Nierendorf, Blossfeldt got a contract with
publisher Günther Wasmuth to publish a book featuring his images
of plants under the name Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature),
which was published in 1928.
The book was an incredible success both with the public and with the
critics, immediately propelling Blossfeldt to fame. On the one hand,
progressive art critics were in awe of the radical purity and straightfor-
wardness of Blossfeldt’s photographic language. On the other hand, the
book managed to connect with a more conservative sector of critics
and public, who saw in it a return to the eternal values of classical
culture – where art imitated nature – as abandoned by expressionism
and New Building.39
In this fascinating case, a project that was wholly based on a claim for
a return to the past – as all arts and crafts movements – became an
incredibly charged proposal for the future, due to the transformative
power of its visual language of spartan beauty, uncompromising rigor
and formal coherence. This dichotomy becomes palpable in Walter
Benjamin’s contemporary reading of the work, as he saw in it both a
cutting-edge use of technology and a reenactment of German roman-
ticism. Regarding its technological component, he equated Blossfeldt’s
work with the advances procured by Moholy-Nagy a few years earlier:
39. F or a contexualization of Blossfeldt’s work within architecture and documentary

photography see Christoph Schreier, “Nature as Art – Art as Nature” in Karl
Blossfeldt, Ann Wilde, and Jürgen Wilde, Karl Blossfeldt, 11-21.
227
“The person who created this collection of plant photos […] has
done more than his share of that great stock-taking of the inven-
tory of human perception that will alter our image of the world in
yet unforeseen ways. He has proven how right the pioneer of the
new light-image, Moholy-Nagy, was when he said: ‘The limits of
photography cannot be determined. Everything is so new here that
even the search leads to creative results. Technology is, of course,
the pathbreaker here. It is not the person ignorant of writing but
the one ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the
future.’ Whether we accelerate the growth of a plant through time-
lapse photography or show its form in forty-fold enlargement, in
either case a geyser of new image-worlds hisses up at points in our
existence where we would least have thought them possible.”40
Interestingly enough, Benjamin did not seem to appreciate a conflict

between Sander’s exacting and progressive use of technology and the
romantic reverberations that he detected in the work, in which he read a
romantic connection that from our standpoint sounds almost Wagnerian:
“One senses a gothic parti pris in the bishop’s staff which an ostrich
fern represents, in the larkspur, and in the blossom of the saxifrage,
which also does honor to its names in cathedrals as a rose window
which breaks through the wall. The oldest forms of columns pop
up in horse tails; totem poles appear in chestnut and maple shots
enlarged ten times; and the shoots of a monk’s-hood unfold like the
body of a gifted dancer. […] We, the observers, wander amid these
giant plants like Lilliputians. It is left, though, to fraternal great
spirits – un-soaked eyes, like those of Goethe and Herder – to suck
the last sweetness from these calyxes.”41
While Benjamin’s bringing Goethe to the table here seems to be at odds

with the reference to Moholy-Nagy, this in fact reveals the dualism
of a work that oscillates between the scientific and the romantic. This
openness to interpretation may very well be caused by the fact that
Blossfeldt’s images came to be evaluated as products of fine art, when
indeed they were conceived of as tools. They are authentic documen-
tary photographs, as opposed to photographs taken in a documentary
style, to the extent that that they truly had a function as teaching aids.42
With Blossfeldt, as with Renger-Patzsch and Sander, we find the

ultimate evidence of the dualism pervading German documentary
photography as it turned its eyes on the natural and the built land-
scape of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. As these authors become the
model for Bernd and Hilla Becher’s documentary photography during
the second half of the twentieth century, our reevaluation of New Ob-
jectivity will prove to be decisive in reframing the work of the Bechers
beyond the customary clichés about their industrial photography.
40. W
alter Benjamin, “News About Flowers” quoted from The Work of Art in the Age of
its Technological Reproducibility, And other writings on media, 271.
41. Ibid, 272-273.
42. F or more on this distinction see chapter 1 of this dissertation.
228
04. Bernd and Hilla Becher on Typology
When Bernd and Hilla Becher (Figure 22) started their career in the
1960s, the German photographic scene was dominated by Subjective
Photography, a movement that in its graphic and formal emphasis
reenacted and updated Moholy-Nagy’s New Vision.43 This movement,
theorized by Otto Steinert and practiced by photographers such as
Siegfried Lauterwasser, Peter Keetman or Wolfganf Reisewitz defended
the notion that photography should be emancipated from the obliga-
tion to represent the world and be turned into an act of creation. For
these photographers, similarly to Moholy-Nagy or Rodchenko, the
subject of the photograph was just a point of departure for the creation
of a picture through experimentation with a wide range of techniques
including solarization, soft focus and over-exposure.
Figure 22: Portrait of Bernd
and Hilla Becher, ca 1995.
As a response to this context – and in an act of historic repetition – the
Bechers decided to turn to New Objectivity, and more precisely to the
work of Renger-Patzsch, Sander and Blossfeldt, as a model for their
own photographic practice.44 Building upon these influences, they
created, over the course of five decades, one of the most cohesive and
coherent archival projects in the history of documentary photogra-
phy. For all those years, the Bechers devoted themselves exclusively to
the documentation of industrial buildings, devising in the process an
incredibly precise photographic language and a unique way of display-
ing their work. Their matrixes of photographs of industrial buildings,
which they refer to as “typologies,” became synonymous in the 1970s
with the eruption of photography as a power in its own right in an art
scene previously reserved for painting and sculpture.
While architects were among the first to acknowledge the appeal in

the work of the Bechers, even before the art world did, the apprecia-
tion and understanding of such work in our discipline today remains
superficial and obscured by the Becher’s loose adoption of architectural
terminology.45 A closer examination of the roots of their photographic
project will prove to be valuable in developing a greater understanding
of their work in the context of this chapter. In the following pages, and
building upon the knowledge of their precedents, we will seek to clar-
ify what the project of the Bechers represents for the field of architec-
ture, and more precisely in the German context during the 1970s.
The Early Work

Bernd Becher (1931-2007) was born and raised in Siegen, in the heart
of a mining region. After an apprenticeship as a decorative painter in
his father’s company, he moved to Stuttgart and then to Dusseldorf
in 1957 to pursue a career as a typographer. Hilla Becher (1934- ) was
born in Potsdam, where she prematurely quit high school to become
43. F or a full contextualization and critical account of the work of the Bechers see
Armin Zweite, “Bernd and Hilla Becher’s ‘Suggestion for a Way of Seeing,’” in
Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher, and Armin Zweite, Typologies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2004), 7-37.
44. They also acknowledge the influence of Eugène Atget and Walker Evans.
45. T he publication of the work of the Bechers in architectural magazines such as
L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui and Architectural Review in 1967 and 1968 predates
their incorporation into the establishment of German art institutions in the early
1970s. See Klaus-Jürgen Sembach, “1820-1920: Constructions du premier âge
industriel,” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui no.38, (1967): 2ff. or “Pithead Archeolo-
gy,” Architectural Review 143 no. 852, (1968): 8.
229
Hauptstraβe 3, Birken, 1971
an apprentice in the photographic studio of Walter Eichgrün, who

specialized in architectural photography, before fleeing East Germany
for Hamburg and then Dusseldorf to study photography in 1957.
By the time they met, in Dusseldorf in 1957, both of them had come
to be interested in industrial architecture but with very different
approaches and motivations. In the case of Bernd, he became inter-
ested in the documentation of the subject during the upheavals in the
Siegerland in the late 1950s. Being a native of the region, it was devas-
tating for him to witness the dismantlement and disappearance of a
way of life associated with the mining industry, as decades of recession
and the creation of the European Economic Community rendered the
local mining industry obsolete. Rushed by this urgency, he set himself
to document the disappearing facilities, first through drawing and then
through collage and photography, in a desperate act of preservation of
a vanishing reality.46
In the case of Hilla Becher, the interest came from her background in
architectural photography and her study of August Sander and Renger-
Patzsch. Through these previous experiences, she had come to be
fascinated by the industrial facilities in the port of Hamburg and the
Ruhr region as they were a subject that challenged her photographic
vision.47 It wouldn’t be until 1959, when both of them started to work
46. A
rmin Zweite, “Bernd and Hilla Becher’s ‘Suggestion for a Way of Seeing,’” 12.
47. Ibid.
230
together, that their very peculiar project and specific photographic vi-
sion started to be developed. It is interesting to notice that during this
formative period in the early 1960s Bernd and Hilla Becher were still
unknown and sustained themselves with small commissions, logotypes
and graphic design in the case of Bernd and architectural photography
– mostly pavilions in international exhibitions – in the case of Hilla.
Quite shockingly, if we consider their later production, the first joint

photographic journey of the Bechers in 1959 was devoted to the docu-
mentation of half-timber houses in the Siegerland region (Figure 23).48
The choice of this subject matter was nonetheless not completely alien
to their initial interest in industry, since the half-timber house was
the predominant house type for the miners in this traditional mining
region. As the Bechers themselves explain in their volume devoted to
these constructions, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
the Siegerland developed a stable economy based on the extraction of
iron ore and the production of iron.49 This particular form of sustain-
able economy, known as Haubergswitschaft (mountain lumbering),
established communal property out of the forests and a system that
controlled their exploitation for the mining industry and guaranteed a
constant supply of coal to the blast furnaces. This economic organiza-
tion, idealized by the Bechers, consolidated through the years a model
of occupation of the territory that was neither completely urban nor
rural, strongly resonating with Schultze-Naumburg’s characterization
of the landscape of the Heimat.
Additionally, the particular type of house that they documented

emerged after a law was passed in 1790 – precisely “around 1800” – that
stipulated the maximum amount of lumber allowed for the construc-
tion of a house and explicitly forbade its use in ornamental elements.
Their austere and ingenious use of structural lumber, combined with
their neoclassical proportions, lent these constructions their charac-
teristic Um 1800 appearance. With all of the above in mind, and taking
into account Bernd’s deep roots in the region – most of the members
of his family were involved in the disappearing mining industry in
one way or another – we have no option but to acknowledge a strong
nostalgic and traditionalist drive in the very genesis of the Becher’s
archival project. The language they devised for this project, however,
photographs of framework houses, 1950s-70s. is one of extreme detachment and objectivity and can be regarded as
a radicalization of the project of the New Objectivity, in which the in-
fluences of Renger-Patzsch, Sander and Blossfeldt are synthesized and
taken to a new level of restraint and rigor.
In looking at these early photographs, one cannot help but sense the
two components of the work – the nostalgic and the objective – almost
fighting each other, creating a tension that accounts for the haunt-
ing quality of the photographs. In fact, some of these images, those
in which the half-timber structures are more sophisticated, become
almost typographic in their playful and serial depiction of a type
(Figure 24). Others, especially those depicting the slated facades, tend
to emphasize the stern neoclassical proportions and style, one that
48. Ibid.,13.
49. T he Bechers carefully recount the history of the region and of this particular
architectural type in Bernd Becher, and Hilla Becher, Framework Houses of the
Siegen Industrial Region (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2000), 7-9.
231
Figure 25: Slated-facade timber houses
photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher,
1959-1960.
the Bechers described as “Calvinist Baroque,”50 again in a description

that resonates with early twentieth century conservative architectural
criticism (Figure 25).
The first exhibition of the photographic work of Bernd and Hilla Becher
took place in 1963 in the Ruth Nohl bookstore and gallery in Siegen and
featured only half timber structures.51 Before this exhibition, though,
during the early 1960s, the Bechers had already avidly begun to doc-
ument other types, such as warehouses, pits, blast furnaces and other
facilities associated with mining (Figure 26). During this period and
as the list of their motifs expanded, the Bechers continued to perfect a
photographic language that emphasized objectivity and impersonality,
fostering an impression of inevitability. In their images, the industrial
structures are always photographed frontally, with the horizon line
exactly at the center of the image, and feature a perfectly overcast sky
and even light. The structures are also skillfully framed in order to iso-
late them from the larger complexes in which they sit, and they always
occupy the same surface in the picture, regardless of their actual size.
All of these pre-established parameters that the Bechers relentlessly

applied to their subjects managed to attain a scientific aura for the
work. Of course, the choices made by the Bechers were not devoid of
subjectivity, but the fact that they were taken beforehand and turned
into a method that was then almost automatically applied to different
subjects caused the work be perceived as objective.52 This homogeneity
50. A
rmin Zweite, “Bernd and Hilla Becher’s ‘Suggestion for a Way of Seeing,’” 10.
51. Ibid., 20.
52. Ibid., 8.
232
photographs of industrial facades,
1960s-1990s.
of vision also allowed for formal comparisons between the different

structures once their photographs were laid side by side in the gallery
walls. In the early 1970s, when the work of the Bechers finally gained
widespread exposure and recognition, this process-based and compar-
ative nature of their work came to dominate its reception, consequently
obscuring the documentary drive of their earlier work.
233
Anonymous Sculptures
The photography of the Bechers had already attracted major attention
in 1967, with an exhibition in the Neue Sammlung in Munich titled
Industrial Buildings 1830 -1930: A photographic documentation by Bernd
and Hilla Becher. Despite its success, in this exhibition the work of the
Bechers was still received in terms of the history of industry as opposed
to being appreciated by its own merits as a photographic endeavor.
During this period, the work of the Bechers was usually accompanied by
lengthy essays by industrial historians and showcased mainly in special-
ized journals, including as we have discussed architectural magazines.
All of this would change with the 1969 show, Anonimous Sculptures:
Formal comparisons of industrial buildings, held at the Städtische
Kunsthale Düsseldorf (Figure 27). Interestingly, and most decisively,
during the same time that the Becher’s show was up, the Kunsthal-
le received a travelling exhibition, titled U.S: Minimal art, featuring
works by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Robert
Smithson, among others.53 The coincidence in space and time of these
two shows marked a turning point in the career of the Bechers, whose
work came to be regarded in relation with the conceptual and minimal
art movements. This association became reinforced by their participa-
tion in several group exhibitions showcasing minimal and conceptual
artists, such as Konception (Leverkusen, 1969), Information (New York
MoMA, 1972) and Documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972).54 Not less importantly,
Carl Andre wrote an influential account of the work of the Bechers in
the December 1972 issue of Artforum, in which he described their pho-
tographs using the same terminology ascribed to conceptual art.
While this sudden change in the appreciation of their work may seem
abrupt, the fact is that the work of the Bechers had been drifting away
from their originary documentary drive and becoming increasingly
more formal, as is evident in the difference between the titles of the
1967 and 1969 exhibitions. While the photographic documentation
of the Siegerland houses was accompanied by extensive additional
documentary material, such as a text on the history of the region and
an exhaustive list of the buildings detailing location, year of construc-
tion, and name and profession of the owner, the Anonymous Sculptures
show featured only very brief descriptions of the different types of
industrial structures being featured.
This augmented preponderance of the visual against the textual speaks

of the degree of proficiency that the Bechers had achieved as photogra-
phers, now fully confident that their images were clear enough for the
objects in them to present themselves without the additional support
of a written explanation. This tendency was further emphasized in
1970, when the Dusseldorf show was turned into a book titled Ano-
nyme skulpturen: Eine typologie technischer bauten.55 This seminal book
53. Ibid., 21.

54. Ibid., 22.
55. In his essay on the Bechers, Armin Zweite suggests that the take on typology
that comes across in the exhibition recalls the writing of Werner Lindner, a con-
temporary of Schultze-Naumburg, who in his 1927 book Bauten der technik: Ihre
form und wirkung, put forward a definition of typology that stresses consistency
and repetition and the alignment of function, structure and form. In his book,
Lindner features illustrations of water towers, cooling towers and skyscrapers, as
well as images of pagodas set side by side with photographs by Karl Blossfeldt,
highlighting their similarities. Nevertheless, Zweite does not clarify if the Bechers
were aware of the work of Lindner. See Armin Zweite, “Bernd and Hilla Becher’s
‘Suggestion for a Way of Seeing,’” 15.
234
Silo für Kokskohle, 1912,
Kokerei Blaenavon, Südwales, 1966.
235
features seven sections or chapters dedicated to seven different types
of industrial structures – Lime-kilns, Cooling-towers, Blast-furnaces,
Winding-towers, Water-towers, Gas-holders and Silos – with each sec-
tion beginning with a short description of the type and the industrial
processes that take place in it. For instance, for lime-kilns:
“Lime or shelly lime-stone is chemically treated in lime-kilns by

firing. The pulverized raw-material is poured into the kiln in layers
from above and slides slowly downwards. By means of firing (at
about 1000º), the carbon dioxide is extracted from the lime-stone
(calcium-carbonate) and fired-chalk (calcium-oxide) is formed.
Lime-kilns are built of fire-proof stone and are coated with tiles or
rubble, steel or reinforced concrete.”56
The short introductory text was then followed by a succession of

images of lime-kilns, in which we are expected to recognize the briefly
described industrial process as the generator of the forms of each of
the examples. This confidence in typology and visual analysis is also
evident in the succinct statement that opens the book:
“In this book we show objects predominantly instrumental in

character, whose shapes are the results of calculation and whose
processes of development are optically evident. They are generally
buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style. Their pecu-
liarities originate not in spite of, but because of the lack of design.”57
Interestingly enough, while the Becher’s take on typology here seems to

be focused on function and the automatic character with which it is ma-
terialized into these buildings, the choices that they made regarding the
layout of the catalog seem to be symptomatic of a much greater interest
in form. For this book, the Bechers laid out photographs of each type
in pairs across the spreads (Figure 28). This arrangement, together with
the striking similarities of the subjects and the highly homogeneous and
unobtrusive visual language, caused the book to become dominated
by a succession of couples that we are prompted to compare in formal
terms. As a result of this format, the original intent to read the industri-
al processes in each of the individual subjects was finally subsumed in
the book by the morphological comparison of the couples.
Figure 28: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Spreads

from the Anonymous Sculptures catalog, 1970.
56. B
ernd Becher, and Hilla Becher. Anonyme Skulpturen, Eine typologie technischer
bauten (Düsseldorf: Art-Press-Verlag, 1970), np.
57. Ibid., np
236
Figure 29: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Figure 30: Sol Lewitt,
Coal Bunkers, 1965-1999. Four-part Open Geometric Structures, 1978-79.
Typologies
This morphologic and comparative component of the work continued
to become more apparent as the Bechers perfected a method for the
exhibition of their work during the following years. Their matrixes or
grids of images – which they incorrectly refer to as “typologies” – took
the mechanism of the couples in Anonyme skulpturen and expanded
it to a series format (Figure 29). These series comprise nine, twelve or
fifteen elements, arranged in three rows of three, four or five photo-
graphs each. These groups of images, each laconically titled with the
name of the industrial type being depicted, allow us to see multiple
formal relationships across the series. The formal drive of the work be-
comes then even more apparent once we realize that the arrangement
of the elements in the series is independent of chronology, geography
or construction method, responding only to the visual intuition of
the authors, who in many occasions substituted one image in a matrix
when moving their work from one exhibition to another, just out of
aesthetic considerations.58 This formal vein in their work was finally
officialized in 1990, when their work exhibited in the German Pavilion
of the Venice Biennale received the Grand Prix for Sculpture.
While the Bechers initially embraced their assimilation with American

abstract and conceptual art, since it reinforced their status as artists and
further removed them from the scene of industrial archeology, they
were also quick to specify their position within the lineage of docu-
mentary photography with an emphasis in German New Objectivity.
Nevertheless, after the association with abstract and conceptual art has
been made it becomes increasingly difficult not to assimilate their use of
the series and their morphological drive with the work of sculptors such
as Donald Judd, or Sol Lewitt (Figure 30), who we could argue share
Figure 31: Sol Lewitt, from the series with the Bechers a similar typographic sensibility. Judd’s series of fur-
Form Derived from a Cube, 1983. niture designs or Lewitt’s Structures (Figure 31), often times exhibited in
58. Armin Zweite, “Bernd and Hilla Becher’s ‘Suggestion for a Way of Seeing,’” 16.
237
orthogonal arrays, feature a rhythm of repetition and difference which
immediately relates to the matrixes of photographs by the Bechers.
According to this interpretation, the work of the Bechers can be read,

in its most conceptual and abstract instances, as emphasizing the
series as a tool to display difference and imply variation. We could
then imagine that departing from one of their “typologies” we would
be able to anticipate how the series would continue, becoming almost
an engine for the generation of new forms. This sensibility finds strong
resonances in the architectural scene of the 1970s. Undoubtedly, the
fact that architecture and documentary photography had played a role
in the emergence of conceptual art contributed during this period to
enable a temporary convergence of all these disciplines.
The earlier work by the Bechers, on the other hand, induces a reading of
their project that closely relates to the most literally conservative aspects
of both Schultze-Naumburg and the masters of the New Objectivity,
in their nostalgic documentation of a disappearing German landscape
and way of life. In fact, many critics have come to regard even their later
work in this romantic vein, based on the undeniable monumentaliza-
tion of their subject of study and its ruin-like character.59 Additionally,
the relentless use of the series and the consistency of the architectural
types in their repetition can be interpreted as stressing architecture as
an expression of social consensus. This highly conservative interpreta-
tion strongly resonates with events taking place in the German archi-
tectural scene of the 1990s, especially after the reunification of Germany
urged architects to readdress the issue of national identity, like we will
later explain regarding the work of Hans Kollhoff.
Across their arch of development, the Bechers offer us a corrected

and augmented version of the dichotomy between the nostalgic and
the conceptual, as already noted in the work of Schultze-Naumburg
and the photographers of the New Objectivity. In the following pages
we will explore the evolution of these ideas in the context of German
architecture, as the morphological project of Oswald Mathias Ungers
in the 1970s was adopted and gradually transformed by Hans Kollhoff
in the following decades.
59. T he work of the Bechers has been situated as a reference for a contemporary
type of photography which focuses on abandoned buildings, many times on their
interiors. Representatives of this current known as urban exploration or ruin porn
are Richard Nickel, Sarah Schönfeld or Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.
238
05. Oswald Matthias Ungers and the
Morphological Transformation Project
Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926-2007) (Figure 32) was born in Kaiserchef,

graduated from Karlsruhe in 1950, and jumpstarted his architectural
career with a series of residential projects that brought him immediate
international attention. These early projects, especially the building in
Werthmannstrasse (Cologne, 1957) and the house in Belvederstrasse
(Cologne, 1959) (Figure 33), were at their time regarded in stylistic terms,
primarily within the discussions about a new brutalism and a new
expressionism in German architecture. Frustrated with this stylistic in-
terpretation of his work, or perhaps just intimidated by his early success,
Ungers focused more heavily in academia in the following years, taking
Figure 32: Portrait of Oswald
a position at the Technical University of Berlin in 1963 and moving to
Mathias Ungers, ca. 1982. Ithaca to become chair of architecture at Cornell University in 1969.
During the early sixties Ungers developed a strong interest in typolo-

gy as a design tool, a fact that can be appreciated in his work as early
Figure 33: Oswald Mathias Ungers,

Projects in Wehrstrasse, Oberhausen
and Belvederestrasse, Müngersdorf, 1950s.
239
as 1964, with his entry for the competition for Student Housing in
Enschede, Holland (Figure 34). This approach to design was gradually
perfected and enunciated during the 1970s, when Ungers put forward
his definition of “morphological transformation”:
“When architecture is interpreted as a continuous process, in which

theses and antitheses are dialectically integrated, or as a process
in which both history and the anticipation of history is involved,
in which the past has the same weight as the anticipation of the
future, then the process of transformation is not just the means, but
also the end of the design itself. At the same time this creates the
possibility of referring to the specific reality of every single place on
which a work of architecture is to be built, and thus to the genius
loci, of discovering the poetics of the place and giving expression to
it, and in so doing enhance the place.”60
In these words we can read Ungers’ interest in a progressive definition

of typology, one that places adaptability, innovation and intelligence
in equal terms with consistency, tradition and identity. This particular
understanding was crystallized through a series of competition entries
in the mid-1970s, among which the Roosevelt Island project of 1975 is
usually referred to as the most representative. In this project, morpho-
Figure 34: Oswald Mathias Ungers, Competition logical transformation is applied to the massing of the city block as a
for Student Housing in Enschede, Holland, 1964. tool for the generation of different subtypes of buildings, which are
then arranged in juxtaposition, according to a street grid (Figure 35). In
Roosevelt Island, the series becomes a mechanism for the generation
of diversity and the street grid is the armature that allows Ungers to ex-
pose that diversity in morphological and comparative terms, much like
in the arrays of sculptures by LeWitt and Judd or in the photographic
“typologies” by the Bechers.
Through the juxtaposition of these three projects, we are confront-

ed with a period-specific phenomenon, a profound entanglement of
disciplines that had been a decade in the making. We have already
mentioned the importance that anonymous architecture as a theme
had in the emergence of conceptual art when alluding to Sol LeWitt’s
use of Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip for his seminal
text, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Similarly, we have also pointed
to Dan Graham’s photographs in Homes for America – which was also
featured by LeWitt in the same article – as extracting a conceptual art
project from the serial logic implicit in American tract housing. For
LeWitt, similarly to Graham, architecture was not only pervasive as a
theme, but more importantly necessary as a conceptual model for the
definition of his art.61
In this respect, our grouping of these projects not only seeks to insert
itself and radicalize a contemporary reassessment of the decisive
influence of architecture in the shifting art scene of the 1960s, as put
Competition for Roosevelt Island, 1975.
60. O
swald Mathias Ungers, “Architecture as Theme.” in Quaderni di Lotus 1, (Milan,
1982), 15.
61. In the prologue of the upcoming book Retracing the Expanded Field, Julian Rose
notes relevant coincidences between Lewitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”
and “Ziggurats”, a previous article by LeWitt focusing on the architecture sprung
by New York’s zoning ordinance of 1916.
240
German Architecture Museum,
Frankfurt, 1979-84.
forward by authors such as Mark Linder.62 We also contend that the

idea of anonymous architecture as a normative system, when digested
and reformulated by conceptual art, became in turn a model for aca-
demic architecture in the mid-1970s. In other words, conceptual artists
felt drawn to generic and ordinary constructions in which they saw
repetition and a rich system of internal rules and external constraints,
and enunciated an art that reproduced such a model. The works that
originated, removed from the actual conditions of production and
formally cleansed through abstraction, became in turn the vehicle for
architects to incorporate the qualities of these generic constructions
and their logic into the discipline of Architecture.
As this process became more and more explicit in the work of Ungers
during the second half of the 1970s – his architecture became closer to
abstract and minimal art – his forms and materiality became increas-
ingly generic and his representation became increasingly analytic, with
an emphasis on grid organization and axonometric drawings. This
evolution culminated with the project for the German Architecture
Museum in Frankfurt (1979-1984) (Figure 36), a building organized
around two internal voids dominated by the presence of a cubic grid
of horizontal and vertical members of even section. In this all-white
62. M
ark Linder has written extensively on the influence of architecture in the enun-
ciation of minimal and conceptual art. Mark Linder, Nothing Less than Literal: Ar-
chitecture after minimalism (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press). The relationship
of the Bechers with the conceptual and abstract art movements is discussed
extensively in Armin Zweite, “Bernd and Hilla Becher’s ‘Suggestion for a Way of
Seeing.’” For an extensive account of the relationship between Robert Smithson
and Bernd Becher see James Lingwood, et al. Field Trips (Torino: Hopefulmon-
ster; Porto, Portugal: Fundaçao de Serralves, 2002).
241
Frankfurt, 1979-84.
gridded space, Ungers’ identification with the abstract and conceptual

project of American art reached its climax, as one gets the impression
of literally inhabiting one of Sol LeWitt’s structures (Figure 37).
If we were to radically assume the identification of minimal or abstract

art with an origin in architecture, we could say that the work of artists
like Judd or LeWitt is in fact nothing but a meta-architecture, an archi-
tecture that is freed from of all its obligations to the world in order to
respond exclusively to its own internal logic. It is especially fitting then,
that Ungers chose the program of an architectural museum to literally
adopt LeWitt as a reference. In Frankfurt, the central piece becomes
the core of the museum and embodies simultaneously architecture and
its representation (Figure 38). It is not surprising then, if we consider
the feedback loop that we just described, that at this point Ungers’
architecture became self-referential, and that the initial drive towards
context that justified his morphological project faded away.
Frankfurt, 1979-84. It was precisely Unger’s increasing fixation with abstraction, and his in-
creasing disregard for the city and tectonics that frustrated Hans Koll-
hoff – who at the time worked for Ungers – and motivated him to start
his own career as an independent practitioner in 1978. While Kollhoff
would continue to employ Ungers’ morphological project as a design
method, the transformations that he introduced in the following years
profoundly altered the nature and purpose of Unger’s original intent.
242
06. Hans Kollhoff and the Reduction of the
Morphological Project
Hans Kollhoff (Figure 39) was born in 1946 at Lobenstein, in the region
of Thuringia. He was raised on a farm until 1953, when his family fled
to Northern Baden, in Western Germany.63 By the time he graduated
and decided to study architecture at Karlsruhe, in 1968, the student
protests had already erupted, forcing Professor Egon Eierman to retire
in the fall of 1970. This was disappointing for Kollhoff, who had chosen
Karlsruhe precisely because of Eierman’s reputation for detail and craft.
Alienated by the political climate in the architecture school, Kollhoff
interrupted his studies in 1970 to intern at the office of Gerhard Assem,
who had been a disciple of Eierman.
After working for four years with Assem, he moved to Vienna to work
with Hans Hollein for a year before returning to Karlsruhe in 1975 to
Figure 39: Portrait of Hans Kollhoff, ca. 2005.
complete his studies. During this period he became aware of the work
of Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi who, considered in conjunction,
offered him the possibility to reconcile his interest in the city and
architecture as mutually interdependent, with architecture defining the
character of urban space. Precisely through his interest in Italian con-
temporary criticism and the magazine Controspazio, Kollhoff became
aware of the writings of Oswald Mathias Ungers. After his experience
with Hollein, who was a formalist, Ungers’ texts offered Kollhoff the
opportunity to explore architecture as a conceptual endeavor dedicated
to the interpretation of the city and its modification.64
Kollhoff presented himself to Ungers in Cologne in 1975 and managed

to get a scholarship to study with him at Cornell University, which at
the time was a vibrant school, polarized between the opposing figures
of Ungers and Colin Rowe. While Kollhoff was Ungers’ assistant at
Cornell, he was also interested in Rowe’s contextual theories. In fact,
his 1976 collage City of Composite Presence (Figure 40), realized in
Figure 40: Hans Kollhoff and David Griffin,

City of Composite Presence, 1976.
63. U
nless otherwise noted, basic biographic information on Hans Kollhoff is taken
from Hans Kollhoff, and Jasper Cepl, Hans Kollhoff: Kollhoff & Timmerman Archi-
tects (Milano: Electa Architecture, 2004).
64. A
condensation of Unger’s urban theories can be found in Oswald Mathias Un-
gers, Stefan Vieths, and Luca Molinari, Oswald Mathias Ungers: The dialectic city.
(Milano: Skira, 1997).
243
collaboration with David Griffin, was included by Rowe in the first
edition of Collage City (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). As with Venturi and
Rossi, the pairing of Ungers and Rowe is telling of Kollhoff ’s effort to
understand architecture as both an object and a texture.
During this period, Kollhoff worked for Ungers, organizing the summer
courses for the Cornell students in Berlin, and also collaborated in his
office on several competition projects, including the Riterstrasse com-
petition in Marburg and the park in Braunschweig Castle. This moment
in Ungers’ office was marked by a shift from the playful typological vari-
ations of Roosevelt Island to the formalistic abstraction of the German
Architecture Museum, a trajectory that alienated Kollhoff and, as we
have discussed, resulted in his departure from the office in 1978.
When Kollhoff left the office of Ungers, he took with him the mor-
phological project, which he had internalized as the basis for a design
method. For Kollhoff, even more so than for his mentor, the stress in
morphological transformation was placed on process – he was not as
interested in the possibility of generating different outcomes as he was
in the cumulative intelligence that could be built into the architectural
object through successive transformations. For Kollhoff, the morpholog-
ical process was an abstract set of rules and operations that allowed him,
through composition, to reconcile his conflicting interests in modernism
and tradition, abstraction and tectonics, and architecture and urbanism:
“The morphological process of design does not aim at a final syn-

thesis. … It takes particular pleasure in ambiguous situations, in
plan and in elevation: just as spatial domains are superimposed in
a ‘transparent manner’ in plan, works of architecture that can ini-
tially be viewed separately are fused into twin figures in the facade,
to establish a new relationship immediately afterward. This can be
seen as a game played with geometry, but it can also be used as an
effective means of composition in architecture, in order to express
the affinities between the building and its constituent parts.”65
Thus, if Ungers’ morphological approach could be described as oper-

ating in a mode similar to the “typologies” by the Bechers, Kollhoff ’s
approach would correlate to the morphological reading of the early
work of the photographers, in which the object becomes an index of
its process of design, being a direct or automatic outcome of a series
of considerations (Figure 41). According to his own explanation, in
Kollhoff ’s morphologic project, site, program and structure become
the modifying forces that successively advance the formation of the
Figure 41: Hans Kollhoff, Morphological

development of the plan of the Berlin Schloss
study, 1993.
65. H
ans Kollhoff, “Project Report for the Victoria Housing Complex,” in Hans Koll-
hoff, and Jasper Cepl, Hans Kollhoff: Kollhoff & Timmerman Architects, 46.
244
Figure 42: Hans Kollhoff, Massing studies
for the building in Potsdamer Platz,
Berlin-Tiergarten, 1993.
Figure 43: Hans Kollhoff,

Apartment Building, Luisenplatz,
Berlin-Charlottenburg, plans of
the situation prior to intervention, project. In this additive process, morphological transformation is
of the competition project and of
the area following its realization, simultaneously the mechanism for the production of a form and for
1983-87. rendering the mechanism of its becoming visible (Figure 42).66
The Block and the Slab

Morphological transformation offered Kollhoff a process-based ap-
proach to design that fulfilled his longing for a conceptual model for
practice and the possibility to reconcile his interest in the architectural
object and its role in the city. With this background, and in the context
of Greater Berlin, Kollhoff articulated his early works around a difficult
and conflicted equilibrium between the city block and the modernist
slab. We can appreciate this sensibility in his early housing projects for
Südliche Friedrichstadt (1977), Victoria Complex in Kreuzberg (1980)
and Luisenplatz in Charlottenburg (1983) (Figure 43), all of which are
intelligent and unstable surgical interventions in the city fabric:
“Even if we are no longer able to insert the architecture into the

urban scene without constraints, it may still be worth making an
attempt: devising ambivalent urban constructions, which originate
from their intrinsic functional outline and are shaped, at the same
time, by a morphological elasticity with regard to the context.
66. A
didactic and exhaustive explanation of this design method can be found in
Annegret Burg, Kollhoff: Examples (Basel; Berlin; Boston, Mass.: Birkhauser
Verlag, 1998).
245
Figure 44: Hans Kollhoff, Ethnographic Museum Figure 45: Hans Kollhoff,
in Frankfurt, insertion in the urban context Competition project for Atlanpole,
showing the effect of the illuminated transparent Nantes, France, side elevation,
roof at night, 1987. 1988.
Singular compositions, which are obviously seen as part of the

urban texture, but which can also sometimes be cut loose from
the context, like objects, presenting themselves as sculptures. If in
the opposition between internal and external forces we are able to
keep open an urban space, to overcome the glaring lack of space in
modern architecture, in the interest of urban living, should we not
consider ourselves fortunate?”67
In these words and through the sequence of the above mentioned

projects we can follow an increasing emancipation of the architectural
object, a development that became explicit in the competition entry
for Fasanenstrasse in 1983, marking the end of the period in which
Kollhoff remained equidistant in his oscillation between architectural
object and city fabric. In the following years, Kollhoff radicalized his
practice through a series of competition entries in which the large-
scale architectural object became increasingly autonomous and iconic.
The Megaform
In these larger projects, which include the Competition for the Ethno-
graphic Museum in Frankfurt (1987) (Figure 44), the Atlanpole Project
in Nantes, France (1988) (Figure 45), or the Urban Study for Moabit in
Berlin (1988) (Figure 46), the morphological transformation project
unleashed all of its sculptural potential through the production of a se-
ries of outrageous profiles in the urban landscape. Kollhoff had become
aware of the difficulties of working in the depopulated and thin city fab-
ric of West Berlin during his 1977 summer course with Ungers. In the
context of this seminar, they had enunciated the concept of the Green
Archipelago, radically proposing that the population of Berlin should
67. H
ans Kollhoff, “Report for the Fasanenstrasse Competition Project” in Hans
Kollhoff, and Jasper Cepl, Hans Kollhoff, 64.
246
Urban Study for Berlin-Moabit,
1988.
be concentrated in the more consolidated areas of the city, letting nature

take over the rest of the territory and turning Berlin into a necklace of
urban islands within a forest, tied only through infrastructure.
While Kollhoff devoted his early projects in Kreuzberg and Charlotten-

burg to the difficult reconciliation of fragments of the city – a sort of
urban remediation – he gradually became more and more interested in
exacerbating and taking advantage of the unexpected moments found
in the fallow areas in and around the city, in what we could describe as
Berlin´s urban state of exception:
“But it is precisely the situations of conflict that represent the norm

today. […] Out of this springs a kind of cannibalistic delight and it
is not possible to repress a sort of surrealistic pleasure. In many cas-
es we are confronted by readymades, which signifies that the proj-
ect is already there and it only takes a little push to open the eyes
even of those who don’t want to see. […] Here in the outskirts and
in the areas left fallow inside the city it is again possible to think
about what is unknown. A space of experimentation has opened
up, fields of tension between empty spaces and isolated structures
which no longer comply with a regulatory concept of harmony,
concord and reconciliation, but accept separation and diversity.
The functional nexuses, above all the traffic systems, constitute the
scaffolding of a new order, which is presented to our perception as
a series of images.”68
In this passage, Kollhoff ’s opportunistic view of the uncontrollable

urban phenomena occurring in the periphery of European cities, his
search for a new beauty in the ugliness and banality of the periphery,
68. H
ans Kollhoff, “Architecture versus Urban Design,” in Quaderns d’arquitectura i
urbanisme, no. 183, (1989): 14.
247
Figure 47: Wim Wenders, still from
the film Wings of Desire, 1987.
even the choice of words (conflict, delight, pleasure, euphoria), deeply

resonate with a particular sensibility of the time, one that we can ac-
knowledge in the films of Wim Wenders – Wings of Desire (Figure 47)
was shot in 1987 – or the coetaneous projects of Rem Koolhaas, who
had also been a disciple of Ungers during the Cornell years. Kollhoff
was indeed very active during the late 1980s in promoting a new ap-
preciation of fallow areas within the European architectural discourse
and the lack of confidence in urbanism that came with it. His article
“Architecture versus Urban Design,” for instance was written in 1989,
five years before Koolhaas’ “Bigness,” of which it can be considered
a precedent.69 During this period, too, Kollhoff was responsible for
introducing WimWenders to an architectural audience in the pages
of Quaderns Magazine in 1988, anticipating many of the themes that
would later become popularized in Ignasi Solà –Morales’ “Terrain
vague” article, almost a decade later.70
Quite interestingly, Kollhoff did not take advantage of his early po-
sitioning regarding this new trend in the following years, but rather
swiftly and radically retreated from it after 1989, when the fall of the
Berlin Wall deeply unsettled and undid previous political and econom-
ic conditions in the city. As West Berlin’s surreal condition of isolation
vanished and the city sought to situate itself once again as the capital of
the newly reunited nation, the responsibility faced by Berlin architects
suddenly shifted from the theorization of an exceptional urban con-
dition to the actual reconstruction of the capital city and the national
identity that it was meant to embody.
The Urban Facade

If we then consider this radical change of circumstances – and the
amount and size of commissions that came with it – it will not be as
surprising as it is disappointing to witness how Kollhoff suffered, at
this moment, what we should call a change of heart. Not only were
his large utopian projects discarded; even his early interest in the
69. R
em Koolhaas, “Bigness,” in Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau S,M,X,XL, (New
York: The Monaceli Press, 1995), 494-518.
70. Ignasi De Solà-Morales, “Terrain vague,” 164-171.
248
reconciliation of modernism and the tradition of the German city gave
way in a very brief period of time to a single-minded pursuit of the
rediscovery of the nineteenth century bourgeois city:
“We must stop thinking exclusively in abstract categories, we have to

stop introducing ‘ideas’ that are always new. Instead we should go
in search for the traditional essence of the city. Nor is it enough to
celebrate the city of contradictions and conflicts, the city of process,
bearing in mind the unspeakable examples of city planning that are
to be found in the east and the west. […] Obviously, we are propos-
ing an architecture in stone, imposing in its dimensions and varied,
but adhering to a number of precise rules, with the aim of recover-
ing a lost urban essence.”71
It is indeed difficult to think that this text was written by the same
person that wrote “Architecture against Urban Design,” just three years
earlier. In such a brief period of time Kollhoff managed to move from
an interest in the periphery of the city to a reinstatement of the qual-
ities of its core, from the emancipation of the architectural megaform
in the landscape to a total submission to the nineteenth century urban
facade, from an architecture of innovation to a pre-modern revivalism,
and in summary, from a progressive and speculative approach to the
discipline to a reactionary project for the reconstruction of the city of
Berlin to all its Prussian splendor.
“Our profession has to decide whether to take flight into a psyche-

delic universe as one part of the world of the media or to pick up
the thread again from where it was broken three quarters of a cen-
tury ago. We can see that the world at that time was not so different
form our own as to require us to overthrow everything that had
been perfected over the centuries in the course of creating a sophis-
ticated urban culture. Likewise, we realize that our media-domi-
nated world may not after all be so new as to justify forgetting what
European urban culture once was and what in many places still is.”72
This sudden longing for a greater degree of realism is heavily political

in that it places its bet in the recovery of a social convention from the
past in order to propose a consensus for the future. In a total reversal
of his previous ideas, Kollhoff went from denying the possibility of a
contemporary urbanism to an uncritical embrace of nineteenth cen-
tury urban planning conventions. The result of this is that once these
conventions have been accepted to determine the general massing of
the buildings, the street fronts and the eaves-heights, the architect is
left with the composition of the facade as his main and practically sole
concern. This reductive focus on the facade would then become Koll-
hoff ’s new project, to which he would apply his morphologic process of
design in an attempt to recover the abandoned tradition of pre-mod-
ern construction – the refined articulation of elements found in the
architectural language of the traditional European city:
“After the war, out of a fondness for the principle of structural hon-
esty, functionalist brutalization threw the heritage of objects refined
over centuries onto the garbage heap, selecting an ‘honest’ but cold
71. H
ans Kollhoff, “Report for the Redevelopment Plan for Leipziger Strasse” in
Hans Kollhoff and Jasper Cepl, Hans Kollhoff, 190.
72. Hans Kollhoff, “Architecture Today,”Domus no.756, (1994).
249
urban facades, Berlin, 1990s.
range of materials on which our unsatisfied emotional needs are

unable to take hold. Columns have been replaced by pipes, roofs
and cornices by slabs of reinforced concrete and the socle has been
perversely transformed into a protection against splashes of water,
made of sheet metal and bordered by cast-iron drains.”73
In order to recover the tradition of refinement and politeness of the

urban facade, Kollhoff concentrated on developing a system to clad
buildings in a legible tectonic language, an idea that harkens back
to the writings of Semper or Loos. Kollhoff ’s cladding system was
advanced through a succession of urban projects in Berlin during the
early 1990s, in which he consistently applied the same compositional
rules to a series of urban facades of differing proportions (Figure 48).
The system was based on a layering of overlapping planes of slabs of
stone that, while being a ventilated open-joint double facade, repro-
duced in the composition of their vertical surfaces the depth and sobri-
ety of load-bearing construction (Figure 49).
Figure 49: Hans Kollhoff, Block 208, Hofgarten The morphological project was here dramatically subverted, as its
am Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin-Mitte, 1993-1996. serial emphasis became geared to stress the notion of repetition and
consensus, with the variation and diversity being kept to a minimum,
to a point where it becomes difficult to discern. The whole series of
Berlin stone facades, including the projects in Friedrichstrasse (1994),
Walter-Benjamin Platz (1995), Pariser Platz (1997) and Torstrasse
(1997), can be considered a quest for adequateness, refinement, propri-
ety and convention – in short, all the values of the urban bourgeoisie of
the nineteenth century. This was, of course, a highly charged political
73. H
ans Kollhoff, “Stumpfsinn und öffentliche meinungsbiildung,” Der Tagesspiel, Oc-
tober 4, 1992. Quoted from the English translation in Hans Kollhoff, and Jasper
Cepl, Hans Kollhoff, 23.
250
statement for an architect to make, and once it was made it became
difficult to find any direction for development, except in the radicaliza-
tion and permanent justification of such reactionary thrust.
The ETH Years: A Reactionary Coda, Once Again

Starting in the late 1990s, the career of Kollhoff increasingly paralleled
that of Shulze-Naumburg, as he became more and more invested in pre-
senting his architecture and his position as an effort for cultural reform
and taste making for the German middle and upper middle classes.
Quite fittingly, when invited to exhibit at the newly inaugurated Weisen-
hoff Architecture Gallery in Stuttgart, Kollhoff reinstated Schultze-Na-
umburg’s attacks on modern architecture, thus situating himself as his
inheritor and, within contemporary politics, at the very core of the wave
of conservative neoliberalism sweeping the European spectrum:
“Could it not slowly be dawning on us that the modern psychosis of

progress – the idea that everything has to be more and more abstract,
white, transparent and thus obviously better, more honest and dem-
ocratic – has something paranoid about it? Something that neglects
the human side, especially in the private realm? I want to stress this:
those who are not ready to learn from the history of the reception of
the modern that everyone is the shaper of his own fortune and that
the architect, in this, when it is a question of building, can perform a
useful service if he is ready to do so, are an anachronism.”74
74. H
ans Kollhoff, “Eine verhängnisvolle frage,” in Hans Kollhoff, Wie wohnen heute?,
catalogue for the exhibition at the Architektur Galerie am Weissenhof, Stuttgart,
October 2-30, 2002 (Spurbuchverlag, 2002), 3-5. Quoted from the English
translation in Cepl, Jasper. “Hans Kollhoff and the Craft of the Architect” in Hans
Kollhoff, and Jasper Cepl, Hans Kollhoff, 35.
251
Figure 50: Hans Kollhoff, Landeszentralbank Figure 51: Hans Kollhoff, Delbrück Bank,
of Saxony and Thuringia, 1993-2000. Berlin-Mitte, 1995-2000.
Kollhoff here relies on an assumption of his clients’ wishes in order to

justify his increasingly revivalist project, just as he relies on a neolib-
eral notion of individual freedom in order to justify those wishes. This
appears especially clear when we examine a series of projects for banks
and wealthy private clients realized in the late 1990s. From the rusticat-
ed palazzo of the Landeszentralbank in Meiningen (1997) (Figure 50),
to the baroque echoes of the Delbrück Bank in Berlin (1998) (Figure 51)
or the Schinkelesque knock-off of Villa Gerl, (1997) (Figure 52), in all of
these instances his use of an abstracted classicism is justified in politi-
cal terms. Suffice it here to read Jasper Cepl’s defense of the architect’s
position in his introduction to Kolhoff ’s main monograph:
“Instead of presenting himself as someone working in the cutting

edge of his profession, Kollhoff tries to listen to his clients and to
contribute to their individual happiness, to an atmosphere where
they can live free from the constraint of progressive and politically
correct declarations.”75
Figure 52: Hans Kollhoff, Villa Gerl, Kollhoff ’s residences for the upper-middle classes prove to be especially
Berlin-Dahlem, 1997-2000.
relevant in the light of our comparison with Schultze-Naumburg, who as
a practitioner specialized in such commissions. Similarly, Kollhoff also
adopted the motif of the single-family house as the core of his cultural
project during the early 2000s, when he became more and more preoc-
cupied with issues of normality and tradition. This is clear in his Project
for the K./M. House (1997) (Figure 53), but most of all in his activity as a
teacher at the eth, where he became Chaired Professor in Architecture
and Construction, and eventually concentrated on the problem of the
bourgeois house and interior through a series of courses (Figures 54 to 63).
In the first of these courses, titled Wohnen (Rooms) held in 1998, the
students were given a series of pre-modern buildings for which they
had to produce an interior design.76 In the final product of the studio,
75. J asper Cepl, “Hans Kollhoff and the Craft of the Architect,” 32.
76. H
ans Kollhoff, Wohnen: Studentenprojekte am lehrstuhl Prof. Hans Kollhoff, ETH
Zürich; [Katalog zum Wintersemester 1998/99] (Zurich: ETH, 1999).
252
a book dominated by a series of digital renderings portraying the
interiors of these rooms, we can acknowledge how the pre-modern
plan layout of the originals is unchallenged, while all the energy is
put into the design and application of decorative patterns, moldings,
and in the replication of traditional materials and epoch furnishing.
The fact that the studio was held in the late 1990s, when photo-realis-
tic computer-rendering was still not fully advanced, gives the work a
highly artificial and, to some extent, sinister quality, derived from the
misalignment of the means of representation and the qualities sought
to be represented.
In the second of these courses, titled Häuser (Houses) the students were
given an empty plot on a semi-rural setting in Switzerland.77 Taking
Kollhoff ’s own K./M. House as a model – it is featured in the introduc-
tion to the book – the study departs from the interiors to also develop
Figure 53: Hans Kollhoff, K./M. the external appearance of the houses as well as the garden, with an em-
House, Landau, 1997. phasis on how the buildings sit in their environment. Thus, the studio
sought to offer a comprehensive aesthetic proposal for a way of life, in a
way that almost identically matched Schultze-Naumburg’s efforts in his
Figure 54: Cover of the publication Figure 55: Cover of the publication
for the Wohnen course, 1998. for the Häuser course, 1999.
77. H
ans Kollhoff, Häuser: Projekte von elf studierenden der ETH; [Katalog zum Som-
mersemester 1999] (Zurich: ETH, 2000).
253
Figure 56: Interior perspective by student Figure 57: Interior perspective by student
Corinna Menn, Wohnen, Zurich ETH, 1998. Patrick Roost, Wohnen, Zurich ETH, 1998.
Kulturarbeiten. Furthermore, some of the designs were so literally based

on German vernacular traditions that they could very well be featured
in one of Schultze-Naumburg’s books.
What lies behind this anachronistic endeavor is nothing more and

nothing less than the most nostalgic and conservative interpretation
of typology, one in which tradition has overpowered any possibility of
innovation, a model in which “quality” is opposed to “ideas” in an an-
ti-intellectual approach to architecture that finds an aliby in neoliberal
ideology. The emphasis on repetition is here geared towards the cre-
ation of a new social consensus, one where the conventional is valued
over the “new” and the “original,” which in turn become demonized.
As Jasper Cepl has noted, Kollhoff takes from Adolf Behne in his belief
that architectural form emerges from social consensus, a fact that is
especially visible in the nineteenth century European city.78 While such
a consensus and consistency can be regarded as positive, the problem
of this approach, as defended by Schultze-Naumburg or Kollhoff, is
that it cannot be enforced single-sidedly. There is in fact no such thing
as a condition of normality that exists by default or that is ideologically
neutral. The fictions of quality and normality in Kolhoff ’s later work
are then only indicative of an extreme ideological position that charac-
terizes itself in its denial of its political biases.
78. J asper Cepl, “Hans Kollhoff and the Craft of the Architect,” 18.
254
07. Conclusions
The different instances of serial work studied in this chapter, in their

oscillation between the poles of the conceptual and the nostalgic, de-
scribe a circular trajectory with a start and an end that uncannily echo
each other. It is not our intention however to draw Manichean distinc-
tions between good and bad, or progressive and conservative works or
authors. Quite contrarily, what we would like to emphasize here is pre-
cisely the different ways in which these projects put forward a political
stance, which itself is never easily reduced to a single dimension.
In fact, all of the authors covered here are caught to some degree in the
dichotomy that we just described, shifting positions across their indi-
vidual careers. It seems then that the conjunction of the problems of
seriality and objectivity in documentary photography and architecture
yields projects that are always heavily politically charged but volatile,
in which small displacements or variations of the same elements can
spring forward diametrically opposed political readings. This fact is
surely related to the looseness with which the term objectivity (sach-
Figure 58: Interior perspective by student
Jens-Christian Bohm, Wohnen, Zurich ETH, 1998. lichkeit) was used in German cultural discourse, and with the many
nuanced meanings that it gradually acquired since it emerged towards
the end of the nineteenth century and until the 1930s.
For the sake of clarity, and admitting beforehand that a thorough and
comprehensive study of the term is beyond the scope of this text and
the capacity of this author, it is important to clarify what we mean
when we talk of objectivity. We have already mentioned that the term
was already present in the early writings of Schultze-Naumburg and
other German authors influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement,
who used it to refer to a certain constructive logic and cultural appro-
priateness of traditional constructions, as opposed to the whimsical
eclecticism of late nineteenth century architecture. This reading, which
emphasizes consistency, repetition and the alignment of function and
structure over all other considerations – especially formal ones – be-
came prevalent among conservative architects and heavily influenced
the German approach to typology.79
The more specific term New Objectivity, on the other hand, was actu-
ally coined in 1923 when Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the
Kunsthalle in Mannheim, used it to describe the work of an upcoming
exhibition featuring paintings that departed from the then dominant
expressionist style. For Hartlaub, the inclusion of the word new in New
Objectivity was not meant to signal a total break with expressionism,
but rather an opposition to bourgeois culture and more specifically to
the naturalism of the Dusseldorf School of painting. Hartlaub’s use of
the term, was thus intended to connote a drive towards realism and a
certain socialist leaning, a shift in paradigm from an aristocratic to a
socialist value system through an emphasis on the everyday.80
79. A
rguably, the most influential text on typology in the German context, and the
one that is usually associated with the Bechers and their archival project, is
Werner Lindner, Bauten der Technik: Ihre form und wirkung, (Berlin: Werkanlagen,
1927). Lindner career as a conservative architect echoes that of Schultze-Naum-
burg, as he was involved with the Deutscher Werkbund early on and eventually
evolved towards more radically conservative positions.
80. T his synthetic definition is indebted to Rosemarie Haag Bletter, who in her
introduction to the English translation of The Modern Functional Building by Adolf
Behne, puts forward a comprehensive and insightful account of how the term
was used by different authors during the period.
255
This reading of the term was adopted a few years later in the field of
photography, where it clearly resonates with Walter Benjamin’s inter-
pretation of the work of Sander. Similarly, Hartlaub’s use of the term
influenced the way that modern architects and writers like Adolf
Behne used it during the mid-1920s, before the term became too
closely associated with functionalism. Nevertheless, Hartlaub’s New
Objectivity, as it was imported into photography and architecture, also
retained a considerable degree of ambiguity in its association with
some components of expressionism. This seems proven in our brief
analysis of the three main authors of New Objectivity in photography
and is equally true in the field of architecture, where modern architects
as diverse and Adolf Behne, Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut or Ludwig
Hilberseimer claimed the term for their respective causes.
Interestingly enough, conservative authors like Werner Lindner and

Schultze-Naumburg, continued to use the term throughout this period
to defend a position that was increasingly opposed to that of Hartlaub
– or for that matter Behne – as objectivity for them became an alibi for
a reactionary cultural project based on a profound social elitism and
immobilism.81 It is tempting then to just deny the validity of the term
and to simply say that these authors were using it to describe differ-
ent things. On the other hand, it will surely be more productive if we
try to consider what it is that the projects here have in common – the
internal mechanism through which objectivity is enunciated in them –
and try to figure out how it is possible that they behave so differently in
political terms.
In all the projects covered in this chapter there is first a subject mat-
ter, usually a fragment of the built environment that is designated as
a theme. This subject matter is approached by an author, who may or
may not have an emotional attachment or relationship to that subject
matter. Then a certain filter – that of objectivity – is applied onto the
subject matter. This filter is basically a mode of vision or analysis which
abstracts the subject matter, achieving different degrees of removal or
detachment. During this process, the abstracted subject matter is also
explicitly or implicitly situated within a broader or narrower family
of similar elements, effectively being subsumed more or less intensely
into a series. Up to this point, these remarks are equally true of the way
that photography and architecture operate. Architecture, nevertheless,
then proceeds to propose a new instance or instances of the series and
insert them back into reality – or at least puts forward that possibility
–, which of course adds an additional layer of complexity.
While the quantity of parameters and relationships governing this

process is fairly complex, it is by no means infinite, and it would be
worthwhile trying to map them according to the different political
outputs of the projects. In this respect, it seems clear for instance that
a greater degree of proximity of the author and the subject matter
results in an increased nostalgic component. Ironically, according to
this, Schultze-Naumburg’s relationship with the half-timber house is
way less sentimental than for instance that of Bernd Becher, for whom
it represented the disappearing way of life of his homeland. In turn,
81. W
hile Schultze-Naumburg directed most of his publications to the lower middle
classes, his professional career was devoted to the construction of richly decorat-
ed Schlösser for the remains of the Prussian aristocracy. His most famous built
work is Cecilienhoff, a palace built for Crown Prince Wilhelm and finished in 1917.
256
Figure 59: Exterior perspective by student Figure 60: Exterior perspective by student
Markus Mangler, Häuser, Zurich ETH, 1999. Oliver Davey, Häuser, Zurich ETH, 1999.
a higher degree of abstraction or removal from the original seems to

correlate with projects that are potentially more progressive. Following
with our previous example, here the Bechers manage to escape the nos-
talgic drive of their documentation efforts through a highly abstracted
and consistent visual language, which through repetition frees the
subject from its emotional overtones and renders it as a playful study
of form, in which the intelligence of the constructions is foregrounded
in detriment of their authenticity.
It seems then that we can distinguish between projects that are more
fixated with the original object from others which are more concerned
with the degree of sophistication and rigor of the conceptual mecha-
nism through which it is abstracted and replicated. While those proj-
ects that favor abstraction and an emphasis on process allow for more
difference and innovation and therefore more progressive outcomes,
this also has its limits, since an excessive degree of abstraction or em-
phasis on rules turns a project inwards and removes it from its capacity
to operate at a political level. The former is evident for instance in
Ungers’ later work, where the architecture being abstracted is barely
an idea and no longer a thing, and the resulting project is completely
self-absorbed.
Interestingly enough, the projects in this chapter which seek as an

outcome to produce some form of cultural consensus seem to inevi-
tably become more conservative than those which focus on problems
that are more specifically disciplinary. This is evident for instance if we
257
compare Kollhoff ’s early projects, dealing with the specific problem
of closed block versus slab urbanism with his later experiments at the
eth, where he focused on taste making through generalizable solu-
tions. This is evident in his studies on houses, where the delineation
of a bourgeois interior is directly linked to a perceived longing for a
former way of life.
Interestingly enough this is precisely the point that makes our analysis
of the German case so different from the Italian. While both deal di-
rectly with the construction or formulation of a national identity, their
actual mechanisms are very different. Pagano and the Italian neore-
alists that came after him were departing from a fragmented country
with no common history, in order to fabricate a new identity,
a synthetic construct made out of domestic and foreign sources. Schul-
tze-Naumburg, on the other hand, was trying to save a monolithic
culture, that of nineteenth century Prussia and the elites that supported
it, which during his time was quickly disappearing.
What becomes more daunting then in the case of Kollhoff, what creates
the mesmerizing awkwardness of his architectural project, is the seem-
ingly unbridgeable gap between the extinct aristocratic culture that he
is trying to recapture and the current conditions of life in a modern
European democracy. In this light, his success in packaging an abstract-
ed neoclassicism as a luxury item for neoliberal patrons in the upper
corporate and political crust takes on a somber tone as we realize its
identification with the revival of an exclusive set of values, the very set
of values that New Objectivity was initially meant to dismantle.
Despite the seemingly pessimistic end of this chapter, we will argue

that its broad overview provides us with very valuable insights into the
mechanisms through which the idea of realism articulates different
political positions in architecture, a theme that we will continue to
elaborate through this text. We are probably now in a better position
to assess how applying objectivity, abstraction and a serial logic to ex-
isting architectures in order to produce an architecture of today – this
could be our working definition of typology – is something that can be
done while stressing cultural continuity and repetition, or conversely,
adaptability and intelligence. Ultimately the question is whether we
Figure 61: Exterior perspective by student turn our heads to the past in denial of its loss or interrogate the reality
Regula John, Häuser, Zurich ETH, 1999. around us in order to ignite the future.
258
Figure 63: Exterior perspective by student
Stefan Rufer, Häuser, Zurich ETH, 1999.
259
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261
The Library
for the Technical University
Chapter 5 in Eberswalde
01. Introduction
02. Thomas Ruff

– The Dusseldorf School of Photography
– An Autobiographical Trilogy
– Appropriation Work
– The H&dM Collaboration
– Digital Image-Making
03. Herzog & de Meuron

– Signs and Things
– Making Images
– Building with Images
04. Conclusions
263
Figure 1: Thomas Ruff,
Bibliothek, Eberswalde, 1999.
01. Introduction
The collaboration between the German photographer Thomas Ruff
and the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron started
in 1990 when the architects commissioned the photographer to portray
one of their buildings, and evolved over the course of the decade into
a deeper relationship culminating in their collaboration on the project
for the Library for the Eberswalde Technical School, finished in 1997.
The coalescence of the figures of Ruff and Herzog & de Meuron ac-
quires an increased relevance in the context of this text if we consider
their respective lineages and the striking generational and thematic
parallels in their careers: Ruff is a disciple of Bernd and Hilla Becher
and Herzog & de Meuron were students of Aldo Rossi, both figures
already discussed in this dissertation. In the following pages, the study
of their response to and transformation of their mentors’ projects, will
provide us with a further understanding of the shared attitudes and
biases that enabled and shaped the collaboration between the photog-
rapher and the architects.
Both Ruff and Herzog & de Meuron became known early on for their
emphatic insistence on superficiality, understood in the most literal
of ways. In studying the implications of such preoccupation with the
surface in the context of our previous cases, and in dissecting how
this theme unfolded in their particular collaborations, we will try to
shed some light on the significance of this issue in our contemporary
cultural condition.
02. Thomas Ruff
The Dusseldorf School of Photography

Thomas Ruff (Figure 2) was born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, in the
heart of the Black Forest.1 Determined since his childhood to become a
photographer, he moved to Dusseldorf in 1977, just in time to enroll in
the first class to be taught by Bernd Becher, the new chair of photogra-
phy in the Kunstakademie. The formidable group of students in Bernd’s
class comprised Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Struth, Andreas
Gursky and Petra Wunderlich, among others. This group attained in
the following years a great level of success and exposure, coming to be
known unofficially as the Dusseldorf School of Photography. 2
The actual school, the Staatlichen Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, had

been founded in the early nineteenth century, quickly becoming recog-
nized for its landscape painters, with figures such as Alfred Bierstadt or
Emanuel Leutze. After a period of decay, the school regained promi-
Figure 2: Thomas Ruff, Portrait, 1991. nence again in the 1950s and 1960s, attracting professors like Karl Otto
Götz, Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter. In this context, Bernd Becher
was offered to join the school in 1976, becoming the first chair of pho-
tography to be named in German academia. Over two decades, until
1. Unless otherwise noted basic biographic information on Thomas Ruff is taken

from Valeria Liebermann, et al, Thomas Ruff: Works 1979-2011 (Munich: Schirm-
er/Mosel, 2012).
2. On the Dusseldorf School of Photography see Stefan Gronert, The Dusseldorf
School of Photography (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009).
265
Figure 3: Photographs from Thomas Ruff ’s
Interiors series, 1979-1982.
1997, the Bechers – Bernd was nominally the chair but both of them
always taught together – saw three generations of young photographers
go through their class and impact the international art scene.
During this period, the Bechers’ main contribution as educators was

their decided effort to foster a view of photography as an autonomous
art practice as opposed to a craft that could be learned in order to
make a living. This is relevant if we think of the history of documenta-
ry photography, as all of its proponents, from Atget to Evans, actually
survived on commissioned work, and the Bechers themselves had to
do the same until they became famous. Thus, the Bechers had carved
a new space for photographers in the art world, and while they re-
claimed for themselves a very specific niche within the documentary
tradition, they were crucial in encouraging their students to fill this
newly gained space with their own personal explorations.
If the Bechers were the first photographers to attain recognition as

artists of full right, the members of the Dusseldorf School must then
be held responsible for the confirmation of photography as a force in
the art market on equal terms with painting or sculpture. Two factors
contributed decisively to this impact.3 The first was the introduction of
large format “monumental” prints with a great intensity and subtlety
of color, which were made possible due to the Diasec Face process, a
system used to print enlargements for commercial photography. The
3. S
ee foreword by Lothar Schimer in Stefan Gronert, The Düsseldorf School of
Photography, 7-8.
266
second critical development that the Dusseldorf School introduced and
that enabled photography to compete with painting was the adoption
of digital manipulation techniques, marking a shift from documentary
photography to digital image-making.
It is important here to notice that this new freedom was also fostered
by the simultaneous presence of Beuys and Richter in the Kunstakad-
emie, where their wild crossovers of genres and techniques had a deep
impact in the students of Bernd and Hilla Becher.4 Within this shift
from the documentary to the pictorial, Thomas Ruff occupied both
a central and a marginal position. On the one hand, he was the first
of the group to introduce large format printing and one of the first to
use digital manipulation, but, on the other hand, his wild eclecticism
and the sometimes harsh aesthetic of his work seem to problematize a
purely contemplative reception of his work.
An Autobiographical Trilogy
As a student in Dusseldorf, in 1979, Ruff had already managed to ex-
hibit his Interiors series (Figure 3) in a solo show at the Schötte gallery
in Munich.5 Influenced by the Parisian apartments of Eugène Atget
and the sharecropper cabins of Walker Evans, Ruff ’s series of domestic
interiors were meant to portray the German middle class environment
in which his generation had grown and lived. The images, taken in his
parent’s house in the Black Forest, in his own apartment in Dusseldorf
and in houses of friends and acquaintances, are mostly portrait format
and feature a subtle but intense use of color. While the images have an
explicit documentary component – they are not staged and the lan-
guage is very consistent across the series – the framing disturbs their
documentary drive. Taking from the Bechers, it would have been log-
ical to parallel their formal analyses of volumes with a focus on space
for this series. Instead, Ruff focused on details and most emphatically
on the walls, which were often lined with tiles or patterned wallpaper,
in a way that undid any spatial reading and emphasized surface.
Figure 4: Thomas Ruff, photograph
from the Portraits series, 1981-85. Equally counterintuitive and centered around the concept of surface,
his second series of photographs entitled Portraits (1981-1985), featured
a succession of inexpressive semblances.6 The series of portraits were
formatted as small prints (24x18 cm) with the subjects placed against a
backdrop of a single bright color (Figure 4).7 Unlike with August Sander,
whose work with portraits has been mentioned as a reference for this
series, all of Ruff ’s models were friends from the Kunstakademie, and
therefore roughly the same age, representing a reduced segment of
society. In Ruff ’s Portraits, the psychological interpretation was disabled
through the intentional inexpressiveness of the models, and the socio-
logical reading was disabled through the homogeneity of the sample.
4. Stefan Gronert, “Photographic Emancipation,” The Dusseldorf School of Photogra-

phy, 21.
5. See Thomas Ruff, Gerald Matt, and Tammer El-Sheikh, Surfaces, Depths (Nürn-
berg: Verlag für moderne Künst Nürnberg, 2009), 184-218. And Valeria Lieber-
mann, Thomas Ruff, 40-62.
6. See Thomas Ruff, Surfaces, Depths, 69-185. And Valeria Liebermann, Thomas
Ruff, 62-70.
7. The sitters, mostly colleagues from the Kunstakademie were asked to choose
the color from a range of photographic stock cards, and the portraits were taken
in three different positions in order to avoid monotony in the series, which was
usually exhibited as a single row of images around a room.
267
Figure 5: Thomas Ruff, photographs from the
second phase of the Portraits series, 1986-88.
Later on, starting in 1986, the portraits became full-frontal with blank
light gray backgrounds (Figure 5), and copies in a large format (210
x 165 cm) were produced as limited series. The scaling in this second
series of portraits – which were taken almost like passport photos –
dramatically altered the way they operated in the exhibition room.
Their monumental size, combined with the lack of facial expression,
upsets the conventional reception of a portrait, in which the viewer
interrogates the portrayed person. Here the direction of the gaze is
reversed, as we feel interrogated by the large, stoic busts, which – like
in the Interiors series – are presented to us as impenetrable surfaces.
Ruff ’s third differentiated series (Figure 6) was a set of 29 photographs

of buildings, taken in and around Dusseldorf. Haüser (1987-1991)
completes Ruff ’s autobiographical trilogy and further expands his
interest in the surface.8 The subjects in the series are ordinary housing,
industrial and office buildings dating from the 1950s to the 1970s – wa-
tered-down modern designs in diverse degrees of decay. The frontality
of most of the images, their flatness and large format – the photo-
graphs are roughly two meters tall – invite us to investigate the tex-
tures of the facades. Additionally, the interiors of the buildings remain
unavailable to the viewer, fostering an understanding of the objects as
inexpressive shells, in opposition to the forceful and animated indus-
trial volumes of the Bechers.
As with the interiors and the portraits, Ruff ’s series of architectural

photographs departs from a strict implementation of a photographic
genre, in this case architectural photography, to then subvert it by a
manipulation of its parameters. Ruff ’s negation of the original intent
of the different genres – depictions of space, psychological insight or
articulation of volumes – turns his work into an interrogation on the
way we make and read images.
8. T homas Ruff, Surfaces, Depths, 163-169. And Valeria Liebermann, Thomas Ruff,
70-84.
268
Figure 6: Thomas Ruff, Haus Nr. 61, 1989.
Appropriation Work
Starting in the early 1990s, Ruff started to work on a number of series
for which he appropriated existing footage, a custom that would
become one of his trademarks throughout his career. Newspaper
Photographs (1990-1991) (Figure 7) draws on a selection of newspaper
clippings that the photographer had been collecting since 1981.9 The
photographs in the series were selected based on their construction as
images and allegedly never due to the signification of their content, or
the specific article that they illustrated. In fact, the whole project was
meant to enable the emancipation of a particular type of image that
had been conceived as being subservient to a piece of information and
never thought of in its own terms.
Cropped from their captions, photographed by Ruff and enlarged to a

scale of 2:1, then framed and exposed in large arrays in a gallery space,
the photographs become an inquiry into the construction of images and
the construction of meaning through their association. Thus, this project
insists on the concept of the archive, which is a constant in documentary
photography, but it also problematizes it, since there is no thematic or
objective criterion for the selection and grouping of the images, which
rely completely on the authors’ very personal interpretative voice.10
Ruff ’s interest in the appropriation of utilitarian photography, of actual

documents produced for a specific and practical purpose that are then
transformed in different ways by his agency, is a current that runs
Figure 7: Thomas Ruff, Newspaper Photographs

series, 1990-91.
9. Thomas Ruff, Surfaces, Depths, 221-232. And Valeria Liebermann, Thomas Ruff,
92-108.
10. A
s we will discuss later, The Newspaper Photographs find a precedent in Gerhard
Richter’s Zeitungs & Albumfotos (1962-1966), see Catherine Hürlezer “Herzog &
de Meuron and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas,” in Philip Ursprung, Herzog & de Meuron:
Natural history (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Baden, Switzerland:
Lars Müller, 2002), 210.
269
throughout his oeuvre.11 In his Jpeg series (2004 – present) (Figure 8),
for instance, low-resolution digital images have been blown up in scale
and further compressed to reveal the structure of their pixilation in
a reiteration of his scaling of the duotone pattern of the Newspaper
Images.12 This interest in exploiting the difficult relationship between
utilitarian documentary photography and fine art photography of
documentary inspiration – a productive conflict already detected by
Walker Evans – further characterizes his work as a highly disciplinary
and critical exploration.
The H&dM Collaboration

In 1990, Herzog & de Meuron asked Ruff to portray one of their build-
ings for the Venice Biennale of the coming year. Increasingly interested
with issues of representation, the architects had commissioned four
different photographers – Margherita Krischanitz, Balthasar Burkhard,
Hannah Villiger and Thomas Ruff – to portray four of their projects.13
In keeping with the spirit of the Bechers, Ruff initially turned down the
commission, considering that doing architectural photography would
hurt his position as an independent artist. After receiving and review-
ing a monograph on the work of the architects, he contacted them and
Figure 8: Thomas Ruff, Jpeg series, 2004
said that he would be willing to photograph the Ricola Storage Build-
ing in Laufen, but only if he could have someone else take the pictures
for him. He wrote a detailed set of instructions and a professional
photographer took two shots of the main facade of the warehouse – the
neighboring buildings were too close to allow a single frontal shot –
which Ruff then assembled in the computer to create a single image.14
Further digital manipulation was necessary to eliminate the roof of a
nearby building in the left top corner of the image.
Ruff ’s depiction of the warehouse in Laufen (Figure 9) is a direct devel-

opment of the language developed in his Haüser series, including the
use of digital montage to create an elevation view from several shots. In
fact, the title of the work, haus Nr. 4 II (Ricola Laufen), uses the same
notation system of the former series, implying that the Laufen work
is part of it. In the case of this image, however, the effect of emphatic
superficiality inherent in Ruff ’s technique is enhanced by the fact that
the reduction of the building to a facade was already explicitly and
intentionally embedded in the design. As it happens, the interior of the
warehouse was already determined – it was a fully robotized storage
11. D
ating from the same period, the series Stars (1989-1992) is another exercise
of pure appropriation. These images are re-framed enlargements of original neg-
atives depicting the sky at night that were taken with a Schmidt telescope in the
Chilean Andes. Fascinated by astronomy and unable to take his own images with
the technology at his disposal, Ruff explored the archive of the European South-
ern Observatory for this series, retaining the system of coordinates used by the
observatory as the titles for the images. Later in his career, Ruff reenacted this
operation with the appropriation of images of Saturn taken by the space probe
Cassini and the aerial photography of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for his
series Cassini (2008) and m.a.r.s. (2010).
12. T homas Ruff, and Bennett Simpson, Jpegs (New York: Aperture, 2009). And
Valeria Liebermann, Thomas Ruff, 196-210.
13. W
hile this is the official version, it is known that several other photographers
were contacted too. In 1991 Manolo Laguillo was also commissioned to pho-
tograph the storage building at Laufen. Also, according to Philip Ursprung, the
architects contacted Jeff Wall too on that same occassion. See Philip Ursprung,
“Visiting Thomas Ruff in Dusseldorf,” in Herzog & de Meuron: Natural history,
157. For a full account of the exhibition see Jacques Herzog, and Pierre de Meu-
ron, Architektur von Herzog & de Meuron / fotografiert von Margherita Krischanitz
... (Bern: Bundesamt für Kultur, 1991).
14. Ibid, 158.
270
Haus Nr. 4 II (Ricola Laufen), 1991.
Figure10: Thomas Ruff,

Sammlung Goetz, München, 1994.
facility – and the architects were asked to design only the facade of the
building, interpreting the commission as an essay on the articulation of
a vertical wrapper. As Theodora Vischer has noted, the extreme align-
ment of interests on the side of the architects and the photographer in
this image – the reduction of the building to a blank shell – causes the
image to be difficult to read, almost redundant.15
The original intent of the architects in commissioning several fine art

photographers for the Biennale exhibition was to undo any linear or
homogeneous reading of their projects, to elicit a diversity of views
and interpretations of their buildings and to escape the conventions
of commercial architecture photography. Out of this group, Ruff was
clearly the artist with whom they identified the most, and the only one
with whom they continued to work. Interestingly, in their subsequent
collaborations the idea of visual diversity became a dominating theme:
just a few years later in 1994, at the invitation of gallerist Peter Blum,
Ruff mounted an entire exhibition in New York devoted to the work
of Herzog & de Meuron,16 for which he applied different photographic
techniques to a group of seven buildings by the architects.
Ruff ’s photograph of the Goetz Collection in Munich for the New

York show is reminiscent of his Laufen photograph in its framing and
proportion, but closer examination reveals a greater degree of sophisti-
cation and manipulation. The Goetz photograph (Figure 10) is a double
15. T heodora Vischer, “Thomas Ruff: Lagerhaus,” in Jacques Herzog, and Pierre de
Meuron, Architektur von Herzog & de Meuron, np.
16. T homas Ruff, Architectures of Herzog & de Meuron: Portraits by Thomas Ruff
(New York: Peter Blum, 1995).
271
Figure11: Thomas Ruff, photographs
of the Signal Box in Basel, 1994. exposure and the trees in front of the building have been digitally re-
moved. For the Signal Box in Basel (Figure 11), on the other hand, Ruff
took two images: an architectural photograph in the style of his Häuser
series and a night shot taken with the aid of an electronic night vision
device. For the suva Building in Basel, Ruff took stereoscopic images
of the courtyard (Figure 12), which in the exhibition were presented si-
multaneously in a custom-made view-box with the purpose of creating
a three dimensional effect. For the Apartment Building along a Party
Wall in Hebelstrasse, Basel, the photographer decided to photograph a
model of the project (Figure 13), given the impossibility to photograph
Figure 12: Thomas Ruff, stereoscopic

photographs of suva Basel, 1993.

Model of Hebelstrasse, Basel, 1994.
272
the building in its entirety in its very tight location. The model was
later included alongside its photograph as part of the exhibition. For
the Antipodes I building in Dijon (Figure 14), Ruff took an un-manipu-
lated architectural photograph of the buildings from a forty-five-degree
angle. Finally, for Ricola Mullhouse, Ruff elaborated a highly complex
and manipulated night shot of the building in which the logos have
been removed, the silkscreened motifs of the polycarbonate facade
exacerbated and the sky turned an ominous purple color (Figure 15).17
After the 1994 show, Ruff and Herzog & de Meuron continued to
collaborate, this time in an actual architectural project. In the Library
for the Eberswalde Technical School, a project that we will later discuss
in more detail, the architects had the idea of printing a series of images
in the concrete and glass panels of the cubic volume of the building.18
For this purpose, Ruff provided a selection of images taken from his
archive of newspaper clippings that loosely comments on the location
and function of the building. In Eberswalde, Herzog & de Meuron and
Figure 14: Thomas Ruff, Antipodes I building Ruff were finally able to explore together the problem of superficiality
in Dijon, 1994. in architecture and photography and to produce a statement on the
concept of the archive, two themes with which the photographer and
the architects were intensely involved.19
After its completion in 1999, Ruff portrayed the building in a photo-

graph titled Bibliothek, Eberswalde (see Figure 1), in which he overlaid
a ghostly image of a young man and woman staring at the camera as
Figure 15: Thomas Ruff, Ricola Mulhouse, 1994.
17. In the case of Mulhouse, an additional photograph of the Blossfeldt motif (Nacht,
Blossfeldt, 1994) was produced but not exhibited, using night vision technology.
18. G
erhard Mack, and Valeria Liebermann, Eberswalde Library: Herzog & de Meuron
(London: Architectural Association, 2000).
19. R
uff’s newspaper clippings series was already an exploration on the idea of the
archive in documentary photography, and Herzog and de Meuron, as we will later ex-
plain, had also been working in a similar problem through a series of library projects.
273
they pass in front of the building in a motorcycle. Beyond Eberswal-
de, Ruff and Herzog & de Meuron have continued to collaborate with
decreasing intensity, as the architects designed a studio for the photog-
rapher and have continued to use some of his images for their projects,
among them the Fünf Höfe project in Munich completed in 2003.20
Digital Image-Making
In the following years, Ruff continued to explore his interests in archi-
tecture and portraiture while simultaneously delving deeper into his
interest in digital manipulation. In this respect, a breakthrough was
achieved with his series Other Portraits (1994-1995) (Figure 16).21 In the
process of investigating “composite faces,” a concept probably derived
from his portraits of buildings made of several shots, Ruff became
aware of the existence of the Minolta-Montage-Unit, a machine used
by the police from the 1970s to the 1990s in order to generate images of
unidentified suspects through the combination of four existing portrait
photographs. Ruff borrowed one of these machines from the Police
Historic Collection in Berlin, but he was not allowed to borrow the
collection of photographs used by the police, a problem that led him to
use his own Portraits series as source material.

Other Portraits series, 1994-95.
Each of the images in Other Portraits is thus a combination of two

original photographs merged in the Minolta machine, photographed
by Ruff and turned into a large format silkscreen. The physiognomic
emphasis of this series powerfully reminds us of the work of August
Sander while introducing a subversive component in its artificial graft-
ing of identities and genders. Despite the fact that the Other Portraits
series was devised without recourse to actual digital manipulation
techniques, it was critical in severing the umbilical cord linking Ruff ’s
20. T he images were imprinted in the floor of one of the courtyards in the project.
See Philip Ursprung, “Visiting Thomas Ruff in Dusseldorf,” in Herzog & de Meu-
ron: Natural History, 157.
21. T homas Ruff, Surfaces, Depths, 10-145. And Valeria Liebermann, Thomas Ruff,
118-128.
274
l.m.v.d.r series, 2000-2004
photographs to the notion of objectivity inherited from the docu-

mentary tradition. The androgynous, uncanny faces that we see in the
silkscreens no longer correspond to people in the real world, but for
the first time become pure creations of the artist.22
The leap between the two series of portraits by Ruff would find a
parallel in his next work on architecture, entitled l.m.v.d.r. (2000-2004)
(Figure 17).23 Just like he had done in his early career, Ruff followed to
continue his investigation on portraiture with architectural subjects. As
a commission from the Kunstmuseum Krefeld that was later expanded
by an additional commission by MoMA in New York, l.m.v.d.r. allowed
Ruff to build upon his previous experiences in the Häuser and Herzog
& de Meuron series, expanding on his already diversified catalogue of
techniques to portray architecture. In l.m.v.d.r., Ruff radicalizes and
hybridizes his use of appropriated footage and digital manipulation,
introducing color adjustments and motion blur effects for the first time
in a series of images that challenges the fabricated and narrow historic
vision upon which we rely for the understanding of the work of the
Figure 18: Thomas Ruff, German master.
Substrat series, 2002.
The process leading towards an increased freedom in the production of

images and a detachment from documentary photography through the
dominance of color and texture finally came to fruition in 2001 with
the series Substrates (Figure 18), in which images taken from Japanese
Manga comics were digitally overlaid and manipulated until an amor-
phous field of shifting colors emerged, completely emancipated from
the original images.24 The series Zycles (Figure 19), begun in 2008, went
one step further as its patterns of undulating weaves of lines no longer
depart from an original image taken or appropriated by Ruff, but are
rather generated directly in the computer through the introduction of
mathematical formulae in a visualization software.25
22. Thomas Ruff, Surfaces, Depths, 102.

23. Valeria Liebermann, Thomas Ruff, 160-174.
24. Ibid., 174-184.
Figure 19: Thomas Ruff, 25. T homas Ruff, Surfaces, Depths, 81-95. And Valeria Liebermann, Thomas Ruff,
Zycles series, 2009. 226-238.
275
As we have explained in the preceding pages, the career of Thomas
Ruff departs from a strict consideration of documentary photography
as enunciated by the Bechers in order to challenge it through negating
its purpose and twisting its conventions in an exercise of disciplinary
subversion. Ruff continued to challenge and expand the boundaries of
his inherited discipline when he became interested in appropriating
and manipulating existing footage and archives for the production of
new series. Through this process, his methodology of work gradually
led him towards a greater degree of freedom and plasticity in his later
work, which was influenced nonetheless by the sheer visual potential
of his large formats. As we proceed in the following pages to examine
the early work of Herzog & de Meuron, we will propose our character-
ization of the work of Ruff as a productive template with which to reas-
sess the always elusive and multifaceted work of the Swiss architects.
03. Herzog & de Meuron
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron (Figure 20) were born in Basel
in 1950 and met each other during their architecture studies at Zurich
eth, establishing their joint architecture office shortly after gradua-
tion in 1978. Eventually, they came to systematically characterize their
formative years as being marked by the dual influences of Aldo Rossi,
who was their professor at eth, and the artist Joseph Beuys, with
whom they collaborated briefly after graduation.26
From Rossi, they took not only a formal language and sensibility, but
Figure 20: Portrait of Jacques Herzog also a radical – in the literal sense of the word – understanding of the
and Pierre de Meuron, 2005. discipline, a faith in the potential of architecture to contain the materi-
als for its own advancement, as is most evident in their adoption of Ros-
si’s dictum “architecture is architecture.”27 It was precisely this affinity
with Rossi’s less stylistic and more strictly disciplinary ideas about ar-
chitecture that led the young duo to a disappointment with the gradual
assimilation of his teachings into a postmodern academicism, which
they regarded as using typology to buttress a conservative ideology.28
Within this context, Herzog and de Meuron found an unexpected stim-

ulus in the figure of Joseph Beuys, who fascinated them with his provoc-
ative use of materials. As it happens, in 1977 the Basel Kunstmuseum
had acquired Beuys’ installation Feuerstätte 1 (Hearth 1) for a substantial
sum of money, generating a great controversy in the city.29 The young
Herzog and de Meuron, who were at the time members of a carnival
group, decided to capitalize on that controversy for their next carnival
procession, subsequently contacting Beuys, who immediately jumped
into the project. The artist produced replicas of the objects in Feuerstätte
1 for the event, dressed all the participants with his felt suits, and finally
participated in the procession himself in 1978 (Figure 21).30 During the
26. P
hilip Ursprung, Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History, 81.
27. J acques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron “The Pritzker Architecture Prize 2001” [ac-
ceptance speech], in Herzog & de Meuron: 1978 – 2002 (Tokyo: a+u Publishers,
2002), 6.
28. Ibid.
29. P
hilip Ursprung, “Exhibiting Herzog & de Meuron,” in Herzog & de Meuron: Natu-
ral History, 17.
30. T he materials of the procession were subsequently bought by the Basel Kunst-
museum as an installation titled Feuerstätte 2 (Hearth 2).
276
course of this short collaboration, Herzog and de Meuron became great-
ly influenced by the way in which Beuys’ work alluded to the five senses,
and most of all by the way that he used materials – mostly industrial
ones – to trigger vague but powerful associations and imply meaning.
Signs and Things

With all of the above in mind, and according to their own account,
the early projects of Herzog & de Meuron can thus be read as a critical
reevaluation of the legacy of Rossi, in which materiality plays a subver-
sive role. In the Blue House (1979) for instance, the basic house-form
inherited directly from the Italian master is subtly transformed by a
series of specific design moves, such as the slightly off-centered oculi,
the irregularly shaped deck and the curved north facade (Figure 22).
This aggregation of small specificities and local idiosyncrasies starts to
slowly disable the typological reading derived from the overall profile,
an effect that is multiplied by the bold use of color, which definitively
alienates the object from its initial references and challenges us to con-
Figure 21: Joseph Beuys with
the Old Ways carnival group, Basel, 1978. front it without the prefabricated template of Rossian codification.
This reading of the project, in which the use of color operates by

de-familiarizing a highly coded work, is nonetheless unoriginal. Philip
Ursprung, in his Natural History volume devoted to the Swiss archi-
tects, juxtaposes an image of the Blue House with an image of Yves
Klein’s Venus Bleue (Blue Venus) from 1978, implying a similar trans-
formational effect.31 It could be argued here, though, that such use of
color was already a part of Rossi’s repertoire, as he actually used a very
similar pale blue color is his palette, and that it is precisely around
this period in his career that the use of color transitioned from being
a feature of his drawings to the actual built work, which had remained
largely monochromatic until the late 1970s.32
Figure 22: Herzog & de Meuron,

Blue House, 1979.
31. Philip Ursprung, Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History, 356-357.

32. W
e are thinking here of the colored roofs of the Modena Cemetery, completed
in 1978, which were not featured in the original design of 1971. The same color
was also used in a series of projects immediately after Modena, such as the
Little Scientific Theater (1978), the Teatro del Mondo in Venice (1979), or the
Middle School in Broni (1979).
277
Be it as it may, the interplay of familiarity and awkwardness featured
in the Blue House reappears consistently in a series of domestic and
domestic-sized projects in the early work of the Swiss firm. In the
Photographic Studio Frei (1982), the architects inserted three large and
somewhat heroic north lights inspired by those used by Le Corbusier in
La Tourette into a very modest construction of domestic proportions,
realized in plywood and clad partially in bitumen sheets. In the House
for a Veterinary Surgeon (1984), the elongated proportions, ordinary
materiality and default composition of the surrounding houses are ad-
opted as a theme and taken to an extreme in a delicate interplay of high
and low motifs in which the architects reveal their authorship through
Figure 23: Herzog & de Meuron, a series of unexpected details. Among this series of projects, the House V
House V in Therwil, 1986. in Therwil (1986) – also known as House for an Art Collector (Figure 23)
– offers us the most articulate and powerful iteration of such a game of
contradictions between familiarity and estrangement.
As Martin Steinmann has noted, in Therwil the form, proportion and

articulation of constructive elements mimics the wood construction
of the Swiss Wohnkolinien (Figure 24) of the 1940s.33 The materiality
of the house, on the other hand, is totally alien to this logic, featuring
precast concrete panels and black concrete tiles in a likely reference to
the industrial sheds and warehouses found in the periphery of Basel.
Steinmann has aptly characterized such an attitude in the early work
of Herzog & De Meuron as an attempt to de-codify and revitalize the
heritage of Rossi or even Venturi, turning an architecture of “signs”
back into an architecture of “things.”34 We will add here that Herzog and
Figure 24: Hans Bernouilli,
Wohnkolinie, Riehen, 1942. de Meuron’s subversion of an image of bourgeois culture through its
inoculation with an industrial material is almost an exact reenactment
of Beuys’ strategies. If Ursprung juxtaposed Klein’s Venus Bleue with
Herzog & de Meuron’s Blue House, we will propose here to use Beuys’
felt suit as a model to read the operations at play in House V (Figure 25).
Making Images
Simultaneously with their interest in familiar forms and the disturbing
materiality of ordinary or banal constructions, Herzog & de Meuron
developed from the beginning of their careers a preoccupation with
representation, and more specifically with developing a rougher and
more realistic way to represent their projects (Figure 26). This interest,
which started as an effort to devise a differentiated language for their
firm, actually developed into one of the main themes that influenced
their work during the 1980s and 1990s:
“Instead of drawing in perspective, whose artistic effect we have

always found questionable, we started experimenting with video
at the end of the seventies. The simplest thing was to make models
out of cardboard or plastic, onto which we pasted photographs
from magazines. We then made video stills from them. The results
were astonishingly realistic and completely different from conven-
tional pictures made by architects. There was a cinematic touch to
them that appealed to us because it made our projects look like real
buildings that could have been the setting for a film.”35
33. M
artin Steinmann, “La forme de la barraque: A propos de la maison V. à Therwil,”
in Forme forte: Ecrits 1972 – 2002 (Basel; Boston; Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2003),
241-246.
34. M
artin Steinmann, “La presence des choses,” in Forme forte, 111-131.
35. J acques Herzog in “Interview by Theodora Vischer with Jacques Herzog,” 29.
278
House V in Therwil, 1986, and Joseph Beuys,
Felt Suit, 1970. Two examples of bourgeois image
grafted with industrial materiality.
This interest in video and photography is, of course, not totally unre-
lated to their previously described efforts to transition from a codified
architecture to an architecture based on direct personal experience.
In fact, we will argue that the use of video and photography played a
fundamental role in their definition of a phenomenological approach
to architecture in opposition to the semantic model of postmodernism.
This view is supported by the architects themselves when they com-
ment in retrospect about their early experiments with architectural
models, video and photography:
“In our work pictures have always been the most important vehi-
Figure 26: Herzog & de Meuron, tv still of a video
simulation of the indoor pool’s entrance area. cles or messengers of […] information. […] We are interested in
Indoor and Outdoor Swimming Pool, Mühleteich, pictures because pictures are open; they do not speak a conceptual
Riehen, 1979-1982. language, they speak a universal language and can therefore go
straight to the imagination.”36
This emphasis on experience became even more explicit when their

representational experiments with video and photography became
woks in their own right in the early 1980s. Examples include Killcity II
36. J acques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in “The Virtual House,” Wilfried Wang,
Herzog & de Meuron (Basel; Boston; Berlin: Birkhäuser, 1998), 187.
279
(Figure 27), a fifteen minute video piece shot by Herzog and artist Alex
Silber in 1981, and the film stills in their installation for the exhibition
L’architecture est un jeu … magnifique, held at the Centre Georges Pom-
pidou in Paris in 1985.37 Especially in the latter work, which is com-
posed of two video stills (Figure 28), a model and a text, the phenome-
nological component emerges with undeniable clarity. This is apparent
in the subjective first-person viewpoint of the images and in the tone
of the text, which reminds us not only of Rossi in A Scientific Autobiog-
raphy but also of the writings of Gaston Bachelard.
“We show a view into and from one specific room: images of a child’s
Figure 27: Jacques Herzog and Alex Silber,
room; images connected with our youth, our memories of fantasies
still from Killcity II, 1981. we had during the day and at night; and images of fear, sleep and
eroticism. Working at these images is an architectural work, the
thinking happens in architectural images, which we extend to the
whole design in other projects. The atmosphere in these images is
created by the precisely chosen architectural elements: a wooden
chair painted white, a shelf for the clothes, a place for doing the
homework, an open cupboard with the heart-like ornaments, and
a bed with a chequered blanket – you watch your sister who came
home late take off her clothes – light and shadow, the moon, the
bedside lamp, the harmless ceiling lamp with the cloth lampshade
whose shadow casts a distorted face on the nocturnal wallpaper.”38
While the architects abandoned the art-project format in the late eight-
ies, as work in their office started to pick up and the possibility to build
at a substantial scale became a reality, their interest in photography
continued to influence their work. It was precisely during this period
that they decided, in an unexpected turn of events, to literally graft
photography into their constructions.
Figure 28: Herzog & de Meuron, video stills

from the Lego House installation, 1985.
37. P
hilip Ursprung, Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History, 214 and 311.
38. T ext from the Lego House installation (1984), taken from Herzong & de Meu-
ron’s web page. http://www.herzogdemeuron.com/index/projects/complete-
works/026-050/028-lego-house.html
280
Building with Images
As we have discussed, Herzog & de Meuron’s work from the late 1970s
and early 1980s is characterized by a simultaneous interest in imag-
es and the possibilities of materiality – and more specifically surface
treatments – to subvert otherwise familiar architectures. These two
trends merged in their work in the late 1980s as they started to experi-
ment with photography in the skin of their buildings, coinciding with
a shift from their abstracted domestic volumes to their adoption of the
box as a default configuration for their projects.
In 1988, Herzog and de Meuron put up their Architektur Denkform

(Architectural Form of Thought) exhibition at the Basel Architecture
Museum. For this project, the architects silkscreened the facades of the
museum – a 1960s modern prism clad entirely in glass – with images
of their buildings.39 This bold move liberated the interior of the exhi-
bition space to showcase just a few models and plan drawings, empha-
sizing its modern fluid space. It also animated the glazed facade, which
was thus transformed into a kaleidoscopic arrangement of fragments
of the work of Herzog & de Meuron, which were in turn allowed to
enter into conversation with the old city of Basel (Figure 29).40

photographs from the Architecktur Denkform
Exhibition, Basel, 1988.
39. Wilfried Wang, Herzog & de Meuron, 62.

40. A
n account of the project by the architects can be found in Rémy Zaugg, Herzog
& de Meuron: An exhibition (Ostildern bei Stuttgart: Cantz, 1996), 9-11.
281
The unexpected effect of seeing portions of the city overlaid with imag-
es of their projects – which were, we have argued, based on a reinterpre-
tation of existing architectures – had a profound effect on the architects.
Shocked by their finding and the opportunities that it opened for them,
they set out to explore the full potential of this device through a series
of architectural projects. The first of these projects was the competition
for a Greek Orthodox Church (1989) (Figure 30), for which Herzog &
de Meuron proposed a regular box featuring a thick double skin, with
an exterior layer of glass and an inner envelope delineating the space of
the church composed of thin panels of Pentelic marble.41 This configu-
ration allowed the interior of the church to be flooded with light filtered
through the colored marble, which was to be silkscreened with photo-
graphs of Orthodox icons taken from museums and private collections.
While the project did not get built, in the model photographs we can
appreciate how the repetition of the icon motifs, together with the am-
ber light radiating through the marble, contribute to create a remark-
ably intense ephemeral and charged atmosphere.42
Greek Orthodox Church, Zurich, 1989. Also dating from 1989, but only realized in 1993, the Pfaffenholz Sports
Complex (Figure 31) displays the same silk-screening techniques – this
time showcasing abstract motifs in the green glass facade and in the
prefabricated concrete panels lining the ceiling, walls and floor of the
entrance volume.43 In this case, though, unlike in the Architektur Den-
kform exhibition or the Greek Orthodox Church, what got imprinted
in the construction materials were not photographic images, but rather
abstract textures that diffusely reference nature. Thus, the finicky fiber
motif imprinted in the glass facade and the amplified watermarks
transferred to the concrete panels have the effect of conjuring a com-
plex relationship between the architectural prism and nature, another
theme that would start to develop in the work of the architects around
this time and that would later crystallize with their use of algae and
moss in a series of projects.
In a similar vein, the Ricola Mulhouse Building (1992-1993) (Figure 32)

involves both the use of images and of living organisms as construction
materials.44 A longitudinal storage and production hall, its short walls
are made of black concrete, with drainage designed to slowly run down
their surfaces creating a thin film of algae. The long facades, on the other
Pfaffenholz Sports Centre 1989-93.
hand, are clad with polycarbonate panels, silkscreened with a repetitive
motif taken from a photograph by Karl Blossfeldt. The long building is
placed between the Rhine-Rhone canal and the Ill River, with its longitu-
dinal facades running parallel to the water courses, enabling the Bloss-
feldt motif to establish a conversation with the surrounding nature.
In its repetition of a single motif that was originally selected to serve as

a model for the production of ornament, the Mulhouse project under-
lines a reading of Herzog & de Meuron’s interest in images as applied
decoration, even if we concede, like Jeffrey Kipnis has noted, that their
contemporary techniques transcend traditional ornamentation.45 Re-
gardless of this consideration, the emphasis in Mulhouse is placed on
a nuanced conversation between an understanding of the building as
41. W
ilfried Wang, Herzog & de Meuron, 84.
42. G
erhard Mack, and Valeria Liebermann, Eberswalde Library, 26.
43. W
44. Ibid., 118.
45. J effrey Kipnis, “The Cunning of Cosmetics” in Herzog & de Meuron, 1981-2000
(El Escorial, Madrid: Croquis Editorial, 2000), 26.
282
Ricola-Europe, Mulhouse, 1992-93.
nature – the algae – and the building as representation of nature – the

Blossfeldt motif. This conversation is enhanced by the exquisite de-
tailing of the corners of the building, in which the thicknesses of both
facades are concealed, leading to a reading of the volume as a delicate
juxtaposition of surfaces.
As successful and widely disseminated as the Ricola Mulhouse project

may have been, and despite its direct connection to two of the pho-
tographers in this text, we will argue that the next project by Herzog
& de Meuron to feature the use of images will actually become more
relevant to our current focus. While in the Pfaffenholz Sports Com-
plex and the Ricola Mulhouse projects the architects used images as
a means to elaborate on the dichotomy between the natural and the
artificial, in their project in Jussieu the photographic image regains
protagonism, as it is approached as a type of knowledge, recovering
some of the themes hinted by the Architektur Denkform exhibition.
In the project for Two Libraries in Jussieu University (1992) (Figure

33), the architects designed a facade formed by two alternating sets of
horizontal bands, the first composed of glass panels silkscreened with
Figure 33: Herzog & de Meuron, portraits of the authors featured in the collections of the libraries, the
Two Libraries for the Jussieu Campus, 1993.
second by continuous electronic screens that displayed quotations from
283
Two Libraries for the Jussieu Campus,
facade detail, 1993.
those same authors (Figure 34).46 The use of electronic text had already
been used by the architects in their Blois project (1991) and can be
traced back to the work of artist Jenny Holzer. Their use of the por-
traits, in turn, was borrowed directly from Gerhard Richter, who in his
ongoing work, Atlas of Collages, Photographs and Sketches, was exper-
imenting with appropriating series of encyclopedia portraits.47 Herzog
& de Meuron appropriated Richter’s work directly and without permis-
sion in preparing the collages for the competition, but the idea was to
collaborate with the artist in a new series specifically made for the built
project.48 Interestingly enough, the coincidence of the idea of the facade
as a field of images with the specific program for a library building
results in the Jussieu project in an identification of both the facade and
the interior space of the building with the idea of the archive:
“[The] library certainly is a dimensional structure, consisting of layers

(linked to each other through their content). You reach the endless
shelves of books and tables used by reading and seeking people by
passing through the mental and spatial layer of pictures and state-
ments on the facade. This design illustrates that you penetrate a sur-
face without really ever leaving it behind, that is, you never really walk
into a room because you are essentially always in a kind of shell. But
this shell or surface has depth, has space, which can be formed in dif-
ferent ways – and ultimately entails a very spatial way of thinking.”49
Therefore, in Jussieu, both the facade and the mass of the building are
understood simultaneously as surface and space – or rather surfaces in
space – homogenously charged with knowledge and interconnected by
multiple links in what we detect is an attempt at a new and intertwined
definition of information and space in the contemporary condition.
It is interesting then to note, than when attempting to enunciate a
model for such an organization, the architects turned to the idea of the
archive enunciated and advanced by the artists in the documentary
tradition. The strikingly ambitious project in Jussieu was truncated, as
46. W
47. C
atherine Hürlezer, “Herzog & de Meuron and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas,” in Philip
Ursprung, Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History, 201-202.
48. Ibid., 203.
284
Library of Eberswalde University, 1994-99.
the architects lost the competition, a fact that did not keep them from
readdressing these problems at a smaller scale in 1994, when they re-
ceived the commission to build the library for the Technical University
in Eberswalde (Figure 35).50
Like Jussieu, Eberswalde is an open-plan library confined by a rect-

angular prism covered in a serial repetition of photographic images.
Placed at the corner of a small campus, the modest building in Eber-
swalde is a stack of three reading floors, linked with a glazed passage to
an older building that houses the storage and the administration offic-
es. The exterior of the new building is clad in horizontal bands of glass
and prefabricated concrete panels, where the glazed bands correspond
to clerestory windows for each of the floors and the concrete bands
feature small punch windows placed in order to provide direct views
of the outside from the reading tables. Each of the horizontal bands
of panels features a photographic image that is repeated throughout
the perimeter (Figure 36). While the silk-screening of the glass was
relatively simple, imprinting the concrete panels involved developing a
Figure 36: Herzog & de Meuron, Library
of Eberswalde Technical University,
semi-industrial process that departed from the one used in the Pfaffen-
facade details, 1994-99. holz Sports Complex.51
50. Wilfried Wang, Herzog & de Meuron, 132.

51. Gerhard Mack, Eberswalde Library, 22.
285
Library of Eberswalde Technical University,
detail of facade highlighting disposition
of images, 1994-99.
Despite the evident similarities with Jussieu, for this project Herzog
& de Meuron abandoned the idea of working with Richter’s Atlas and
instead contacted Tomas Ruff for the collaboration. By the time they
called on the artist, they had already decided on the serial organization
of the images in the facade, and therefore invited Ruff to curate the
content of a composition with a prearranged structure.52 As we know
already, Ruff had studied with the Bechers in Dusseldorf, where he
had also been a student of Richter. In fact, Richter’s Atlas series has
been credited with deeply influencing Ruff ’s Newspaper Photographs,
precisely the pool of images that he worked with for the facade of
Eberswalde.53 Ruff subsequently made a selection of footage from his
archive of news clippings as a commentary on the history of the site
and the function of the building (Figure 37).54
52. P
hilip Ursprung, “Visiting Thomas Ruff in Dusseldorf,” 165.
53. C
atherine Hürlezer, “Herzog & de Meuron and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas,” 213.
54. F or a full account of the images used in Eberswalde and their contextualization
see Gerhard Mack, Eberswalde Library, 31.
286
The vertical sequence of images starts at the ground floor with a photo-
graph of 1920s Berlin in which three young women on a grass-covered
roof top listen to the radio. Moving up, the band of images imprinted
in concrete is completed with a photograph of an extravagant airplane
prototype known as cby-3 and a photograph of a father and his sons
contemplating their model railway. All three images could be considered
skeptical comments on technology in the context of a technical university.
The second and central band of concrete panels has a strong histor-
ic emphasis. Across three panels we see a photograph of the day the
Berlin Wall went up, in which a seventy-year-old woman is being
lowered with a rope from her apartment into West Berlin. To counter
the client’s opposition to the inclusion of this image in the project,
Ruff also included a photograph of the reconciliation after the fall of
the wall, with a crowd cheering and waving flags in front of the Berlin
Reichstag. While Ruff had initially intended to overlay the two imag-
es, this turned out to be technically impossible and he finally decided
to have the Reichstag picture cut across the sequence of three scenes
pertaining the construction of the Wall in an arrangement that further
complicates the reading of such loaded images.
The third band of concrete panels revolves around the specific purpose
of the Technical University in Eberswalde, which is devoted primarily
to forestry and engineering. The first photograph from the bottom
thus features a modern villa in Weimar, designed by Georg Muche
and built by Walter Gropius, followed by a photograph of the gate to
the renaissance palace of Colle Ameno in Bologna, spread across two
panels, into which Ruff has montaged another photograph of a gar-
den. Finally, the last photograph in the third band features a group of
students working in a library – at the International Atlantic College in
South Wales – in a direct reference to the activity that takes place in
the interior of the building.
The fourth and last band of concrete panels starts with a photograph
of a stag beetle, an image that is mirrored as it is repeated in order to
avoid the impression of a “stampede” of insects running around the
building. Finally, the last two panels at the top of the building are oc-
cupied by a reframed version of the same photograph used at the very
bottom, with the three young women listening to a gramophone on a
grass-covered roof – just like the actual roof in Eberswalde.
As opposed to the concrete bands, in which motifs are mostly taken

from the current affairs section of the magazine Die Zeit, the glass
bands feature only photographic reproductions of paintings, reflecting
on a more classical or romantic notion of knowledge as culture. Thus,
the first glass band features a photograph of Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and
Cupid from the Louvre. The second glazed band features a fragment
of a vanitas by Pieter Potter, and the third glass band is occupied by an
Eduard Ender painting of Humboldt on one of his scientific expedi-
tions in South America.
While the organization of the images in Eberswalde does not follow a

narrative or a taxonomic logic, it cannot be considered random either.
As in Ruff ’s Newspaper Photographs, or Herzog’s description of the
Jussieu project, the distribution of images on the surface of Eberswalde
287
is even and non-hierarchical while operating through a subtle game
of references and interconnections. Also, as in Jussieu, the description
of the facade could identically be used to describe the interior of the
open-stack library. Despite the fact that a substantial budget cut forced
the architects to reconsider their ambitions for the interior design in
Eberswalde, in the lean plan and section drawings (Figure 38) we can
still appreciate how the stacks are concentrated at the perimeter, liber-
ating the plan and creating an internal landscape of horizontal bands
of books that thus became identified with the images in the outer skin.
We will then conclude that in the Jussieu and Eberswalde projects, we

find a complex intersection of themes that depart from the idea of the
transformative power of surface treatments in architecture and the
choice of the photographic image as a building material to implement
such an idea. The highly charged surfaces that emerge from such an
operation result in physical and conceptual implementations of a con-
temporary definition of the archive, which in turn becomes a model
for the interior organization of the buildings.
This complex yet fruitful negotiation of knowledge and space through

the use of images and surfaces is clearly a theme that obsessed the
architects during this period, to the extent that they insisted on using it
once more in an exhibition project for the Centre Georges Pompidou.55
In fact, the 1995 Herzog & de Meuron show (Figures 39 to 46), designed
in conjunction with the artist Rémy Zaugg, can be considered a devel-
opment of the latent spatial component of the Jussieu and Eberswalde
projects. This relationship is most palpable in the photographs of the
Library of Eberswalde Technical University, exhibition in which we contemplate the repetition of the parallel bands
floor plans, longitudinal section and elevation, of continuous tables, with their glossy tops occupying the entirety
1994-99. of the exhibition room in a banded configuration reminiscent of the
facades of Jussieu and Eberswalde.
While Herzog & de Meuron became wary of the identification of their

work with minimalism in the late 1990s and abandoned their investi-
gation of the box in order to undertake a tour de force of material in-
novation and volumetric expressionism, the above mentioned projects
constitute, in the context of this text, a powerful body of work in which
a particularly intense exchange of concepts and techniques is palpable
between the fields of documentary photography and architecture.
04. Conclusions
As we have already noted, both Thomas Ruff and Herzog & de Meuron
entered their respective professions at a moment when their disci-
plinary fields had been dramatically deepened and broadened by the
generation of their mentors. This is especially well documented in the
case of the Bechers, who managed to attain for their documentary
work the highest possible status in the world of art, but also in the case
of Rossi, whose recourse to analogous architecture granted him an
unprecedented degree of freedom and authorship and contributed to
cement the notion that a totally autonomous architecture was possible.
55. A
n extensive account of the exhibition project by Zaugg and the architects can
be found in Rémy Zaugg, Herzog & de Meuron: An exhibition, 19-73.
288
Figures 39 and 40: Herzog & de Meuron
and Rémy Zaugg, Herzog & de Meuron,
exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1995.
We could then say that Rossi and the Bechers contributed decisively to
liberate their respective disciplines from their obligations with the world,
and additionally that they did so through an extreme degree of consis-
tency in their work. In fact, it would only be fair to characterize their
careers as entirely devoted to repeating and perfecting a single project.56
The generation of Ruff and Herzog & de Meuron, on the contrary, when
faced with the vast space created by their predecessors, decided to popu-
late it with a range of deep and narrow explorations that, despite featur-
ing some unifying threads, can be characterized as eclectic.
This shift from a life-long project format to a diversification of themes

and genres was influenced in both cases by a generation of artists
working across disciplines and formats in the German context, mainly
by Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys. This coincidence was proba-
bly one of the reasons why the German photographer and the Swiss
56. T his idea is repeatedly stressed by Rossi in A Scientific Autobiography (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).
289
Figure 41: Herzog & de Meuron
architects were able to strike such a long and fruitful collaboration. In

fact, commenting on their interest in Thomas Ruff ’s depiction of their
work, Jacques Herzog would say:
“Our approach defined the building to begin with and now we want
an outsider’s specific and personal view of it. That’s the point of
departure. In Ruff ’s case, the personal standpoint is particularly
striking. He builds up an architecture of his own that is juxtaposed
with ours. That interests us. Ruff uses various techniques within
his work that might be understood as different ways of looking at
things, that is, one has the feeling that different photographers took
these pictures.”57
In these lines the architect identifies a project-specific focus in Ruff ’s

work, one that correlates with his own way of approaching architectur-
al problems. This moment of recognition was indeed reciprocal, as Ruff
himself acknowledged when asked in a similar vein in an interview
with Theodora Vischer.58 Interestingly enough, this newly gained range
of possibilities was used both by the photographer and the architects
to slowly erode the projects of their masters. In the case of Ruff, this
happened through the problematization of the photographic language
of clarity and legibility of the Bechers in his initial trilogy of interiors,
portraits and buildings. In their early domestic projects, Herzog &
de Meuron attempted a similar operation through the introduction
of unexpected materialities that destabilized the Rossian typological
codification of architecture.59
It is interesting to note then that the process of upsetting the legacy of

their mentors in a quest for a differentiated voice led both the photog-
rapher and the architects to invest themselves in projects of disciplinary
57. J acques Herzog in Jacques Herzog in “Interview by Theodora Vischer with

Jacques Herzog,” 29.
58. In that occassion Ruff would say: “Maybe we work so well because they also
take such different approaches.” Thomas Ruff in “Interview by Theodora Vischer
with Thomas Ruff,” in Thomas Ruff, Architectures of Herzog & de Meuron: Por-
traits by Thomas Ruff, 35.
59. S
ee Martin Steinmann, Forme forte, 111- 131 and 241-246.
290
subversion. For Ruff, this was achieved through an exploitation of the
utilitarian aspects of documentary photography, adopting existing
footage created with a practical purpose for the creation of critical
statements in the context of fine art.60 A similar transformation of a
utilitarian and banal substance matter into a deeply critical project can
be found in Herzog & de Meuron’s adoption of ordinary materials and
the box as the base elements for their architectural speculations.61
In this parallel characterization, the margins of documentary pho-

tography and architecture were surveyed and exploited in an effort to
challenge assumptions about the way that images and buildings are
conceived, made and perceived. While both Ruff and Herzog & de
Meuron gradually succumbed to more plastic and formal experiments,
their early work up to the mid-1990s – a phase that we can describe as
restrained and analytical – offers us an accumulation of fruitful and
provoking crossovers, most of which revolve around their intersecting
approximations to the concept of surface.
It becomes almost impossible then, to discuss this convergence around

the surface, without resorting to our previous analysis of Ed Ruscha’s
photography and its impact on the work of Robert Venturi and Scott
Brown.62 In fact Ruscha’s “facadedness,” particularly his depiction of
Californian superficiality in Every Building on the Sunset Strip, can be
considered a direct precedent of Ruff ’s epithelial approach to portraits
and architectural photography.63 In very similar terms, Venturi and
Scott Brown’s “decorated shed” became a clear reference for Herzog &
de Meuron’s tattooed boxes of the 1990s, a fact that has been noted by
both critics and the architects themselves.64
The differences between these two episodes, however, become most

noticeable if we focus on the specific treatment of the facade in the
buildings of Herzog & de Meuron as opposed to those of Venturi and
Scott Brown. First of all, the facades of Venturi and Scott Brown tend
to disengage from their buildings, exhibiting their thickness and be-
coming semi-autonomous volumes. In contrast, in the case of Herzog
& de Meuron, the fusion of the facade with the volume is an indispens-
able condition, and every effort is made to detail the corners of the
buildings as to make the depth of the facade disappear. This is not just
a tectonic preference on the side of the Swiss architects, but rather has
to do with a conceptual identification of surface and space, as we have
already discussed. In order for the facade and the space that it encloses
to become identical, the depth of the facade has to tend towards zero.
Another capital distinction would be that the symbolism in the facades

of Venturi and Scott Brown is explicit – their graphic ornamentation
is a codified or “heraldic” one – while in the case of Herzog & de
Meuron, the photographic image is chosen precisely for its capacity to
communicate without becoming a sign. The allocation of information
60. E
xamples of such disciplinary exercises are the Nights, Newspaper Photographs
or Jpegs series. For a full account of Ruff’s career as a response to the tradition
of documentary photography embodied by the Bechers see Thomas Weski, “The
Scientific Artist,” in Valeria Liebermann, et al, Thomas Ruff, 21-40.
61. F or a characterization of Herzog & de Meuron’s practice as a disciplinary endeav-
or see Jeffrey Kipnis, “The Cunning of Cosmetics,” 26.
62. See Chapter 2 of this dissertation.
63. T he Bechers introduced their students to Ruscha among other American refer-
ences.
64. See for instance Gerhard Mack, Eberswalde Library, 43.
291
across the facade, its density, would be another capital difference, with
Venturi and Scott Brown concentrating their symbols according to a
classical notion of compositional hierarchy and Herzog & de Meuron
adopting an all-over evenness.
Up to this point, our explanation of Herzog & de Meuron’s approach to

surface reinforces Jeffrey Kipnis’ characterization of their technique as
a “cosmetic minimalism.” 65 In his famous criticism of the Swiss firm,
Kipnis aptly explains how their technique transcends traditional orna-
mentation through an all over, non-hierarchical approach to surface
that seeks to undermine the materiality of the body of the building
as a whole. In addition to this, Kipnis is also quick to underscore the
disciplinary nature of their experiment, another trait that further distin-
guishes their approach to surface from that of Venturi and Scott Brown.
Indeed, for Venturi and Scott Brown the construction – the shed – and
the signs – the decoration – are two different things, while for Herzog
& de Meuron, educated in the Swiss tradition, the images become
assimilated into the construction, since buildings can only be made
of architectural substance. This architecturalization of the venturian
billboard is stressed by Herzog & the Meuron when they declare that
in their buildings “the sense of advertisement is almost destroyed, and
[…] the photographic image acts exactly like a brick or a stone or a
Figures 42 and 43: Herzog & de Meuron concrete wall, like an ordinary building material”66
While Kipnis’ analysis of the architecture of Herzog and de Meuron is
in many ways impeccable, it is also true that he focused for the most
part on the conflation of materiality and form, and therefore failed to
acknowledge and explain the importance that images and more impor-
tantly photography played in their definition of superficiality. We will
argue then that while Kipnis’ phenomenological approach produces a
comprehensive explanation of projects such as the Signal Boxes, it fails
to fully address the sequence of projects involving the use of images
that has been the focus of our study, and most of all that it fails to
acknowledge their subversive quality.
It is precisely in trying to further explain this series of works, that the

parallel study of Ruff and Herzog & de Meuron becomes important,
since it enables us to understand the ultimate meaning of the archi-
tects’ fixation with superficiality and the photographic image. Like we
have discussed already, Ruff adopted Ruscha’s pioneering realization
of the superficiality of our environment and our mode of vision as a
leitmotif and took it to its last consequences in his work. Quite tell-
ingly, when pushed by Philip Ursprung to comment on the seemingly
contradictory flatness of his architectural photographs, Ruff respond-
ed: “I did not build the world out there, somebody else did. I just love
the two-dimensional rendition of it,”67 and “reality can be as deep as it
wants. I make my pictures in the surface.”68
Ruff ’s emphatic superficiality, his distinction between reality and the

realm of images, is then important for us because it goes beyond pho-
tography’s medium specificity to imply that images exist in a virtual
65. J effrey Kipnis, “The Cunning of Cosmetics,” 26.

67. T homas Ruff in Philip Ursprung, “I Make my Pictures in the Surface: Visiting
Thomas Ruff in Düsseldorf,” Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History, 164.
68. Ibid.
292
world. This is not a minor distinction, but rather one that indicates a
change of paradigm in the consideration of the photographic image,
which with the irruption of digital technology and the age of informa-
tion lost its last vestiges of objecthood and became in its proliferation,
a vessel for the transfer of knowledge.
This blunt and single-minded defense of photography’s virtuality and

capacity to communicate in an open ended mode is one that deeply
permeates Ruff ’s career, whose appropriations and manipulations of
digital and analogue archives can be in fact characterized as an attempt
to make sense such new condition. As Jacques Herzog has noted, the
architects detected in Ruff ’s images a subversive and productive “per-
ceptual effort,” an acknowledgement of a new visual paradigm full of
possibilities.69 In the following paragraph, Jacques Herzog offers a valu-
able insight into their overlapping preoccupations with superficiality
and images and the type of problems that they were trying to unlock at
the time of their collaboration with Ruff:
“I believe that in our civilization there is a tendency to reduce the

dimensions of space to the images of space, that is, to two dimen-
sions, as a consequence of the development of the technical image
which has taken the place of the magical image (to borrow the ter-
minology of the philosopher Vilem Flusser). We can do nothing to
halt the process, and, indeed, it would be stupid to do so; similarly,
it was impossible to prevent the painter of the sixteenth century
from developing a new conception of space which was not that of
the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
It is, nonetheless, absolutely indispensable that we develop new

strategies of images; subversive strategies; strategies which contra-
dict the legibility of the everyday; which raise questions rather than
satisfy superfluous needs in the way that commercial television and
contemporary architecture do.” 70
69. Jacques Herzog in “Interview by Theodora Vischer with Jacques Herzog,” 32.
70. Ibid.
293
What is at stake here for Herzog & de Meuron is the realization that
the world is now perceived through a new visual paradigm based on
virtual images, and the necessity to find an architecture that works
self-consciously within that framework. This realization shook their
whole architectural edifice: if they had set themselves early on to
enunciate an architecture based on perception, and if the world was
now perceived through images, then the necessity arose to develop
techniques for both the representation and the construction of their
projects that operated at that level with a certain criticality.
“I believe that our architecture is full of images, that it evokes

images, that it contradicts images. […] The wealth and complexity
of images, fruit of the conception of the architectural whole, are
free to renew themselves in each re-encounter with the work; by
contrast, everybody gets tired of applied images, which constantly
replace one another, keeping pace with the rhythm of the world of
commerce; in any case, there is no reason why that should be the
same as the world of architecture tomorrow.”71
Frustrated with the adoption of media as a model by contemporary

architecture in its perpetual and uncritical renovation of its image,
Herzog & de Meuron turned to art, and more precisely to the con-
cept of the archive, as developed over more than a century within the
discipline of documentary photography, in order to establish a critical
model for the curation of images. They first experienced with this con-
cept in their Architektur Denkform exhibition, in which the mullions
and partitions of the curtain glass wall provided them – almost by
chance – with an armature that they in turn filled in with silkscreened
images. Later on, their designs for two libraries in Jussieu and Eber-
swalde gave them the opportunity to further develop such a model for
the non-hierarchical organization of knowledge through the curation
of images. This model, taken from Ruff and his lineage in the visual
arts, was implemented first in the facade, and then became a model for
a new spatial condition in the interior.
71. Ibid., np.
294
It is precisely the collapse of the concepts of image and knowledge
and information and space, facilitated by the specific programs of the
library and the exhibition, that makes these projects so difficult to
understand, as they seek to become physical manifestations of a virtual
phenomenon, namely of the way that information flows through
chains of images in the digital world. It then becomes necessary to
explain that for Herzog & de Meuron, the physical and the virtual are
not mutually exclusive categories, but rather interdependent facets, an
understanding that allows them to envision projects like Jussieu and
Eberswalde as operating simultaneously at these two levels.
These ideas, which the architects were reflecting on in parallel to their

Figure 46: Herzog & de Meuron collaboration with Ruff, became explicit in 1996, when any Corpo-
ration asked Herzog & de Meuron to develop a project for a virtual
house.72 Instead of producing the requested 3D virtual environment,
the architects responded by producing a series of linked web pages
featuring images (see Figure 47 in next page) – including their early
experiments with video stills – and a text. For them the idea of a purely
virtual building – a simulation – made no sense, since they considered
that the virtual and material worlds were linked through human expe-
rience, and were therefore “existentially interdependent.”73 The idea of
a linked web of images, however, did fit their idea of a virtual archi-
tecture, operating as an “open-ended system of communication,”74 and
continuously referring back to the world of physical existence.
According to the architects’ explanation of this project, the dependence

between the virtual and material realms is mutual. On the one hand,
the virtual world of imagination always finds its origin in the physi-
cal world of our existence. On the other hand, images and thoughts
become indispensable if any sense is to be made of the world of pure
matter. In the light of this view, projects like Mulhouse, Jussieu, Eber-
swalde, or the exhibitions in Basel and Paris become physical archi-
tectures that hint towards the existence of the virtual through their
material configuration and emphasis in superficiality. In reflecting on
these ideas in their text for the Virtual House project, the architects
identified a set of precedents that operate according to this particular
mode, therefore laying out for us a lineage against which their surface
and image-based projects can be read.
“That feeling of astonishment, somewhere between admiration and

rejection, at the site of old farm houses in the Swiss Engadine that
are practically tattooed with frescos or the desire to understand
shoji architecture or the natural artificiality of gardens in Japan or
the mystifying impact of bewildering surfaces and sequences of
rooms in Islamic architecture. This forms are all material to the
extreme: refined, clarified and distilled matter. Which is precisely
what makes them so virtual!”75
72. J ohn Rajchman was the guest editor for issue 19/20 of ANY Magazine, for which
he commissioned seven architects to design a “virtual” house. The projects
were discussed during a seminar in Berlin, 21-22 March 1997. A description
of the project by Herzog & de Meuron and their full text can also be found at
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, “The Virtual House”, in Wilfried Wang,
Herzog & de Meuron, 178, 185-188.
73. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, “The Virtual House”, 185.
74. Ibid., 188.
75. Ibid.
295
Figure 47: Herzog & de Meuron, images from
the Virtual House project, 1996-97.
We may conclude then, that the group of projects highlighted here

in which Herzog & de Meuron focused on the use of photographs
responded to a change of visual paradigm brought about by the succes-
sive developments of photography and digital information technology.
These projects tried to find a physical and symbolic representation of
this new visual paradigm through their “refined, clarified and distilled”
materiality, a perspective that allows us to better understand the inten-
tions behind their specific massing, detailing and surface techniques,
all aimed at making these projects transcend their materiality in a
process of sublimation.
The group of projects that we have foregrounded here subverted expecta-

tions regarding their physical presence by hinting towards an immaterial
world of pure images and thought. In this regard, they became represen-
tations of a new experience that was becoming normative, namely our
everyday involvement with a vast expanse of information and images
through technology. They also sought to operate internally according
to the same nonhierarchical and relational logic present in the virtual
realm, by enabling the construction of knowledge through interconnect-
ed chains of images. For a further articulation of this tenuous model,
Herzog & de Meuron borrowed from documentary photography and its
notion of the archive, mostly via their collaboration with Ruff.
Images here are considered to convey meaning while remaining open

to interpretation, and therefore enable architecture to communicate
with a level of criticism that was previously reserved for art. This is
true not only for each image as an isolated instance, but most of all of
their association. As with Ruff ’s series, this is a subversive disciplinary
effort, an understanding of architecture as creation and organization
of knowledge that shies away from reinforcing certainties, that seeks in
turn to challenge conventions, ask questions and produce aesthetic and
political statements.76
76. In their text for the Virtual House project, Herzog & de Meuron concluded: “Our
idea of virtual architecture involves asking questions and questioning givens; it
is not affirmative; it does not confirm and conserve. In the final analysis, [it] is a
political statement.” Ibid.
296
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297
Chapter 6 The Nagelhaus Project
01. Introduction
– The Sugden House Group
– Tony Fretton
– The Lisson Gallery
– Familiarity and Abstraction
02. Caruso St John

– Faithful Inheritors
– Almost Everything
03. Thomas Demand

– The Formative Years
– An Interpretation of the Work
04. The Collaboration

– Exhibition Projects
– The Nagelhaus
05. Conclusions
299
Figure 1: Caruso St. John and Thomas Demand,
Nagelhaus, installation at the 2011 Venice Biennale.
01. Introduction
The Sugden House Group

In London in the late 1980s, an alternative architectural scene started
to emerge around the charismatic figures of Florian Beigel and Tony
Fretton.1 A loosely formed coalition of young architects, this scene was
involved in an informal but intense conversation fueled by the creative
energy of figures such as Adam Caruso, Peter St John, Jonathan Ser-
gison, Steven Bates, Jonathan Woolf, Mark Pimlott, David Adjaye, Ce-
cilia Lau and Irénée Scalbert.2 In the context of a severe economic crisis
and a British architectural scene dominated by large, postmodern com-
mercial firms and the rise of the high-tech lords, these young architects
sought to open up a space for their generation by fixing a position and
establishing an ethic and aesthetic model for their incipient practices.
The group was concerned with enunciating an approach to architecture

based on personal experience, taking after Alison and Peter Smithson,
whose legacy of authenticity they reclaimed as their very own lineage.
Within their attempts to establish a common ground, in the mid 1990s
the group tried to coalesce into a more articulated form of collective
by holding regular Sunday morning meetings in the flat of Jonathan
Sergison.3 For these sessions, the members of the group wrote position
papers that were in turn intensely debated. The intent of the meetings
was to generate a book of essays outlining a common stance, but the
strong egos of the participants and the dominance exerted in the group
by the older Fretton caused the group to abandon their weekly meet-
ings before producing any relevant output.4
Figure 2: Photograph by Mark Pimlott,
visit to Alison and Peter Smithson’s Sugden House.
Despite the fact that all the participants involved tend to downplay the
relevance of those meetings held in the mid-1990s, they have become
a sort of foundation myth. This is especially true of a trip the group
took to visit the Sugden House by Alison and Peter Smithson in 1995.
During that day with the Sugdens, several photographs were taken
where we can see the members of the group drinking wine and listen-
ing to Derek Sugden talk about his collaboration with the Smithsons
(Figure 2). The publication of these photographs positioned the young
architects as willful inheritors of the brutalist couple and caused them
to be informally known as the Sugden House Group.
Out of this trans-generational group of architects, several offices

emerged that in the following years, decisively influenced the devel-
opment of architecture in England, through their coincidence around
a particular type of British realism.5 In this chapter, we will focus first
on the figure of Tony Fretton, who with his early and emphatic use of
1. On this subject see Jesús Vassallo “La épica de lo cotidiano,” Arquitectura Viva
121 (2010): 80-84.
2. Irénée Scalbert in personal communication with the author, December 2009.
3. Adam Caruso in personal communication with the author, December 2009.
4. A small exhibition was held at the Architecture Foundation, but only a few of the
architects attending the meetings participated. Adam Caruso in personal commu-
nication with the author, December 2009.
5. Philip Ursprung has been the critic that most explicitly has related the work of
these British offices with a politically charged concept of realism. See Philip
Ursprung, “The Fragile Surface of Everyday Life, or, What happened to realism?,”
2G 34 (2004): 84-91.
301
photography enunciated many of the ideas that were later adopted and
developed by the younger members of the group. We will then fol-
low to study the trajectory of Caruso St John Architects, who initially
adhered most faithfully to the ethos of the Smithsons and who in their
evolution gradually incorporated an increasing amount of references,
including many of the architects and artists mentioned in this disserta-
tion, adopting an eclectic and open approach to architectural practice
that challenged the traditional boundaries of the discipline.
We will then conclude by examining the intermittent relationship that

Caruso St John Architects have sustained with German artist Thom-
as Demand, starting in 2000 with a series of exhibition projects and
culminating in a fully fleshed collaboration in the competition entry
for Escher Wyss Platz, in Zurich in 2007. In this project, known as
the Nagelhaus, the architects and the artist present us with a complex
artifact that challenges our understanding of how architecture operates
in the city and opens up a series of questions about the increasingly
tenuous line separating art and architecture.
Tony Fretton
Tony Fretton (Figure 3) is an architect with a particularly colorful
biography.6 Born in 1945 to a working class family in East London, he
worked for three years in the construction industry after graduating
from high school, a period during which he entertained the idea of
becoming a painter. Eventually, being inspired by the social compo-
nent of architecture, he applied and was accepted to the Architectural
Association, graduating in 1972. He then followed to work in a series of
offices, including Arup Associates, Neyland and Ungless, and Chap-
man Taylor, eventually acquiring substantial responsibility as a project
architect in large housing and commercial projects. In 1980, he quit his
job at Chapman Taylor and became a performance artist, first as part
Figure 3: Portrait of Tony Fretton, ca. 1995.
of the company Station House Opera and eventually on his own.7
Frustrated by his experience in corporate architecture offices, Fret-

ton saw performance art as a way to study the relationship of man
to spaces and things, to enhance his awareness of how buildings are
understood and lived in by people. Therefore, many of his perfor-
mances (Figure 4) were personal “readings” of a space, subjective but
open invitations to critically examine the ideas behind the habits and
consensus that rule architecture and our daily lives within it. Years later
Fretton would describe one of his performance works from the early
1980s as a catalyst and a model for his architectural career:
“I examined where I was living, holding a camera sometimes with

the lens facing me, and carrying a cassette recorder. The slides and
sound were edited, and one track of the cassette was programmed
to control de projector while the other played the sound. The piece
was made to run by itself, showing an imaginary place which
resembled my experience of the place itself, with the objects in it
altered by my way of seeing them, both in this work and in life.”8
6. A
ll biographic information on Tony Fretton is taken from Irénée Scalbert, “Interview
with Tony Fretton,” in Irénée Scalbert, et al. Tony Fretton Architects: Abstraction and
familiarity (Vitoria-Gasteiz: a+t ediciones, 2001), 150-157.
7. D
avid Turnbull, Tony Fretton: Conversation with David Turnbull (Barcelona: G. Gili,
1995), 92.
8. T ony Fretton describes one of his performance works from 1980 in David Turnbull,
Tony Fretton, 13.
302
Figure 4: Photographs from a performance
by Tony Fretton, ca. 1980.
This enhanced and proactive inhabitation, aided by photography, was

geared to the emancipation of the individual and to the production of
a type of soft knowledge that Fretton related to conceptual art and that
he characterized as being “imprecise and life-like, and open to inter-
pretation.”9 Therefore, Fretton’s approach to buildings became influ-
enced by his experience with performance art, defined by an extreme
site-specificity and the realization that very basic and common mate-
rials – because of their familiarity – could be reinterpreted to produce
new and open meanings. Inspired by this experience with performance
art, he opened the office of Tony Fretton Architects in 1982.
The Lisson Gallery

The first project in which Fretton had the opportunity to put his ideas
into play was the Lisson Gallery built in London in 1986. The client, a
gallery owner, had bought a small semi-derelict building in a narrow
and irregular site facing Lisson Street, part of a working class neigh-
borhood removed from the gallery district in London. In addition to
Figure 5: Tony Fretton, Lisson Gallery,
London, 1986.
the difficulty of having to stabilize the precarious construction and
work within the constraints of such a small site, the owner continued
to buy small pieces of property in the back of the plot while the project
was being built, all of which Fretton had to incorporate into the design
during the construction phase (Figure 5).
9. Ibid.
303
Figure 6: Tony Fretton, collaged photographs
depicting the found conditions in the block
in Lisson Street, 1986.
In the end, the architect surrendered to the appeal of this anarchic

situation and developed the project as a series of domestic-scaled bits
of space adding to each other in a sequence, with vernacular forms
coming together in a careful and nuanced reading of the found con-
ditions.10 This careful observation and reinterpretation of the casual
architecture of a traditional working class area of London strongly
brings to mind Alison and Peter Smithson’s photographic expeditions,
both with Nigel Henderson and on their own, as if the Smithson’s in-
terest in “as found” conditions had become – even more literally – the
seed for a project methodology.
This resemblance is underscored by the materials that Fretton used

to publish this project, like his collage of photographs of the original
conditions inside the block on Lisson Street (Figure 6), an image that
literally evokes Peter Smithson’s photograph of the interior of a block
in Islington.11 Looking at the architectural drawings for the Lisson gal-
lery, we can appreciate how the forms and volumes in the photograph
became the raw matter for the project, which limited itself to their con-
trol and careful rearrangement according to a new use, as Fretton him-
self acknowledges when he describes how “the shape of the streets and
building lots in the neighborhood continues inside the building, but
becomes quieter and more reserved.”12 This more quiet and reserved
character had to do, according to Fretton, with the fact that he was,
in the end, forced by the client to unify the fragmentary aggregation
of spaces with the white washed materiality of international gallery
10. T ony Fretton, Abstraction and familiarity, 18.

11. S
ee chapter 1 of this dissertation.
12. T ony Fretton, Abstraction and familiarity, 18.
304
Figure 7: Tony Fretton,
Lisson Gallery Expansion, 1992.
architecture, a strategy that was contrary with his initial designs, which
were “intoxicated […] with the tactility and disorder of the site.”13
A few years later in 1990, the owner of Lisson Gallery bought another
building on the same block, in this case facing Bell Street, and asked
the architects to expand the gallery into this new plot through a link
at the basement level. This second phase, completed in 1992, furthered
and made more explicit a compositional method based on the abstrac-
tion of found forms in a new construction, as we can assess in Fretton’s
own description of the project:
“The floors of the building align with those of the 18th century build-
ing next door, and the ground floor windows sketch out a minimal
version of the older building shop window and door. The different
alignments above are intended to make the facade seem narrower
than it really is, and more in the scale of the older building. On
a wider scale, parts of the elevation like the blank window in the
facade have rhyming relations with the facade of the [nearby] office
tower and schools.”14
In the expansion of the Lisson gallery (Figure 7), Fretton’s attentive and
critical attitude towards his surroundings turned into a compositional
method based on the manipulation of fragments of reality – recog-
nizable bits and pieces that through abstraction became more open
to aggregation and to different readings. Within this method, which
brings to mind Venturi’s text on “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture,”
familiarity acted by enabling communication with the context and the
viewer, while abstraction was the necessary homogenization for the
found materials to coalesce into a new building and for the building to
become an enhancer of the site.
This particular approach to architecture, as Fretton has often em-

phasized, is also indebted to a Rossian understanding of the city as a
cultural artifact created through a long process of aggregation of anon-
ymous fragments. In fact, we could say that Frettons’ Lisson gallery
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 21.
305
Figure 8: Chris Steele-Perkins (Magnum),
photographs of the Lisson Gallery Expansion,
1992.
emulates this process in its own formation, and in doing so validates

the fabric around it by becoming a self-conscious version of it, and a
point of special intensity within it:
“the elevation […] rhymes with the surrounding high rises, voids
and objects to point out that these are not mistakes or by-products,
but part of an unconscious project that has to be acknowledged
[…] they shine a light on a continual process that needs more than
architecture to happen.”15
This attentive recognition of the city and its inner workings as source
material for architecture is also present in the photographic documenta-
tion of the built project. For this occasion, instead of using an architecture
photographer, Fretton commissioned Chris Steele-Perkins of Magnum to
portray the building (Figure 8).16 This resulted in newspaper-style black
and white photographs in which the people and the city take the fore-
ground and the building is intentionally pushed towards the background,
15. T ony Fretton as quoted by Kenneth Frampton in “A piece of String: Reflections on

the work of Tony Fretton,” Mark Cousins, Kenneth Frampton, and Tony Fretton.
Architecture, Experience and Thought: Projects by Tony Fretton Architects (London:
Architectural Association, 1998), 52.
16. Irénée Scalbert, Never Modern: On bricolage and the work of 6a Architects, (Zu-
rich: Park Books, 2013), 144.
306
Figure 9: Chris Steele-Perkins (Magnum),
photographs of the first show
at the Lisson Gallery Expansion, 1992.
thus reinforcing its resonance with the surrounding fabric. Within this
images, these echoes are most present in the photographs of the exhibi-
tion rooms (Figure 9), where we can appreciate how the works of art enter
into a dialogue with the city through the large gallery windows.
In these images, the works by Dan Graham, which had been an inspi-
ration for Fretton, mirror the school building across Bell Street, and Sol
LeWitt’s array of similar but diverse volumes uncannily resemble the
unruly aggregation of smoke stacks in the back of the plot. It is precisely
in these images that we most poignantly realize the deep influence that
minimal and conceptual art, in their abstraction of generic conditions,
had on the formation of Fretton’s architectural project and position.
Familiarity and Abstraction

The sole idea that the city is “an unconscious project that has to be
acknowledged” strongly resonates with Dan Graham’s early work, and
more specifically with his Homes for America project, where he saw in
the repetition of speculative builder houses in New Jersey the promise
of an art project based on abstraction and seriality.17 In a similar vein,
17. S
ee Dan Graham’s documentary photography of American tract housing devel-
opments for his Homes for America piece. Dan Graham, and Gloria Moure, Dan
Graham: Works and collected writings (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Polígrafa; New
York: D.A.P., 2009), 1-16.
307
Fretton’s photographs of London for the AA exhibition held in Earls
Court in 1990 (Figure 10) present the city as an implicit project where
abstraction and repetition are already in play, and whose hidden laws
he unveils through an attentive look.18 These photographs, which at
the time were unexpected and caused a big impact on the generation
of younger architects surrounding Fretton, can also be regarded as a
development of his earlier performance work, an extension of his rein-
terpretation of interior spaces to the scale of the city.
According to our characterization, Fretton’s architectural project amal-

gamates the influences of the Smithsons, Venturi, Rossi, documentary
photography and conceptual art in a careful and very conscious attempt
to work with the abstraction of existing conditions for the generation
of new architectures. The question then becomes why this is a legiti-
mate or interesting proposal for Fretton, and what the benefit is that he
obtains from this approach. In reading Fretton’s justification of his own
work, we quickly realize that in his mind, the collective, anonymous and
fragmentary nature of the architecture of the city embodies the idea of a
Figure 10: Tony Fretton, photographs of London
common language that allows him to communicate with the users of his
for the exhibition at Earls Court, 1990. buildings, and also a certain fluidity or lack of resistance to change that
he associates with a democratic character. Just like the city of London,
Fretton’s buildings try to be unfinished and open to interpretation:
“There are very distinct ways in which we and some other similar
British offices practice. These ways are concerned with the relations
between buildings and their physical and social surroundings and
the experience of people who use or encounter them. I think we do
this by recognizing that buildings embody shared meanings and
that people, in a very healthy way, will construct their own imagi-
native use of the buildings we design. This view has been formed by
working in London […] where the vernacular history of buildings
plays a larger part than the formal history of architecture.”19
In the same text, he later elaborates on his identification of the vernac-

ular with a non-prescriptive approximation to contemporary design:
“Use is invited but not specifically determined. I work freely with

architecture that already exists and seems to me to be relevant to
issues of the present time […] The familiarity of the motifs I use
and the way that I do not let them culminate into a full statement of
historical architecture seem to produce buildings that are communi-
cative and open to personal interpretation by those who use them.”20
These familiar fragments, abstracted and kept in unstable equilibri-

um, represented for Fretton the only possibility to work within his
contemporary condition in a way that allowed him to simultaneously
communicate and maintain a degree of freedom in the interpretation
and use of the buildings. In the following years, and as his reputation
was established in England and continental Europe, Fretton’s concep-
tual and site-specific approach solidified into a style. This appreciation
18. This exhibition was apparently organized by Matthias Sauerbruch, but the author
has been unable to find specific dates or if a catalogue was ever produced.
See Irénée Scalbert, “Interview with Tony Fretton,” in Abstraction and familiarity,
153-154.
19. T ony Fretton, “Houses, Housing and Houses for Art,” Martin Bürge, et al. Das
Haus (Zürich: gta Verlag, 2010), 9.
20. Ibid., 15.
308
is supported by the degree of consistency of his later works, which
reiterate the same formal elements and materiality of his early London
works in locations as diverse as the historic core of Groningen in Hol-
land (Building with Two Apartments, 2001), or a rural estate in Lol-
land, Denmark (Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, 2008). While we argue that
Fretton did at some point in the 1990s enter an automatic-pilot mode,
his impact in the younger generation around him continued to shape
the British architecture scene, most notably as the office of Caruso St
John slowly gained international recognition.
02. Caruso St John
Adam Caruso (Montreal, 1962) and Peter St John (London, 1959) formed
their partnership in London in 1990 (Figure 11), after having worked for
several offices, including Richard Rogers, Ian Ritchie, Florian Beigel and
Arup Associates, where they met.21 As is the case with Tony Fretton, their
venturing on their own was an act of conscious resistance against the
commercialism of big firms and the political inanity of star-architecture.
This oppositional attitude is evident in their early writings, most of all in
their first published article entitled “Frameworks,” which can be con-
sidered a fully-fleshed manifesto in which the architects enumerated a
series of ideas “against” which they defined their architecture.22 Namely,
these were “a priori compositions,” (formalism), “a rhetorical use of
Figure 11: Portraits of Adam Caruso technology,” (high-tech architecture), “invention” (historical disconnect),
and Peter St John, ca. 2005.
and “invisible architecture” (the virtual).
As is also the case with Fretton and other members of the Sugden
House group, the city of London – in its emphasis on background
over foreground – had a strong influence on their early work and their
formulation of a position as architects, and was a theme that they
extensively referred to in lectures and articles. As illustrations for these,
Caruso St John systematically employed the documentary photography
of London (Figure 12). Like the Smithsons, Fretton or their younger col-
leagues Jonathan Sergison and Steven Bates, Caruso St John took their
own photographs as a way to approach and apprehend the nuances and
particularities of the fragmentary built fabric around them.23 At this
point, and after Fretton’s 1990 show, we will argue that documentary
photography was not only a way to achieve a greater understanding or a
deeper knowledge of the city, but had also become a badge of honor, an
act of adhesion to a lineage of architectural realism that the architects in
the Sugden House Group understood as resistant to market forces.24
Figure 12: Caruso St John,

photographs of London, 1997.
21. P
eter St John in Aurora Fernández Per et al, As Built: Caruso St John Architects
(Vitoria-Gasteiz: a+t ediciones, 2005), 17.
22. Adam Caruso and Peter St John, “Frameworks,” A+T no. 8 (1996): 38-51.
23. S
ee for instance Peter St John, “London 1997,” in Aurora Fernández Per et al, As
Built: Caruso St John Architects (Vitoria-Gasteiz: a+t ediciones, 2005), 14-15 or
Adam Caruso and Peter St John “London For Instance,” Daidalos no. 75 (2000):
18-21. In the case of Sergison Bates see the section titled “Place” in their com-
pilation of essays. Stephen Bates, and Jonathan Sergison, Papers 2 (Barcelona:
Gustavo Gili, 2007)112-148.
24. Adam Caruso, As Built, 21.
309
Figure 13: Caruso St John, refurbishment
of an old barn, Isle of Wight, 1992.
Faithful Inheritors
With all of the above in mind, the features that characterized the early
work of the firm of Caruso St John were an enhanced attention to con-
text, a careful and creative use of construction materials and a sense of
historic continuity, which at first manifested itself in an attempt to revi-
talize and update the architectural project of Alison and Peter Smithson.
These features are evident in their first built works: the conversion of a
barn into a house in the Island of Wight (1992) (Figure 13) and a private
residence in Lincolnshire (1993) (Figure 14). These projects strongly re-
semble Alison and Peter Smithson’s rural projects in their mix of tradi-
tional and contemporary materials and in their relaxed and sometimes
awkward compositions, but they are also reminiscent of early Fretton
and of the 1980s work of Herzog & De Meuron, who we will argue also
served as distant role models for the young British architects.25
Similarly, their next project, the Studio House in North London (1993),
could easily be related in its scale and scope to the Smithson’s unreal-
ized project for a house and studio in Soho, which featured the bare
spaces and rough construction materials of “a small warehouse” in a
domestic project within a Georgian terrace (Figure 15).26 This unreal-
ized house, which the Smithsons regarded as their first “brutalist” proj-
ect, had a much reduced footprint and almost no partitions, drawing
its strength from the exhibition of its brick and concrete structure and
the use of raw construction materials, avoiding internal finishes.27
As opposed to the Smithsons’ project, which was an ex-novo con-

struction, Caruso St John’s House Studio departed from an already
existing two storey warehouse that had suffered several alterations and
25. C
aruso St John started their practice ten years after Herzog & de Meuron, whose
early work had by then been widely disseminated. While the Swiss architects
were a major influence on the British office during their first years of practice,
this influence tends to be downplayed in their publications and interviews.
26. A
lison and Peter Smithson, undated manuscript, as quoted in Claude Lichten-
stein, and Thomas Schregenberger, As found: The discovery of the ordinary
(Baden: Lars Müller, 2001), 126.
27. Ibid.
310
Figure 14: Caruso St John Architects,
Private Residence, Lincolnshire, 1993-94.
Figure 16: Caruso St John, Studio House

in London, 1993, photograph by Hélène Binet.
311
in London, 1993, photographs by Hélène Binet.
intervened in it minimally (Figure 16). The strategy was in this regard

similar to Fretton’s Lisson gallery in its adoption and careful recon-
sideration of the fragmented geometries and precarious construction
of an original building. In this case, though, because the project was
self-commissioned – it was Adam Caruso’s residence – the architects
were able to radicalize some of the ideas in Fretton’s gallery project. As
we have already noted, in the Lisson Gallery, Fretton was forced to ho-
mogenize the interiors in the all-white language of spaces for art, while
Caruso St John, in their Studio House, were able to rejoice in the wild
juxtaposition of different materials in a way that almost didactically
exposed the chronology of construction:
“This small studio and house in a North London mews is made with-
in the shell of a two storey warehouse. The existing building was of
various ages, and the idea of the new construction is to add further
layers to make it a new whole. Modest materials (mdf, plasterboard,
timber studwork, fibre cement panels, insulating glass) are used in
their raw state so that their material presence is analogous to the
rough brickwork and layers of paint of the existing building.”28
The careful consideration of the existing shell and the way that the new
materials are selectively applied to it indicate an attention to the histo-
ry of the existing construction that approaches a biographical under-
standing of its formation in time. This is most evident in the interior
photographs by Hélène Binet (Figure 17), which were taken while the
building was inhabited by the architect and where we can see how even
the layers of damaged wallpaper were kept in their found state and jux-
taposed with unpainted plasterboard and existing brickwork. In these
photographs, as in those taken by the Smithsons when documenting
28. A
dam Caruso and Peter St John, “Project report for the Studio House in North
London,” As Built, 36.
312
in London, 1993, photographs by Hélène Binet.
their own residences, we find small ornamental compositions, traces of

life that make us think of inhabitation as an extension of construction,
an additional “layer” in the careful creation of an atmosphere.29
While the project introduced a large skylight in section that reorga-

nized the building into a complex spatial whole, the design for the
House featured no perceptible formal gestures, with all the aesthet-
ic energy focused on the quality of the different surfaces. The only
exceptions to this rule are the ladder to the sleeping platform, made in
pressed galvanized steel and resembling a Robert Smithson sculpture,
and the dining table with a single support in the form of a “T,” recall-
ing Sigmund Lewerentz’s structural system for St. Peter’s church – an
homage to two of the architects’ heroes. Overall, when contemplating
this project in its extreme bareness and privation, one begins to see
an overlap between its radical reduction, derived from an aesthetic
consideration, and its asceticism understood as a political statement.
In the House Studio project, we most poignantly understand how the
Sugden House Group collapsed the Smithsons’ professional ethics and
their emphasis on materiality and authenticity, using the latter as a
symbol of their position of resistance.
The next built project by Caruso St John, the New Art Gallery Walsall
(1995-2000), continued to deepen the contextual and compositional at-
titudes of preceding projects. For this competition, the first new build-
ing to be built in decades in the depressed city of Walsall in central
England, Caruso St John adopted a general massing and fenestration
strategy that echoed the abandoned industrial structures surrounding
the city core. For this purpose, they intentionally and explicitly bor-
rowed from Alison and Peter Smithson’s Sugden House in its informal
and blunt use of geometry. In fact, when asked to comment on the
29. See Chapter 1 of this dissertation.
313
Sugden house project for a monograph on the Smithsons published
by the Architecture Association, Peter St John turned his comment of
the small residential project into a manifesto for his own architectural
agenda, and more specifically, for their building in Walsall:
“At first glance projects by Alison and Peter Smithson can seem
powerfully inelegant, with their strange proportions and coarse
material profiles. But ultimately it is this defiantly physical object
presence that is their strength. […] The house for Derek and Jean
Sugden in the suburbs of Watford is a small building that has
always occupied a big space in my imagination. […] Regarding
the house from its garden, its image is not clear but instead it is
ambiguous, unstable and vital. When we considered the mood that
the elevations should have in our project for the New Art Gallery
in Walsall, we were looking for something that could resonate with
the melancholy of the broken industrial buildings round about.
This unsteady image, somewhere between the grand and the awk-
ward, is what we had in mind.”30
Looking at photographs of the Gallery standing amidst the post-indus-

trial landscape of Walsall – and again this is most true in the images
by Hélène Binet (Figure 18) – one cannot but acknowledge the degree
of success with which Caruso St John were able to blend in with an

New Art Gallery, Walsall, 1995-2000,
photographs by Hélène Binet.
30. P
eter St John, “An Emotional Architecture,” in Architecture is Not Made with the
Brain: The labour of Alison and Peter Smithson, edited by Pamela Johnston, Rosa
Ainley, and Clare Barrett, (London: Architectural Association, 2005), 72.
314
New Art Gallery, Walsall, 1995-2000,
photographs by Hélène Binet.
architectural statement that is “ambiguous, unstable and vital,” in-

tended to instill optimism in its humble and ordinary setting without
alienating it. The use of abstracted forms of industrial buildings in the
Walsall project (Figure 19) is also indebted to the photographic work of
Bernd and Hilla Becher, which the architects knew very well and from
which they again borrowed a few years later in their competition entry
for the Center for Contemporary Arts in Rome.31
While the bigger moves of the exterior configuration of the building

were geared towards a contextual response, the development of the
project was devoted to the compulsive exploration of the expressive
potential of construction in every detail. Thus, if we are to read the
project as a sort of statement of contextual optimism, the overall mass-
ing was geared towards securing the familiarity of the building with
its surroundings, while its materiality and construction details were
intended to convey a certain upbeat and playful character.
In fact, reading the description of the building by the architects, it is

sometimes shocking to notice how openly they discuss their construc-
tive choices as based on tectonic effects rather than economies. This is
evident, for instance, when they describe how “the depth of the joist
element of the floor construction is sized according to the [height of
31. “ The serial and typological format of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs
show how generalized, formal consistencies make more apparent the specific
conditions of material, surface and situation.” Adam Caruso and Peter St John,
“Project report for the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Rome,” As Built, 48.
315
Figure 20: Caruso St John, New Art Gallery, Figure 21: Caruso St John,
Walsall, entrance hall and main stairs, 1995-2000. New Art Gallery, Walsall, 1995-2000
the] space being spanned rather than the structural span,”32 (Figure 20)
or when they mention how “window cladding reinforces the [equivo-
cal] impression of the stainless steel as an underlayer running beneath
the terracotta overcloak of the building”33 (Figure 21).
While the strategy of manipulating constructive conventions in unex-

pected ways had already been exploited in the early projects by Herzog
& de Meuron, as discussed in this dissertation, we will argue that the
Swiss architects turned such manipulations into critical statements
aimed at destabilizing our assumptions about architecture. Caruso St
John, on the other hand, seemed from the beginning of their career
to display a more playful attitude, finding solace in the expressive and
plastic potentials of such experiments. It seems as if for the British
architects, the insistence on the materiality of the work was enough to
make it resistant, allowing themselves to experiment with the effects
of manipulating construction more freely, a trait that would become
increasingly dominant in their work during the next decade.
This increasing importance of the expressive potential of construction

materials was further advanced in their renovation of Stortorget
(Figure 22), the central square in the small Swedish town of Kalmar
(1999). For this project, Caruso St John chose to focus solely on the phys-
ical configuration of the surface of the square, departing once again from
a consideration of the configuration and history of the place:
32. A
dam Caruso and Peter St John, “Project report for the New Art Gallery in Wal-
sall,” As Built, 48.
33. Ibid.
316
“The physical history of Stortorget has been about the shifting of
stones – field stones from the surrounding architectural lands
stacked into dry stone boundary walls, and then wall stones
providing the raw materials to make the streets and square of the
baroque town. The presence of field stones at the center of Kalmar
is a reminder of this physical, almost primitive, transformation or
rural land into urban place. Over a period of 300 years these stones
have been laid, lifted and re-laid.”34
Following from a careful consideration of this continuous process,

Caruso St John decided to intervene by rearranging the stones ac-
cording to its original continuous configuration, one that had been
fragmented and obscured by the introduction of the car and surface
parking in the square during the nineteenth century. With help from
the artist Eva Löfdal, Caruso St John treated the square like a canvas, in
which the original field of stones was restored to its continuity. Areas
Figure 22: Caruso St John, Stortorget, Kalmar, for gathering were covered with larger regular-shaped cobblestones, and
1999, photograph by Hélène Binet.
paths for pedestrians were signaled with large pre-cast concrete slabs,
using exposed aggregate matching the color of the original stones. A
system of interconnected water wells was added, with punctual grilles in
pre-cast concrete and glass bringing the sound of trickling water to the
surface of the square. Finally, the design for the square was completed
with the addition of a series of tall, thin steel masts holding small red
glass lamps that at night create a virtual ceiling for the square.
Through this careful procedure of rearrangement and minimal inter-

vention – the small fountains and thin masts are the only additions –
the surface of the square acquires an enhanced biographical character
that is reminiscent of the architects careful intervention in their Studio
House, but also of the equally careful rearrangement and activation
of found conditions carried forward by the Smithsons in the interior
courtyard of their Solar Pavilion. This resemblance is most strikingly
visible (Figure 23) when we compare the plan drawing of Stortorget
with its different textures, with the similarly obsessive rendition of the
surface of the courtyard at Fonthill by Alison Smithson.35
Figure 23: Caruso St John, Stortorget, Kalmar,

1999, photographs by Hélène Binet.
34. Adam Caruso and Peter St John, “Project report for Stortorget,” As Built, 82.
35. See chapter 1 of this dissertation.
317
Almost Everything
During the mid and late 1990s, as references to the Smithsons be-
came commonplace in critiques of their work, Caruso St John started
to consciously distance themselves from their chosen architectural
ancestors, pushing the material investigation in their work to a point
of diversity and richness that definitely exceeded the repertoire of the
austere brutalist couple, adding in the process a wealth of post-modern
and pre-modern references to their repertoire. This eclectic explosion,
which Philip Ursprung has characterized as a capacity to consider “al-
most everything” as a reference for their architecture, soon became the
major identifying trait in the work of Caruso St John.36
This shift became most visible in the early 2000s in their blatant use
of construction materials as ornament, with projects such as the Sport
Theatre in Arosa (2000) and the renovation of the Barbican Concert
Hall in London (2000). In their competition entry for Arosa (Figure 24),
for instance, the trusses are much deeper than they need to be in order
to allow a thinning of their members, and are painted to induce an illu-
sion of lightness, while the facade is clad with “reflective and sparkling”
efte pillows in a vertical rhythm that gives the building “the lightness
of a bubble.”37 Similarly, in their renovation of the Barbican Concert
Hall (2000), their baroque design for a woven acoustic ceiling (Figure
25) was clad in smooth stainless steel treated with a passive oxide layer
that produces different colors when reflecting light in different angles.
The metal appears “bright purple” when seen in perpendicular, and
“rich bronze” when seen at an oblique angle, producing “flares of co-
lour” under direct light and becoming darker, like “the centre of a dark
red rose” in low light.38

Sporttheatre, Arosa, 2000.
36. P
hilip Ursprung, Caruso St John: Almost everything (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígra-
fa; New York: D.A.P., 2008), 7.
37. A
dam Caruso and Peter St John, “Project report for the Sporttheatre Arosa,” As
Built, 90.
318
The exploitation of materials as ornament soon gave way to the im-
plementation of geometric ornamental patterns, which the architects
cunningly used to introduce contextual references when working in
historic settings. This was visible for the first time in their renovation
project for the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood (2002). In this
intervention in a nineteenth century building, the architects proposed
a new facade clad in a thin stone veneer of colored quartzites and
porphyries, consciously designed in the style of ornament enunciated
by Owen Jones and contemporary with the existing building they were
working on (Figure 26).39 Ornament also became the main theme in
their project for Nottingham Contemporary (2004), which is clad in
colored pre-cast concrete panels showcasing a bas relief pattern refer-
encing the rich Nottingham tradition of lace manufacturing and the
ornate historic facades of the surrounding area (Figure 27).40
Figure 25: Caruso St John, Barbican Concert
Hall Renovation, London, 2000-2001.
Looking at these group of projects it becomes once again impossible not
to establish a parallel with the work of Herzog and de Meuron in their
use of ornament. While the Swiss architects refrain from an explicit use
Figure 26: Caruso St John, The Victoria Figure 27: Caruso St John,
and Albert Museum of Childhood, London, 2002. Nottingham Contemporary, 2004.
38. A
dam Caruso and Peter St John, “Project report for the Barbican Concert Hall
Renovation,” As Built, 94.
39. In their 2005 monograph, edited by Philip Ursprung, the architects included four
plates from Owen’s seminal work, Grammar of Ornament. See Philip Ursprung,
Caruso St John: almost everything, 195-198.
40. S
ee Adam Caruso and Peter St John, “The Development of a Textile Facade for
Nottingham Contemporary,” in Philip Ursprung, Caruso St John: Almost everything,
248-253.
319
of traditional ornamentation, consistently problematizing their repeti-
tions of images and patterns through a discussed set of techniques, the
British firm is affirmative in their use of historic references, ascribing a
positive value to the capacity of ornament to communicate with people
and to re-engage dialogue with pre-modern sources.
Another feature characterizing this exuberant phase in the career of

Caruso St John was the increasing emphasis in the qualities of the
interior spaces of their projects. In order to develop and visualize these
interior designs, the architects worked with large interior models (Fig-
ure 28) in which they tried to simulate the colors and textures of the
foreseen construction materials, including human figures and furni-
ture, in order to better convey a sense of scale. As part of this process,
the models were carefully photographed, with the camera simulating
an eye-level view, in order to create an image as realistic as possible in
an effort to anticipate the actual experience of being in the building.
This practice had been introduced by the firm as early as the Walsall
project and it may have been derived from the type of models made in
Figure 28: Caruso St John, Parasite exhibition design, since the focus on Walsall was on the interaction of
(ideas competition), 2000.
the art pieces and the space. Despite being a part of the architect’s tool-
box from the outset of their career, around 2000 this specific type of
model became the prime tool for design and visualization in the Caru-
so St John office, coinciding with the adoption of colored paper as the
primary material for their realization. This very particular technique,
as may seem evident to the observer of contemporary art, was directly
derived from the work of the German artist Thomas Demand, a fact
that the architects have publicly admitted.41 While Caruso St John had
been aware of the work of Demand for some time, it was in the year
2000 that a collaboration began that would last a decade and have a
profound transformative effect on the work of the British office.
03. Thomas Demand
Thomas Demand (Figure 29) was born in 1964 in the small German
town of Schäftlarn, near Munich, the son of two painters and grand-
son of an architect.42 He came into contact with conceptual art in his
adolescence, through the art collection and library of Jost and Barbara
Herbig, the parents of a close friend, who had started to collect local
and international pieces in Dusseldorf during the 1960s. Among the
books in the Herbigs’ library, Demand found several exemplars of Ed
Ruscha’s photography books from the 1960s. These books, in their
indeterminate position between the documentary and the conceptual,
made a deep impression on the young Demand, and made him realize
that art was not a frozen collection of objects, but rather an engage-
ment with contemporary problems, an active force in an ongoing
cultural debate.43 Additionally, Ruscha’s freedom to use the friction
between different mediums to advance his work while refusing to fully
embrace any of them would later become a model for Demand.
Figure 29: Portrait of Thomas Demand, ca. 2010.

41. C
aruso St John use images by Demand in order to explain their architecture
students how to produce and photograph models for their projects.
42. Unless otherwise noted, all biographical information of Thomas Demand is taken
from Roxana Marcoci, “Paper Moon,” in Thomas Demand, Roxana Marcoci, and Jef-
frey Eugenides, Thomas Demand (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 9-27.
43. “ Adam Caruso and Thomas Demand interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist at the
Venice Architecture Biennale,” Uploaded on Aug 28, 2010, accessed on June 10,
2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ancaMMf3aI
320
Figure 30: Thomas Demand,
Studio View, 1993.
The Formative Years

Demand began his formal training in 1987 at the Akademie der Bil-
denden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich, where he studied
interior design. His education in Munich focused on theater and
church design, and his student projects were mostly architectural
settings, décor and scenographic models. From 1989 to 1992, Demand
attended the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, where he studied primarily
with Professor Fritz Schwegler, a sculptor who also mentored artists
such as Katharina Fritz and Thomas Shütte. Under Schewegler, work
was advanced through the production of models, an approach that
contributed to shape Demand’s working method, which was based on
the construction of precise paper mock-ups that reconstituted parts of
the built environment (Figure 30).
Paper was not only a readily available material and easy to work with;
it was also inexpensive enough that his student work could be pho-
tographed and then disposed of, avoiding the need to store the bulk
of his sculptures in his apartment.44 It was precisely in the process
of documenting his work that Demand found that he was unable
to photograph the models without certain distortion preventing his
photographs from looking like the original. 45 At this point, Demand
approached Bernd and Hilla Becher and asked them if he could learn
photography with them, the Bechers replied that he would need to
study photography for at least three years before they could actually
teach him something, which convinced Demand to abandon the idea.46
44. “ At first, I didn’t want to make objects that would be lying around afterwards get-
ting in my way. Also, I was thinking about ways to keep things moving and avoid
spending years and years in workshops.” Thomas Demand in Thomas Demand,
Hans Ulrich Obrist: The conversation series, (Cologne: König, 2007), 104.
45. B
eatriz Colomina, “Media as Modern Architecture,” in Thomas Demand, Beatriz
Colomina, and Alexander Kluge, Thomas Demand (München: Schirmer/Mosel,
2006), 19-46.
46. Ibid.
321
Figure 31a: Thomas Demand, Podium, 2000. Figure 31b: Thomas Demand, Staircase, 1995.
Interestingly then, despite the fact that Demand is customarily re-

ferred to as a disciple of the Bechers, he was actually never a student of
theirs.47 This, however, does not invalidate the fact that Demand learnt
photography during his stay at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf while
in close contact with some of the disciples of the Bechers. Andreas
Gursky, for instance provided one of the first cameras that Demand
used.48 Similarly, the method that Demand employs systematically
for printing his large images on Plexiglas – the Diasec process – is
the same process used by Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and Thom-
as Struth. Among this group of older artists, all of whom influenced
Demand, Ruff seems to have had the greatest impact, even directly
inspiring some of Demand’s works as direct responses to his own.49
By the time Demand left the Kunstakademie in 1992, he had already

established a clear working method (Figure 31), one that he has con-
tinued to use throughout his career until today.50 In fact, all the works
47. S
ee for instance Barry Schwabsky, “A Makeshift World: On Thomas Demand,”
The Nation, November 9, 2009, http://www.thenation.com/article/make-
shift-world-thomas-demand.
48. T homas Demand in Thomas Demand, Hans Ulrich Obrist, 126.
49. Demand’s Constellation series (2010) is directly evolved from Ruff’s Stars series
(1989-1992).
50. Ibid., 104.
322
that have brought international recognition to the artist respond to
the same modus operandi. First, an image in the media is identified
that is of some significance to Demand. Next follows a phase of mild
to intense research, where he finds out as much as possible about the
image and the objects or space within it. Then, a paper model is made
that reproduces these space and objects, most times at a scale of 1/1.
The model is then photographed with a Swiss Sinar camera employing
large-format color negatives. The model is finally destroyed and the
final image – usually just one per model – is enlarged into a Plexiglas
panel and exhibited without a frame.
An Interpretation of the Work

Because of this very particular work methodology, Demand’s work has
become inextricably linked to the media images from which he obtains
his motifs, to the extent that interpretations of his work customarily re-
volve around the political and social signification of the original photo-
graphs.51 More often than not, Demand’s images are indeed connected to
highly charged and ominous political events, sometimes even to sinister
crimes, as with his works Office (1995) that depict the abandoned offices
of Eastern Germany’s infamous Stasi, or Klause (2006), a full exhibition
devoted to the depiction of a crime scene involving child molestation.
The fact that Demand’s images are devoid of people and details and
presented to the public without the support of additional explanations –
as if cleaned from the information we would need to understand them –
seems to underline the importance of each original photograph through
its absence. We will argue, on the other hand, that Demand’s work builds
upon Thomas Ruff ’s Newspaper Photographs or Jpegs series, becoming a
comment instead on the phenomenon of multiplied circulating images
Figure 31c: Thomas Demand, Room (detail), and on its difficult relationship to the notion of knowledge and truth:
1996.
“I’m at the end of an entire chain of worlds of images that present

themselves to me. All my experience, everything I essentially am,
is largely the upshot of things passed on to me. We all know that. I
endeavour to put myself in a position in which I can actually add
something to the chain. When something comes to me, as trivial
as it may sound, it always has a history, a history of how it has been
received. A piece of lawn seems initially to be just that. But the im-
age of the lawn comes to me by any manner of paths, be it through
ads, a film, or whatever. And sometimes I deliberately make things
which are so empty that they no longer transport a truth, but offer
at most sincerity or a certain faithfulness, as it were. When I make a
piece of art I’m not yet at the point where I can say what its mean-
ing should be. Initially I am simply amazed.”52
Interestingly enough then, we can consider Demand’s work departing

from media images as a radicalization of Ruff ’s emancipation of utili-
tarian photographs – as an operation that simultaneously liberates these
images from their role as support of a text and enables them to reach
their full potential as autonomous constructions and open-ended carri-
ers of meaning. In this regard, the difference between the two artists is
51. S
ee for instance the analysis of Demand’s retrospective show at New York
MoMA in Roxana Marcoci, “Paper Moon,” 13-27.
52. T homas Demand, “A Conversation between Alexander Kluge and Thomas
Demand,” Thomas Demand, Beatriz Colomina, and Alexander Kluge, Thomas
Demand, 60.
323
that in the case of Ruff, his manipulations of the original photographs
– his exaggeration of duotone patterns and pixilations – are just filters
meant to exacerbate and expose their origin as media images, while in
the case of Demand his integral reconstruction of the images further
removes them instead from their source and original format.
Demand’s hyper-constructed and painstakingly rigorous work method

– like that of the Bechers – utilizes precision and consistency as a way
to induce an illusion of objectivity – what he describes as “sincerity.” In
Demand’s case, however, his obsessive faithfulness in producing replicas
of banal motifs – with a zeal that can only be characterized as clinical
or scientific – has the effect of problematizing the visual language of
documentary photography and its identification with a notion of truth.
Demand’s images deploy even lighting, perfect focus and calm framing
– the full range of tools that documentary photography uses to convey
objectivity – in order to present us with counterfeited objects and places.
Figure 31d: Thomas Demand, Bathroom, 1997. Interestingly enough, it is precisely this admittedly fictitious character
of his work, together with the undeniable mesmerizing quality of the
materiality of his models that prompts a reading of the work which is
independent from its origin in media images. Because Demand builds
his sets from scratch, his process forces him to decide upon every single
detail as he painstakingly reconstructs the pieces in his studio, selectively
editing information out in each step, a fact that has lead Michael Fried to
characterize his art practice as being “saturated” of authorial intention.53
Demand’s simplification of the world also entails a level of abstraction
and idealization that in many cases results in its beautification, a view
that the artist strongly rejects. Interestingly for us, in defending him-
self from such criticism, Demand sees it as necessary to distinguish his
works from architectural mockups, identifying his interest in models
instead with the idea of experimental models in scientific research:
“The interesting thing about this for me is how the conceptual mod-
el functions as a source of insight. […] In my works, the models
that I continually attempt to create are related to experiments,
not to any notion of minimalization, pettiness or likeness to god.
Normally an architect creates a model of a building, and you can
imagine what the building will eventually look like based on this
Figure 31e: Thomas Demand, Camping Table, 1999. and then form an opinion about it. […] The models submitted to
architectural competitions are fascinating. They are always attrac-
tive; I’ve never seen a building that looked horrible as a model.
Despite this, there’s an unbelievable number of horrible buildings
that used to be models. So I guess the beauty of the models is trans-
formed into banality somewhere along the way. But this is only one
common use of models. The other, as I have already mentioned is
to gain insight – a type of conceptual model or a system of parame-
ters that represents a test assembly or a learning environment.”54
Reversing Demand’s logic, we could then argue that his work rescues
the built environment from its “banality” and restores it to its original
condition of beauty by turning it again into a model, thus reversing
the process of “banalization” and the inevitable compromises when
53. M
ichael Fried has written extensively on Demand’s photography. See Michael
Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2008). For Fried’s comments on Demand’s video format work see Mi-
chael Fried, “Thomas Demand’s Pacific Sun,” in Thomas Demand et al, Thomas
Demand: Animations (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 2012), np.
54. T homas Demand in Thomas Demand, Hans Ulrich Obrist, 140-141.
324
Figure 31f: Thomas Demand, Pit, 1999.
building things in the real world. Despite his initial experiences with
models as an interior design student and his continued fascination
with architectural models, we will not question here the authenticity
of Demand when he declares that for him, his models are conceptual
means to an enquiry, a way to gain insight into the world. What we
will argue instead is that architectural models, in their articulations of
part-to whole relationships and relationships to site are actually more
analytical than Demands scenographic work, with its fixated points of
view. In fact, architectural models are never considered a final product.
Their materiality is just holding a place for the actual construction, and
therefore their value lies in their capacity to represent relationships
that will later be enacted at a different scale, thus acting as prototypes.
Demand’s sculptures, on the other hand, adopt the materiality of these
architectural models and reify it by presenting it to us as a construc-
tion, not as a representation.
This contradiction became especially palpable, when in 2010 the artist

was asked by the Getty Center in L.A. to photograph the working mod-
els of architect John Lautner, producing for the occasion a series of close
ups in which small fragments of the cardboard models are presented
to us as small stage sets (see Figures 40 to 47 at the end of this chapter),
with a strong emphasis in surface that undoes any possible reading of
larger relationships – compositional or other – in the projects. What
we are trying to say here, is that despite his best intentions, Demand’s
325
“saturation” of authorship and his capacity to idealize architecture and
spaces, to remove them from the dirty reality where they belong, are
precisely the features that have mesmerized architects around the globe,
as they redefine “paper architecture” and create an illusion of total con-
trol that becomes irresistible to the architecture profession.
04. The Collaboration
Exhibition Projects
The collaboration between Thomas Demand and Caruso St John came
about in 2000 when Demand was offered a solo show at Fondation
Cartier in Paris. The exhibition space at Fondation Cartier, a building
by Jean Nouvel, is a completely transparent glass prism with no opaque
walls. Faced with the necessity to generate a framework to display his
prints in this problematic space, Demand first considered creating his
own exhibition architecture, but then realized that anything he could
produce would become the focus of the exhibition, eclipsing his prints.
This, of course, was unacceptable for an artist who destroys his own
sculptures, which we can only encounter as photographs. Demand then
realized that an architect could be a valid mediating figure that would
present his work, acting as “a host, like in a talk show.”55 Accordingly,
he contacted the architectural offices of Internat (Kühn, Malvezzi and
Böhm) in Cologne, B&K+ (Brandlhuber, Kniess and Partners) in Berlin
and Caruso St John in London to ask for proposals for the show.56
While the proposals from the two German offices proved to be difficult
to implement, Demand found that Caruso St John’s project solved the
problems posed by the building with great simplicity and remained
within the limitations and budget imposed by the institution. Their
proposal, adopted by Demand, was composed of seven thin walls
placed in the large hall perpendicular to the long facades.57 This simple
solution preserved the transparency of the building to the garden in
the back, retaining its immaterial quality from a frontal view while
achieving a sequential and cinematic experience from the oblique,
when walking or driving along Boulevard Raspail (Figure 32).
These screens – thin single-profile plasterboard walls – were then cov-

ered with wallpaper of different colors. For this purpose, Demand con-
tacted the company that had manufactured Le Corbusier’s wallpaper
for the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille and convinced them to produce
them again for this show.58 Each side of each screen was assigned a
single color, arranged so that drivers on the large Boulevard would see
faded or whitish colors on their way into the city during the morning
commute, while the same drivers returning home in the evening when
the building is illuminated would see strong, pure colors.59 The project
thus became a careful and sometimes difficult dialogue between the
colors in the wallpaper and the colors in the photographs, which was
paralleled by a secondary rhythmic dialogue between the pictures and
the similarly sized openings in the walls.

56. Ibid.
57. C
aruso St John website, “Project Report for the Thomas Demand exhibition at
Fondation Cartier,” accessed June 10, 2013, http://www.carusostjohn.com/
projects/thomas-demand-fondation-cartier/
59. Ibid.
326
Figure 32: Caruso St John, exhibition design
for Thomas Demand at Fondation Cartier, 2000.
327
for Thomas Demand at Palazzo Pitti, 2001.
Excited by the success of their first collaboration, Demand again called

on Caruso St John for his show at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence in 2001
(Figure 33). The exhibition was to be mounted in an equally problem-
atic space: the former apartments of King Vittorio-Emmanuelle II, a
set of highly ornate spaces including a ballroom of cubic proportions.60
Since it was not possible to intervene in the walls, the architects de-
signed a set of furniture pieces in the fashion of a table, a secretaire or
an altar. The prints were then placed on panels resting on the furniture.
The pieces designed by Caruso St John were veneered in two tones
of dark wood, and featured sizes and proportions that specifically re-
sponded to the awkward architecture of the King’s apartments, serving
as anchors for the works in the rooms.
As Demand has noted, the pieces of furniture in the exhibition were

not real furniture, but rather “Arstchwager-like objects” in reference to
the American artist Richard Arstchwager and his sculptures inspired
by domestic motifs.61 This comes as no surprise, if we consider that
since the beginning of their careers the architects had indulged in such
sculptural quotations in their projects, as we have discussed regard-
ing their Smithson-like steel stair at their Studio House and in their
design for a staircase for Gagosian Gallery in the manner of a Rachel
Whiteread piece.62
60. C
aruso St John website, “Project Report for the Thomas Demand exhibition at
Palazzo Pitti,” accessed June 10, 2013, http://www.carusostjohn.com/projects/
thomas-demand-pitti-palace/
62. C
aruso St John website, “Project Report for the Gagosian Gallery at Britannia
Street,” accessed June 10, 2013, http://www.carusostjohn.com/projects/gago-
sian-britania-street/
328
After the Pitti show, Demand continued to rely consistently on Caruso
St John for his exhibition designs, first for an installation part of the
artist’s Phototropy exhibition in Kunsthaus Bregenz, in 2004. And later
for his show L’espirit d’escalier at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in
Dublin in 2006.63 The fifth and final exhibition project in which De-
mand and Caruso St John collaborated was Demand’s 2009 retrospec-
tive show at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (Figure 34). 64 This was
an especially important show for the artist and the institution since
it coincided with the 60th anniversary of Western Germany, the 20th
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the 40th anniversary of
the building by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and its inaugural exhibition
of paintings by Paul Klee.65
Highly concerned with the significance of the show, Demand selected

a group of thirty works that reflected on the history of Germany after
the war. He also researched every single exhibition held at the gallery
in a search for the best way to display his work in such an idiosyncratic
space, producing a detailed file that he then shared with the architects.66
Demand initially proposed exhibiting his prints by simply hanging
them from the ceiling, as was Mies’ original design for the Klee show,
but found this to be technically impossible. Apparently, because of
temperature gradients between interior and exterior, the horizontal
structure of the building expands and contracts to produce oscillations
of up to 10 centimeters in the vertical axis, which would have caused the
hanging panels to tilt in different directions during the day.67
The architects then came up with a design that was reminiscent of

Mies’ original exhibition concept, but also of his installations with Lilly
Reich for the Velvet and Silk Cafe during the 1920s, the first of which
was held in Berlin in the Exposition de la Mode of 1927.68 Inspired by
Mies and Reich’s use of textiles in these shows, Caruso St John and
Demand proposed to intervene in the Nationalgalerie with a series of
hanging curtains that rearranged the open plan of the building into a
series of connected “room-like” spaces. The woolen curtains featured a
palette of dull colors that related to the work of Demand but contrasted
with its gloss finish. Arranged at two different heights, the curtains dis-
rupted the dominant symmetry of the building, in a polite but strong
transformation of Mies’ space.69
for Thomas Demand at Neue Nationalgalerie, 2009.
63. T homas Demand, Dave Eggers, Enrique Juncosa, and Karen Sweeney, Thomas
Demand: L’ésprit d’escalier (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art; Cologne: Koe-
nig; New York, N.Y.: D.A.P., 2007).
64. F or a full account of the circumstances surrounding the show see Adam Caruso,
and Thomas Demand, “Architecture + Art: Crossover and collaboration,” Lecture
at the Architecture Foundation, London. Filmed on November 2, 2009. Accessed
on June 10, 2013. http://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/programme/2009/
architecture-art-crossover-and-collaboration/adam-caruso-and-thomas-demand.
65. C
aruso St John website, “Project Report for the Thomas Demand exhibition Na-
tionalgalerie, at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin,” accessed June 10, 2013, http://
www.carusostjohn.com/projects/thomas-demand-nationalgalerie/.
66. A
dam Caruso, and Thomas Demand, “Architecture + Art: Crossover and collabo-
ration. Lecture at the Architecture Foundation.
67. C
aruso St John website, “Project Report for the Thomas Demand exhibition
Nationalgalerie, at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.”
68. A
dam Caruso in “Architecture + Art: Crossover and collaboration,” Lecture at the
Architecture Foundation.
69. T he curtains were custom made by the firm Kvadrat. For more on the specifics
of these textiles see Adam Caruso, and Thomas Demand, “Adam Caruso and
Thomas Demand discuss their collaboration,” Conversation recorded for Wallpa-
per Magazine video archive, accessed on June 10, 2013, http://www.wallpaper.
com/video/art/thomas-demand-and-adam-caruso-interview/72450400001
329
The exhibition design was then complemented with a series of vitrines
designed by the architects in the guise of pieces of furniture. Each of
these objects, which quoted Demand’s models in their gray color and
lack of detail, contained two open books with English and German
captions referring to the works on display that were written specifically
for the show by German playwright Boto Strauss.70 As in the Palazzo
Pitti, these pieces of furniture were larger-than-life, as were the books
inside, which were enlarged versions of the actual exhibition catalogue.
This monumentalization of the furniture and the curtains was then

contradicted by the chosen range of dull colors and “dusty” textures,
inducing a soft feeling of domesticity that contrasted with the cool
aesthetic of Mies’ building.71 Looking at the photographs of the show –
especially those without people in them – it is hard not to question if
we are looking at a photograph of a show by Demand, or a photograph
of one of his works. Such is the level of mimesis achieved by the archi-
tects and the artist in this collaboration.
The Nagelhaus
This convergence of Demand and Caruso St John around the formal
language of the former had actually been advanced in the two years
leading up to the Berlin show through a collaboration of a different
kind. In 2007, the architects had contacted the artist with a proposal to
work together on a “public space / public art” competition, which in-
volved the creation of interdisciplinary teams of architects and artists.72
According to Demand, he was initially reluctant to accept the project,
since the idea of making his sculptures directly accessible to the public
terrified him.73 In fact, the reason why the artist had initiated the
collaboration with Caruso St John in the first place was to avoid having
to build at all, but despite his doubts he felt he owed Caruso St John for
their continued support, and so he finally accepted.
The project organized by the City of Zurich for Escher Wyss Platz was
part of the rearrangement of vehicle circulation in the area and coincid-
ed with the restoration of the Hardbrücke Viaduct, an elevated highway
dating from the 1960s.74 Placed in Zurich West, the competition played
a small part in a larger effort to gentrify this formerly industrial part of
the city, with several major housing and commercial projects already
underway. The competition brief called for the design of a small kiosk
providing basic services like a ticketing office and restrooms, and for a
public art piece that it was assumed would be a sculpture.75
Caruso St John and Demand then jointly decided that it would be

more interesting if instead the public art piece became a second piece
of architecture, which would in turn allow them to define a space
between two buildings and more meaningfully reorganize the space
70. C
aruso St John website, “Project Report for the Thomas Demand exhibition
Nationalgalerie.”
71. A
dam Caruso and Thomas Demand in “Architecture + Art: Crossover and collabo-
ration,” Lecture at the Architecture Foundation.
72. Ibid.
73. U
npublished lecture by Thomas Demand. Rice School of architecture, September
15, 2011.
74. C
aruso St John website, “Project Report for the Nagelhaus Project,” accessed
June 10, 2013, http://www.carusostjohn.com/projects/nagelhaus/.
75. A
dam Caruso and Thomas Demand in “Architecture + Art: Crossover and collab-
oration.”
330
Figure 35: Woody Allen, still from Figure 36: “Stubborn Nail House”
the film Annie Hall, 1977. in Chongqing, China, 2007.
under the viaduct. With this in mind, they agreed that they would
jointly design the two buildings in the project.76 While Demand
remained nervous about this setup, the fact that all the other teams
selected for the competition were Swiss gave him some assurance that
their proposal would not win, and he made a point that they should
take the opportunity to propose something truly radical, in the hope
that it would further reduce their chances of success.77
In the conversation that followed, the artist and the architects started
to think about possible references, or images that could become the
basis for the project – an approach that already tells us about the dom-
inance of Demand in the collaboration. The first of these references
came from Annie Hall (Figure 35), the 1977 Woody Allen film, in which
the protagonist recounts growing up in a house tucked under the
Thunderbolt roller coaster in Coney Island as an excuse for his lifelong
involvement with psychotherapy.78 In this surreal image, it is impossi-
ble to tell if the house was built under the roller coaster or if rather the
roller coaster had been built over the house, an effect that the architects
and artist sought to reproduce working under the viaduct in Zurich.
The second reference, which Demand brought to the table, was the
“Stubborn Nail,” (Figure 36) a story from Chongqing, China, where a
private owner refused to move out of his restaurant in order to make
way for a new shopping mall development.79 The resistance by the
owner as the bulldozers dug a three-storey basement around their
building brought the case to the attention of the public, becoming a
viral internet phenomenon. In the end, media attention granted the
“stubborn” owner a better economic compensation from the authori-
ties, but did not save the building which was demolished in 2007.
76. Ibid.
77. T homas Demand, unpublished lecture at Rice School of architecture, September
15, 2011.
78. A
oration.”
79. Caruso St John website, “Project Report for the Nagelhaus Project.”
331
Very cunningly, Demand and Caruso St John based their competition
entry on a narrative according to which “the City of Zurich […] gen-
erously found a place”80 for the disappeared Chinese building, catering
to the very high image that the Swiss have of their political system as
an exemplary democracy. Accordingly, one of the two new buildings
would be a Chinese restaurant, built as a replica of the original “Stub-
born Nail” a la Demand, and so the project was fittingly and humor-
ously titled Nagelhaus (Nail house).
Interestingly, the paper model made for the competition entry (Fig-
ure 37) was not constructed in Demand’s workshop, but rather by the
Figure 37: Caruso St John and Thomas Demand, architects, a fact that Demand is always quick to point out.81 Be it as
Nagelhaus, model, 2009.
it may, the surreal gesture of the scaled Chinese noodle restaurant
squeezed under a Swiss viaduct captured the attention of both the
jury and the public, becoming the winning entry for the competition
(Figure 38). A design process followed in which Demand made his own
version of the paper models for the buildings, then sent them to the
office of the architects, who drew plans and sections that modified the
models by stretching their proportions, jumpstarting an iterative pro-
cess through which the project was developed until it was submitted
for planning permission, which was granted in 2009.82
At this point the project had acquired a certain level of exposure in the
media and had begun to raise some eyebrows in conservative sectors of
Swiss society. In 2009, the Zürich section of the far right Swiss People’s
Party (svp) launched a petition against the project, arguing that it was
a waste of taxpayer’s money, which forced the celebration of a refer-
endum among the citizens of Zurich.83 The project subsequently lost
the vote with 51% of opposition in a very narrow result, with just 2000
votes of difference.
Figure 38: Caruso St John and Thomas Demand,

Nagelhaus, models, 2009.
80. C
aruso St John website, “Project Report for the Nagelhaus Project.”
81. A
oration.”
82. Ibid.
83. C
lemens Bomsdorf, “Far Right Scuppers Public Art Project: citizens vote against
Thomas Demand’s Nagelhaus,” The Art Newspaper, online version, published
on November 2010, accessed on June 10, 2013, http://www.theartnewspaper.
com/articles/Far%20right%20scuppers%20public%20art%20project/21775
332
Figure 39: Caruso St. John and Thomas Demand,
Nagelhaus, installation at the 2011 Venice Biennale.
Sadly, a few weeks before the date of the referendum in the fall of 2010,
Caruso St John and Thomas Demand had built a full scale fragment of
the project (Figure 39) for the Architecture Biennale in Venice, which
attracted a good deal of attention in the art and architecture circles.84
In this mockup, which reproduced the main facade of the restaurant
building, the architects and the artist had the chance to experiment
with the actual construction techniques that they had been developing
for the buildings in Zurich. The textured construction made of painted
cnc milled wood panels was the result of digitizing the surface of a
piece of wet cardboard with a 3D scanner and gave the whole artifact a
soft appearance that had nonetheless “an abstract quality that avoided
any sense of ‘hand crafting.’”85
84. S
ee for instance Adam Caruso and Peter St John, “Nagelhaus,” Quaderns no.
262 (2011): 22-28.
85. Caruso St John website, “Project Report for the Nagelhaus Project.”
333
The aim of this technique, which so forcefully sought to reenact the
materiality of Demand’s models at an urban scale, was to exploit the
“pathetic” character of the proposed narrative while simultaneously
avoiding its “monumentalization.”86 As we know already, all this so-
phistication had little impact in the Swiss public vote, a fact that deeply
saddened the architects who were heavily invested in the project.
Thomas Demand, on the other hand, was actually satisfied by the final
outcome.87 Not only had he avoided stepping into the collaborative
world of architecture, with all its compromises and lack of control, ad-
ditionally, the project had become itself a story in the news – just how
it had begun – therefore satisfying his ambition to re-insert his work in
the flow of media images.
05. Conclusions
As we have noted already, the collaboration of Thomas Demand and

Caruso St John was marked by the dominant role played by the artist,
a fact that caused many in the architecture world to question the
architects for mimicking Demand. In defending himself from such
accusations as enunciated by an attendant to one of his lectures in
2009, Adam Caruso was quick to acknowledge that they had gone into
collaboration with Demand with the intention of learning from him,
but also that all the themes that they had developed in conjunction
with the German artist were already present in their earlier work.88
According to Caruso, from the beginning the architects had been inter-
ested in engaging low or banal architecture for its “emotional content,”
a notion that is as present in the photographs of Demand as it is in their
House Studio, for instance, which had a similar scale and appearance
as the “stubborn” house in Chongqing. Additionally, the architects had
also shown an interest in the photography of architectural models as
a new means of representation before meeting Demand – a technique
that they similarly derived from scenography and interior design and
that suited their emphasis on the physical experience of architecture.
Figure 40: Thomas Demand, photograph
from the Model Studies series, photograph of
a working model of Segel House by the architect
The contact with Demand thus only exacerbated such an interest in
John Lautner, 2010. making “pictorial” models created for the sole purpose of being pho-
tographed. Accordingly, Caruso regarded Demand’s work as an inves-
tigation on “construction,” and more precisely on the “appearance of
construction,” on how to make the inevitable choices about “what to ex-
press and what to suppress” when building something.89 The interest of
the architects in the artist thus revolved around an understanding of his
work simultaneously as representation and construction. Like we have
discussed, this feature is most noticeable in Demand’s photographs of
the architecture models of John Lautner for the Getty Research Institute
(Figures 40 to 47), in which the materiality of these small mock-ups is
presented to us in literal terms and for its tectonic value. The realization
of the creative potential of such confusion of terms between repre-
sentation and construction seemed to call for a radicalization of the
architect’s ongoing investigation on the manipulations of constructive
86. A
oration.”
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
334
Figures 41 and 42: Thomas Demand,
photographs from the Model Studies series,
photographs of a working model of Segel House
by the architect John Lautner, 2010.
materials and techniques for expressive purposes, while also propelling

it further by explicitly introducing an element of fiction.
Interestingly enough then, the most recent production of the office of

Caruso St John can be seen as an incursion into the creation of architec-
tural fictions that has been on the other hand kept in check by a parallel
series of projects imbued with a certain Central European classicism.
This development has paralleled their gradual assimilation with the
Swiss architectural scene, involving several visiting professorships at
Mendrisio and Zurich and culminating with Adam Caruso’s taking over
from Hans Kollhoff as Professor of Architecture and Construction at
the eth Zurich in 2011. Seen in the context of this dissertation, Caruso
St John’s experimentations with materiality, image-making and a broad-
er idea of realism are important in that they amalgamate many if not all
of the references that we have covered in this text as they continue to
search for their own voice within this increasingly self-conscious and
densely inhabited architectural camp.
In this regard, we have presented their early work and political position
as a radicalization of the project of the Smithsons as revisited by Fret-
ton, through an insistence on site and materiality that they envisioned
as resistant to market forces. However, as opposed to what we found
with the Smithsons, the dose of reality in Caruso St John’s early work is
335
not kept in check by a complementary technological or formal com-
ponent. In fact, in some of Caruso St John’s first projects such as the
House Studio, materiality becomes fetishized and authenticity becomes
as dominant a theme as to break the fine balance established by the
Smithsons and Henderson in favor of an approach that in its austerity
and privation starts to acquire a religious component.
As if aware of the dead-end that they were facing, and in order to

disintoxicate themselves from such dry experiments, Caruso St John
started to consider the potential of the manipulation of construction
materials and details for plastic purposes, a development which implied
the abandonment of their initial constructive sincerity in favor of a freer
and more expressive approach that in projects like Stortorget, Arosa or
Nottingham took on an overt experimentation with form and pattern
making. According to our account of these projects, Caruso St John’s use
of materiality and ornament differs from the work of Herzog & de Meu-
ron in its playful and assertive understanding of tectonics as an expres-
sive language to be mastered and exploited instead of problematized.
Figure 43: Thomas Demand, photograph
from the Model Studies series, photograph of
It is precisely around this moment, and as their voluptuous display of
a working model of Segel House by the architect materiality became central to their practice that they encountered the
John Lautner, 2010. work of Demand, which they immediately recognized as being simi-
larly concerned with construction understood as “how things look,” as
opposed to an idea of structural honesty. Seen in this light, Demand’s
trickery and emphasis on effect when working with paper to reproduce
other materials is not so different from Caruso St John’s manipulations
of finishes and constructive details, since both practices are concerned
with the perception of the work, with an illusion of realism, but no
longer with reality itself.
Such conceptual discontinuity is evident in some of their latest works,

such as the competition entries for the refurbishment of the Veemge-
bouw building in Eindhoven (2007), the New Crematorium for the
Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm (2009) or the Basel Ozeanium
(2012). In all of these projects, with their abundance of references, their
material excesses and their overflowing imagination, fiction starts to
take over: this is especially true in the project in Basel, where the ar-
chitects recreate a full under-water world, mosaics of marine monsters
included. In fact, we will argue – using a literary metaphor – that read-
ing the work of Caruso St John chronologically, like we just attempted,
is a little bit like reading a work by Gustave Flaubert which slowly and
inadvertently turns into a novel by Jules Verne.
In the context of this dissertation, this episode marks a transition

according to which the techniques inherited from documentary pho-
tography and its way of constructing images make their way into the
construction of architectures that are conceived of in terms of their
appearance. In other words, as images get more and more constructed
and constructions get more and more assimilated with their image,
there is a point where boundaries blur and a crossover between disci-
plines occurs. This possibility nonetheless poses a problem for the ar-
chitect who then becomes exposed to criticism for neglecting his social
contract in pursuit of a fiction. This conflict of interest, as seen with the
tragicomic history of the Nagelhaus, is especially poignant in the case
of Caruso St John, since they had originally situated themselves within
a certain righteousness, outlining from their office in the East End an
architectural project which extracted its legitimacy from an identifica-
tion of realism with a set of ethical values.
336
Figures 44 and 45: Thomas Demand,
photographs from the Model Studies series,
photographs of a working model of Segel House
by the architect John Lautner, 2010.
337
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ria-Gasteiz: a+t ediciones, 2005.
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Gili, 2007.
– Bates, Stephen, and Jonathan Sergison. Sergison Bates Architects:
Brick-work, thinking and making. Zürich: Gta, ETH Zürich, 2005.
– Caruso Adam, and Peter St John. “Nagelhaus.” Quaderns no. 262
(2011): 22-28.
– Caruso, Adam, and Peter St John. “London For Instance.” Daidalos
no. 75 (2000): 18-21.
– Caruso, Adam. “The Emotional City.” Quaderns no. 228 (2001): 8-13.
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and collaboration.” Lecture at the Architecture Foundation, London.
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chitecturefoundation.org.uk/programme/2009/architecture-art-cross-
over-and-collaboration/adam-caruso-and-thomas-demand
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339
Conclusions
01. The Terms of the Debate
02. A Tree of Realisms
03. Realism or Avant-garde
04. Towards a Contemporary Project
341
01. The Terms of the Debate
This text is structured through the study of two concepts – documen-
tary photography and architectural realism – which are problematic
in their parallel redundancy. Photography on the one hand is docu-
mentary by nature: it is considered to be not just a visual construct,
but rather an index of reality, an almost automatic record of what is in
front of the camera in the moment of taking the photograph.1 Archi-
tecture, similarly, becomes part of reality once it is erected and inhab-
ited, thus becoming a part of the built environment and a backdrop for
human life. This is of course not to say that photography is not loaded
with human agency and biases, or that architecture cannot be utopic or
idealistic, but rather it forces us to question why the photographers and
architects in this text have devoted their careers to explore, exacerbate
and ultimately advance the documentary and realistic traits already
implicit in the definition of their disciplines.
Similarly, the structure of this case study should force us to question

why these two parallel lineages of architects and photographers have
systematically and recurrently felt drawn to each other through the
years. Beyond coincidence, an overarching argument starts to emerge
that calls for a reassessment of the relationship between the two disci-
plines as they conflate around a series of themes with a larger impact in
the definition of contemporary culture. Therefore, it is also the assump-
tion that our parallel study of photography and design, articulated as a
subjective curation of episodes, should start to acknowledge and clarify
an ongoing dialogue about realism in architecture that could be regard-
ed as symptomatic of larger developments in culture and society.
The fact that documentary photography as a term is well recognized

in academic literature has allowed us to employ it as a mirror or a
template for a tentative understanding of architectural realism, which
in the context of this dissertation is proposed speculatively as amal-
gamating a disparate body of work into a historical lineage. The idea
of an architectural realism stems from an article by Philip Ursprung in
which he categorizes the work of British architects Sergison Bates as
belonging to such an undercurrent.2 Thus, following from Ursprung,
our use of the term realism has been an elastic one, in an attempt to
bring together a series of diverse instances in which architects and
artists have felt the urge to bring their disciplines closer to the reality
of the world around them. We will then argue that after going through
such an inclusive study it is necessary to revisit the term and to further
discriminate its different uses and nuances, if we want to clarify its
meaning, currency and potential for the future.
In order to undertake this effort of clarification, it is important once

again to note how today, both the term realism and the term docu-
mentary are invested in a certain contemporary notion of truth that
is impossible to conceive of without the existence of photography as
a technical process. We should start then by reminding ourselves that
1. While this is an idea that has been argued by many authors, its most notorious
enunciation is to be found in Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies art
in America (Part 1),” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68-81 and “Notes on the Index:
Seventies art in America (Part 2),” October 4 (Fall 1977): 58-67.
2. Philip Ursprung, “The Fragile Surface of Everyday Life, or, What happened to real-
ism?” 2G, no. 34, (2005): 84-91.
343
photography was initially considered a development of science, much
like the combustion engine or electromagnetism, all made possible by
the increasingly rapid progress of technology during the first third of
the nineteenth century. Indeed, the camera’s miraculous capacity to fix
reality into an image was at first unquestioned as a scientific fact, very
much in the same way that we regard an mri today. It was only through
its gradual popularization and consumption by society that photogra-
phy was realized as a medium and began to gradually be understood in
its own terms.
In the decades following its invention, as photography slowly gravitat-

ed from the realm of science and into the worlds of printed media and
art, its difficult position within this triangle became apparent. In this
process an innate conflict was revealed: that photography simultane-
ously expanded and complicated previous notions of truth and beauty
as well as the relationship between the two. In a way, all critical writing
about photography to this day can be considered as an elaboration of
or an attempt to make sense of this condition, from Walter Benjamin’s
obsessive efforts to explain photography as a political phenomenon, to
John Szarkowski’s appreciation of its specificity as a medium, or Susan
Sontag’s poignant observations on how its ubiquitous presence has
affected the way we regard the world.3 In this regard, while the problem
of truth and beauty pervades all genres and instances of photographic
production, it was from the beginning especially present within a cer-
tain documentary lineage whose exchanges with architecture, planning
and preservation we have summarized here.
Despite a common mistake to sometimes associate the term documen-

tary4 with photojournalism and street photography as epitomized by
for instance Henri Cartier-Bresson, this text has focused on a more
strict definition of the genre, establishing a lineage going from the
xixth century urban surveys to American documentary photography of
the early 1930s and dealing with Italian Neorealism and German New
Objectivity as parallel phenomena. What distinguishes these chosen
cases from photojournalism – like we discussed regarding the differ-
ences between Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White – is their
scientific sensibility towards the problem of truth, relying merely on
visual means to convey the actuality of a fraction of the world. While
photojournalism is loaded with humanist and literary overtones, the
documentary photographers in this dissertation share an unbreakable
faith in the capacity of photography to operate through autonomous
images independent from text, relying solely on their visual language.
3. T hese three writers, together with perhaps Roland Barthes and Rosalind Krauss,
are arguably the most quoted in the history of photographic criticism even today.
For contemporary editions of their most seminal writings on photography see
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in The Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, And
other writings on media (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2008), John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (New York, Museum of
Modern Art, 2007) and Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 2002).
4. T he term documentary appears in the second decade of the twentieth century. It
was allegedly coined by Scottish film director John Grierson in a review of Robert
Flaherty’s film Moana published at the New York Sun. For a detailed discussion of
the origin and signification of the term see Olivier Lugon, El estilo documental: De
August Sander a Walker Evans, 1920-1945 (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de
Salamanca, 2010), 21-26.
344
02. A Tree of Realisms
This first distinction between a humanistic and a scientific strain of
realism is already an important one. On one hand, photo-reportage
seeks to cancel out photography’s capacity to convey meaning while
remaining open to interpretation. For this purpose it uses extreme
subjectivity in both its visual and textual components, as it tries to pin
down a precise and amplified message. The documentary approach on
the other hand, relies precisely on a removal of the subjective point of
view of the author in order to enhance such openness of meaning and
enable an unmediated encounter between the object and the viewer.
Interestingly enough then, while all the authors in this text are invest-
ed in the idea of the documentary as an objective or scientific visual
language, it is undeniable that they put such techniques to work with
a remarkable diversity of results, especially in terms of the political
reading of their work.
We are forced then to consider where the root of such political hy-
per-sensibility of the documentary project lies beyond its intentional
openness, what are the differences that allow the projects in this text
to produce such remarkably different ideological outputs. Architec-
ture becomes here more useful than photography, since the architect’s
work, unlike the photographer’s is immediately interpreted as a specific
proposal for the future, in addition to a commentary on existing condi-
tions. In this regard, and once we have established the commonalities
of a certain visual paradigm, the question becomes what aspects or
fragments of reality get foregrounded in each project, and how precise-
ly this initial subject matter becomes projective.
We have studied for instance, how certain architects have turned their
attention towards past vernacular types in search for the definition of
a national identity in a process that links the vernacular in architecture
directly with political conservatism and nationalism. Still, even among
these cases, many nuances can be appreciated and differences can be
made that speak to the different attitudes of the architects and shed
some light on the mechanisms through which such projects can be in-
terpreted in political terms. Such is the case if we compare the similar
episodes of Paul Shultze-Naumburg in Germany and Giuseppe Pagano
in Italy, both of whom attempted a curation of vernacular architectures
in order to put forward a new national architecture.
The difference here is nonetheless twofold. On the one hand there is a

distinction to be made regarding the homogeneity of the architecture
being sampled: the vernacular types in Pagano’s 1936 exhibition come
from all periods and corners of the fragmented Italian peninsula,
and are thus demonstrative of a certain diversity, while the fixation of
Shultze-Naumburg with Um 1800 in his Kulturarbeiten, is conversely
based on an appreciation of its consistency. Secondly, in addition to the
different degrees of heterogeneity, there are also different degrees of
transformation of the original: while Shultze-Naumburg’s rallies for the
half-timber house produced replicas that are mostly impossible to dis-
tinguish from the original, the Italian work than ensued from Pagano
after the war speaks of a far greater tolerance for change and diversity.
These remarks support the reading that Pagano was invested in the cre-
ation of a new national identity – modern Italy, fascist or not – which
entailed the adoption of a set of new values, while Shultze-Naumburg
was on the other hand invested in an attempt to recover a quickly
345
vanishing national value system – that of Prussian aristocracy. There-
fore, even between these highly similar cases, some of the main differ-
ences are to be found in the degree of intensity with which the projects
look into the past in search for answers to the present, a fact that be-
comes painfully evident when comparing Shultze-Naumburg’s project
with that of Hans Kollhoff, as the subject matter remains basically the
same, while the distance in time with the author who reinterprets it
increases, thus exacerbating the reactionary nature of the proposal.
A much greater difference becomes appreciable nonetheless, when

we compare those projects that emphasize past vernacular types with
those that approach in turn contemporary conditions or new urban
phenomena. These projects, such as Denise Scott Brown and Robert
Venturi’s interest in commercial American construction, or Herzog &
de Meuron’s experiments with the industrial shed take on a whole new
dimension, as they no longer rely on the past to provide certainties for
their time, but rather confront and interrogate the challenges posed by
the present in order to ask questions about the future. We can say then
that after our initial distinction between a humanist and a scientific re-
alism, a second distinction seems to emerge between a strain of realism
that uses its objectivity to become reassuring – looking back at former
ways of life in order to provide artificial certainties for a changing
present – and an approach that privileges estrangement and a further
evacuation of meaning as a means to enhance our awareness and thus
force us to confront current conditions.
Within this second split, the emphasis on the vernacular correlates

with an increasing degree of nostalgia and romanticism and thus
becomes more prone to delve into issues of national or regional iden-
tity and in general into more politically conservative proposals. The
projects that adopt banal contemporary conditions as a theme, seem
on the other hand to intentionally become more difficult to interpret,
as they openly address unwanted phenomena and in doing so become
a challenge to the viewer. In this regard, the House V at Therwil by
Herzog & de Meuron becomes an interesting illustration of this argu-
ment, as in this project the familiarity provided by the appropriation of
the wooden Wohnkolonie type of the 1940s clashes with the unsettling
banality of contemporary prefabricated construction, with the result
that the latter destabilizes the former.
It is interesting then to think, when confronted with such projects that

over-emphasize the everyday – we could also use the term ordinary
– what the ultimate aim of this operation is, beyond a certain destabi-
lizing effect. One immediate answer to this question, and one that we
have already entertained in this text, is that an emphatic or exacerbated
ordinariness is a means to call the attention on the authorial voice of
the project. This observation can be ascertained in projects as diverse
as those of Aldo Rossi or Venturi and Scott Brown, or closer to our
days in the work of Herzog & de Meuron, Tony Fretton or Caruso St
John, just to mention some of the architects that we have focused on. It
is precisely because of the diversity of this body of work that the ques-
tion remains as to what the aim is when confronting the viewer with
the banal and undesired realities of contemporary sites and artifacts.
The question then arises if the everyday, in its power to repel us, has
not become an aesthetic category of its own that needs no justification,
a statement that seems not too farfetched in the context of our parallel
study of the architecture of Aldo Rossi and the cinema of Michelangelo
346
Antonioni. In both these cases, the exacerbation of the everyday –
according to Paul Schrader – becomes a mechanism to expose the
radical incompatibility between the inhuman character of our envi-
ronment and the vestiges of humanity within our alienated selves, and
thus trigger a moment of transcendence. Thinking for instance in the
rote repetition of banal forms and stark shadows in Rossi’s Gallaratese
project, or in the truncated endings of Antonioni’s films, one cannot
help but wonder if the everyday, when presented in its most extreme,
has not become a new form of the sublime.
A very different reading is extracted nonetheless if we think for in-

stance of the photographic work of Ed Ruscha or the early projects of
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, which in their detachment,
calculated ambiguity and wry humor adopt a completely secular and
much more circumstantial take on the everyday. It becomes clear then
that a third distinction has to be made between those projects that
bring the overemphasis on the everyday to a full blown, all-subsuming
aesthetic proposal, and those projects that use it as part of a cultural
or at least more time and place-specific commentary. According to
this line of thought, a characterization could be made differentiating a
transcendental and a political strain of realism among those projects
that deal with the everyday.
In this regard, the early work of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Ventu-
ri becomes especially relevant as it discloses how the lack of affect
inherited from the tradition of documentary photography is instru-
mentalized in architecture in order to allow the assimilation of those
urban phenomena that have sprung regardless of the discipline and
its core values. Especially if we consider their early body of work in
the larger context of its contemporary scene – if we add David Hock-
ney, Reyner Banham, Dan Graham or Dan Flavin to the mix like we
have suggested – it then becomes apparent that their efforts are part
of a larger exercise of self-acceptance, of a contemporary willingness
to acknowledge a shift of paradigm away from the heroic/industrial
canon of modern ethics of production and into a banal/postindustrial
condition of pervasive consumption.
This interpretation of the work of Venturi and Scott Brown becomes

important as we move closer to our time, as it sheds some light on
their influence on the realist architects of the 1980s and early 1990s for
whom Venturian superficiality became a necessary counterbalance to
the heroism of the Brutalists or the melancholy of Rossi. Especially in
the case of Herzog & de Meuron, this influence becomes necessary in
order to appreciate their early work as an attempt to develop a critical
attitude and a sensibility towards the unbearably banal reality around
them, whether it was the bland residential architecture of pitched roofs
or the ubiquitous presence of small industrial sheds in the formerly
idyllic Swiss landscape.
347
03. Realism or Avant-garde
The gradual differentiation of the idea of realism based on the interac-
tions of architecture and photography the that we just attempted here
is important to the extent that it allows us to realize how our compar-
ative study, conceived initially as a very specific endeavor, is actually
situated at the core of a larger current discussion on the role of art as a
political practice. Nicolas Bourriaud has recently reminded us that the
history of modern art is based to a large extent on a constant process
of inclusion and exclusion, of repression and rehabilitation of ideas,
materials and forms.5 According to the system described by Bourri-
aud, the artist identifies a disregarded subject matter and assigns an
aesthetic value to it, thus creating a disruption in cultural consensus
and a subsequent reassessment of the status quo. Interestingly enough,
Bourriaud situates the origin of this trend as contemporary with the
invention of photography, as this development pushed painters like
Gustave Courbet towards a race for an ever greater level of differentia-
tion and specificity of texture – towards realism. For Bourriaud, Cour-
bet’s realism sought a direct and unmediated confrontation with the
objects of reality, ignoring ideological filters and cultural hierarchies,
and thus became an attack on idealism.
In this characterization, realism is depicted as the main progressive force

in the process that articulates the relationship of art and politics. This
point is especially important to our argument, since realism is generally
associated with conservatism, a generalization that is all the more true in
the realm of architecture, within which it is regarded as either identical
to pragmatism and problem solving or like we have discussed in some
cases, dialectically opposed to modernity and progress. Conversely,
Bourriaud’s explanation allows us to read Walter Gropius’ 1913 appropri-
ation of images of factories and silos – which he acquired from Amer-
ican industrial magazines – as an operation that is basically identical
to Scott Brown’s use of Ruscha’s parking lot images: both used the most
straight-forward and unmediated visual language available to them in
order to confront the cultural elite with a repressed but pervasive reality,
one that pointed towards the underlying organization of society.
Interestingly too, for Bourriaud, realism and abstraction are not op-
posed forces, but rather reinforce each other as they cooperate in the
above mentioned process. If unmediated reality is a challenge to ideal-
ism and an attack on cultural hierarchies, abstraction is just a means to
augment and enhance its abrasive powers. Through the selection, iso-
lation and reduction of elements from the real world, abstraction has
the capacity to create “stock cubes” of reality, concentrated moments
that maximize art’s capacity to unveil the workings under the surface
of everyday life. This view resonates with recent architectural criticism,
more specifically with Pier Vittorio Aurelli’s account of the work of
Ludwig Hilberseimer as a clarification and abstraction of the generic
5. B
ourriaud has written extensively on the relationship of art and politics. The most
explicit and synthetic explanation and the one that we focus on here is taken from
Bourriaud’s latest and yet unpublished work, The Exform. See Nicholas Bourriaud,
“What is The Exform? Culture, history and rejection in the Google era,” Lecture at
The Royal Academy of Arts, London. Taped on November 8, 2013. Accessed on
February 20, 2014.
http://www.mixcloud.com/thesuperuserlink/nicolas-bourriaud-what-is-the-exform-
culture-history-and-rejection-in-the-google-era/
348
city and its industrial processes.6 Indeed, Aureli’s recent interest in the
conflation of the everyday and abstraction in modern art and film7 is
in many ways close to the themes developed in this dissertation, and
a further testimony to the currency of these ideas and the urgency to
develop a discourse based on them.
We can then say that Bourriaud’s argument about realism can be

regarded as a general framework for our discussion of the interac-
tion of documentary photography and architecture, which we could
consider in turn as an enhanced and specific case within such lager
dynamic. For Bourriaud, realism is an apparatus carefully designed
to enable an intensified contact with reality in order to upset current
cultural hierarchies, and abstraction is a way to foster the transfor-
mative or projective power of such operation. Similarly, according to
our recollection, architects have used documentary photography as a
way to survey the built environment, in order to extract and abstract
fragments from it, thus assigning them an aesthetic value in order to
challenge conventions about what is considered to be architecture, in
an attempt to upend cultural consensus through a direct confrontation
with the material world.
In our case too, the mechanics of this process are further exposed and
clarified by the fact that architecture is a limited parcel within general
culture, and to a large extent controlled by an academia which explic-
itly decides where the boundaries of the discipline lie. Such level of
control and definition thus only makes the centrifugal and centripetal
struggles described by Bourriaud easier to recognize and trace, in a
process of permanent displacement between the periphery and the
center. Interestingly enough then, our study exceeds Bourriaud’s expla-
nation in that it acknowledges that such displacements do not always
result in progressive developments, but rather that realism can also
produce movements of cultural regression just as easily.
04. Towards a Contemporary Project

The question then becomes what a contemporary realism would
look like, which are the repressed or marginalized elements of reality
today that can be rehabilitated and thus activate a progressive cultural
displacement. It appears clear from our study, that this is not an easy
question to answer, since the elements in our discussion are moving
targets and revisiting the motifs of previous generations can only
result in sterile exercises of ossification. In asking himself a similar
question, Bourriaud seems to identify the irruption of the internet as
further complicating this issue as it generates – in its massive capacity
to archive without discrimination – a horizontal tsunami of inclusion
which blurs previous categories and hierarchies.
6. Pier Vittorio Aurelli, “Architecture for Barbarians: Ludwig Hilberseimer and the rise
of the generic city,” in AA Files 63, (2011): 3-18.
7. Aurelli has recently developed an interest in the photography of Lewis Baltz and
the films and writings of Paul Schrader, in a turn that points towards an incipient
involvement with popular references and realism. Pier Vittorio Aurelli in personal
communication with the author, November 2013.
349
Figure 01: Architecture by de Vylder Vinck Tailleu,
photograph by Filip Dujardin, House Alexis, 2008.
Contrarily to this view, we could say that the undifferentiated mass of

information that individuals generate online about themselves, about
every banal detail of their lives, can indeed be considered a new cultur-
al debris, a sort of refuse from which a new realism can be crafted. The
repressed today is then not just what is absent from the internet – since
almost everything is in there – but rather those phenomena that while
existing within the cloud remain unsanctioned by current ideolo-
gies. We will argue then that the increase in the volume of available
information has in fact produced a diversification of cultural actors,
creating both a new audience and a new subjectivity, but definitely not
a dissolution of relationships of power.
Another way in which the realm of the online starts to become relevant
to our conversation is through the increasing conflation of the virtual
and the physical. We have already discussed here how many architects
have reacted to the emergence of the digital by a retreat to an enhanced
materiality of arcane undertones. Others, it is true, reacted contrarily
by embracing an emphatically digital project that seems today to be
exhausted. We will argue then that a more productive effort would be
to start to gain an understanding of how our permanent exposure to
the virtual has necessarily re-programed the way that we relate to our
physical environment and the current value that we ascribe to images
and things. It is undeniable that our idea of what needs to be physical
and what doesn’t has changed, just like the notion of ephemerality
and even our sensibility towards materiality have been altered. In this
350
Figure 02: Digital collage by Filip Dujardin,
Fictions, 2007.
regard, Ruff and Herzog & de Meuron’s interrogation of the ramifi-

cations that the virtual finds in the physical and vice versa becomes
relevant in that it implicitly states that human experience is the locus
where the virtual and the physical merge, hinting towards the neces-
sity for a hybrid phenomenology, and allowing the re-introduction of
realism in the conversation.
In this light, the collaboration between Caruso St John and Thomas

Demand, in their multiple comings and goings from object to image
seems to advance such a redistribution of roles among architecture and
image-making as these disciplines echo the aforementioned conflation
of the physical and the virtual. Indeed, Demand’s work, in its total de-
termination is not lacking in materiality or richness of experience. It is
however literally condensed, flattened and packaged to be consumed in
a purely visual fashion and without commentary or context – exactly
how images are disseminated on line. Another way in which Demand’s
work conforms to contemporary visual paradigms is through its era-
sure of detail, and its ambiguity of scale. Demand’s images – or should
we say his objects – are indifferent, innocent and scaleless,8 features
8. These are all emerging terms in contemporary architectural debate. Innocence

and Indifference were the titles for No. 1 and No. 7 of San Rocco magazine and
Scaleless was the title for No. 4 of Another Pamphlet.
351
Figure 03: Architecture by Roger Boltshauser,
digital photograph and collage by Philipp Schaerer,
Wülflingen, 2012.
that we will argue allow them to navigate the flow of information and
cater to a new global audience characterized by a reduced attention
span and little or no shared cultural common ground.
Up to now we have mentioned several themes which may become param-

eters for a discussion of contemporary realism: the apparent lack of edito-
rial control in a world of producers/consumers resulting in the emergence
of a new global subjectivity and audience, the gradual hybridization of
architecture and image-making which gives way to the emergence of a
digital/physical phenomenology and the simultaneous exacerbation and
collapse of the notion of context in a digital society. If we then proceed to
interrogate the contemporary scene in search for practices which connect
to these ideas, we will soon find that most of these topics are actually
already at work in the production of younger generations.
It then becomes apparent that the natural continuation of our his-

toric study would be a more engaged survey of contemporary hybrid
practices, a study that is nonetheless beyond the scope of these brief
conclusions. Among the many contemporary figures who could be-
come protagonists of such a study we will briefly point towards a group
of architects and photographers whose practices are currently coming
of age in Central Europe: the group that we are referring to, whose
work acquires a new relevance and cohesiveness in the context of our
case study, includes the photographer Filip Dujardin and the architec-
ture office of de Vylder Vinck Taillieu in Ghent, the architects Philipp
352
Figure 04: Digital collage
by Philipp Schaerer, Bildbau No 05, 2007.
Schaerer and Roger Boltshauser in Zurich and the photographer Bas

Princen and the architects Kersten Geers and David Van Severen in
Brussels. Despite the fact that these designers and artists no longer
need to collaborate directly to produce projects, they seem to insist in
gravitating towards each other in couples (See Figures 1 to 6), perpet-
uating and furthering the dynamic unearthed by this dissertation in
their influencing and usurping of each other’s roles. Very briefly, here
follow three descriptions of such couples and their interactions.
Filip Dujardin is a Belgian art historian who at one point became a pho-
tographer. His main commissions are architecture photographs. Among
the many Flamish architects with whom he works, he has a special re-
lationship with Jan de Vylder, who systematically asks Dujardin to por-
tray the buildings by his office, de Vylder Vinck Tailleu Architecten.9 De
Vylder’s projects are like collages. He literally cuts existing constructions
and inserts new elements into them. After many years working togeth-
er, Dujardin started creating his own images of architecture through
collaging photographs of buildings – sometimes de Vylder’s – in his
computer. This in turn has prompted de Vylder to radicalize his drive
towards assemblage. Very recently Dujardin has started to build his own
installations, using the same construction materials that de Vylder uses
9. Jan de Vylder et al., Architecten de Vylder Vinck Taillieu, 2G no. 66 (2013).
353
Figure 05: Architecture by oficce Geers Van
Severen, photograph by Bas Princen,
Nieuwbouw van een Kantoorgebouw, 2009.
in his projects. De Vylder is considering commissioning Dujardin with

building one of his pieces for his own house.
Philipp Shaerer is an architect who calls himself a bildgestalter. For

many years he worked as the archivist for the firm of Jaques Herzog
and Pierre de Meuron in Basel. During this period, he designed his
own software application to keep track of the thousands of images and
documents that he handled. He eventually adopted this application as
his personal diary. Soon after, Schaerer started using these documents
as the source material for a series of digital collages.10 In his images,
there is an almost unbearable tension between the hyper realism of
the photographic textures and the extreme flatness of perspective. In
2011 the Architect Roger Boltshauser asked Schaerer to re-imagine his
built projects in the visual language of his digital images for an exhi-
bition. After the exhibition, they continued to collaborate. Several of
Boltshauser’s latest projects are currently under construction in Zurich,
and as they go up we witness Schaerer’s virtual world become real.
Bas Princen studied architecture and became a photographer. His

photographs of landscapes and architectures are carefully and obses-
sively edited down in the computer, generating a tension that makes us
uncertain if what we see is real or a digital fiction. Kersten Geers and
10. P
hilipp Schaerer et al. Philipp Schaerer: Bildbauten (Basel: Standpunkte, 2010).
354
Figure 06: Manipulated photograph
by Bas Princen, City Edge, Istanbul, 2009.
David Van Severen are a couple of architects who became famous with
the collages they make for their competitions. The architects think that
Princen’s images and their collages share a common language, that they
are part of a larger architecture project.11 The architects say that when
Princen photographs their buildings they are “making architecture
together.” In the last Venice Biennale, Geers, Van Severen and Princen
put up an exhibition in which their photographs and collages chal-
lenged each other from opposing sides of a room. The pavilion holding
the exhibition mysteriously resembled the architectures in the images.
In these last three paragraphs and the images that illustrate them, we
witness the level of creative promiscuity achieved by this generation,
their exponential acceleration of the historic processes that we have tried
to clarify and render explicit in this text. Indeed, looking at this body of
work, it feels as if the ideas that we have been entertaining had entered a
particle collider: as they accelerate and crash, they start to become some-
thing different altogether. But this, we are afraid, is another story.
11. K
ersten Geers et al., OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, 2G no. 63
(2012).
355
Reality Bites
Jesús Vassallo
April 2014

Jesus Vassallo Fernandez

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Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Escuela Técnica Superior

Tribunal nombrado por el Mgfco. y Excmo. Sr. Rector

Realizado el acto de defensa y lectura de Tesis

EL PRESIDENTE LOS VOCALES

A mis hijas María y Olivia, que dan sentido y plenitud a mi vida.

A mis padres Luis y Maria, cuyo afecto infinito

Introduction: Methodological Framework

Chapter 0. Documentary Photography and

Chapter 1. Nigel Henderson vs.

Chapter 3. Italian Neorealism 153

Chapter 5. The Library for the Technical

Most importantly, I owe a debt of gratitude to my Dissertation Advi-

In Cambridge too, I met Luis Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón, whose

My students at Rice were exposed to this project in different stages, and

In thinking about this prospect, it immediately becomes apparent

The idea then becomes to organize the research as a series of cases,

Pensando en esta idea, resulta evidente que si bien el realismo carece

Parece entonces lógico el organizar la investigación como una serie de

Because of this capacity to lend a certain materiality to ideas, pho-

In the study of this parallel development of the two disciplines, we

Therefore, the text will adopt a methodology analogous to that of the

The second segment of the text is in turn devoted to bringing into

It seems evident after going through the selection of cases to be studied

Similarly to the selection of the photographic and architectural cases

Interestingly enough, despite the many different authors and voices

02. 1 840-1880: The Architect as a Client:

03. 1 880-1900: The Urban Planner

04. 1 900-1930: The First Documentalist:

05. 1 930-1940: The Canonic Documentary

In addition to their role as individual clients, architects, in their

Unlike in England, where photography was a matter of upper-middle

Despite the fact that the Mission Héliographique was considered a

1. F or a comprehensive account of early use of photography by architects see Robert

scientific process devoid of human agency. It becomes especially sig-

3. Robert Ellwall, Building with Light, 16.

That he was successful in devising a photographic language for the

picturesque approach based on chiaroscuro and an expressive use of per-

photographers of choice for architects and architectural publications as

During the following decades, the consumption of architectural pho-

Once photography adopted the visual conventions preferred by

Figure 14: Examples of architectural details

Figure 16: Photograph of Rhode Island State

A quintessential example of such use of photography is the documen-

The photographs taken by Marville are thus not only propaganda,

photographic campaign undertaken by Georg Koppmann & Co. (Fig-

Though much more reduced in quantity, Thomas Annan’s depiction of

a citizen about the rapid transformations taking place in Glasgow and

The feeling of nostalgia that pervades these photographic projects of

During his early years as a photographer, Atget made a living exclu-

More specifically, during the years leading up to 1920, Atget managed

Although Atget’s photography can in many ways be considered a con-

In addition to Atget’s capacity to diversify and differentiate his work in

Her photographs for the 1934 exhibition were primarily composed

This formative experience in the photography of an architectural

33. See Olivier Lugon, El estilo documental, 89-90.

and take control of the formation of cities, as opposed to the industrial

Abbott’s growing political involvement and the influence of her part-

Later on, and continuing his development in parallel with Abbott,

02. 1 840-1880: The Architect as a Client:

03. 1 880-1900: The Urban Planner

04. 1 900-1930: The First Documentalist:

05. 1 930-1940: The Canonic Documentary

1. F or a comprehensive account of early use of photography by architects see Robert

3. Robert Ellwall, Building with Light, 16.

33. See Olivier Lugon, El estilo documental, 89-90.

45. T his summary of the characteristics of documentary photography is a personal

– Abbott, Berenice. Atget: photographe de Paris. Paris: Jonquières, 1930.

3. T he Independent group was a generational offshoot of the Institute of Contempo-

“My wife and I knew we would experience alienation in the work-

41. T he famous series of photographs of children playing was taken in 1951 in

“I sent a few of my rather dim initial prints to my friend in Paris,

“In architecture, the ‘as found’ was something we thought we named

“Setting ourselves the task of rethinking architecture in the early