Among modern architects, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) is the one who most resolutely turned his back on the history of image and the notion of the European academic project. Very early on (1925[1]), he freed himself from the representations of architecture based on history painting, washes and drop shadows, adopting a kind of analytical deconstructivism that reduces architectural form to a functional and constructive assembly of volumes, a kind of phenomenology. He refrains from forming a prior image of the built thing. His system leaves no room for architectural representation. For Gropius, drawing - that is, the image of what would be built - had once been a working tool for the designer, before becoming one of his essential disciplines, distancing him from practice, tools and materials. For him, this observation meant that the education of the architect had to be freed from the straitjacket of the academy[2] and the reign of the image, and emancipated from anything that might hinder the rational search for volumetric solutions. He sought to equip the architect with a kind of "Baukasten" a necessary and sufficient tool for volumetric design.
The approach was radical, but it was also ephemeral. As soon as they entered the fray, the brand-new "architectural photographers" in the vans of modernism zealously set about re-establishing the reign of the image. Later in the century, after post-modernism had restored its legitimacy, the architectural image would regain its hegemony[3] and benefit from the countless innovations made possible by the development of information technology.
Science, art, perspective and image
A priori, everyone has an idea of what these terms cover, but on closer examination, it turns out that there are more questions than answers. According to the Western vulgate, perspective was "discovered" (sic) during the Renaissance, and is therefore a kind of natural science fact. Others attribute its origins to the Arab East. There is a wealth of literature on these subjects, including Hans Belting’s Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science[4] . The author draws a complex picture of the relationship between the physiology of human vision, art, science, image, point of view and geometry. For Belting, perspective is a geometric medium that art has seized upon to turn into a symbolic form[5] , it "constructs a space, but is not a space"[6]. As we shall see below, this argument is central to the technical operations carried out by architectural photographers when they "correct" (sic) the perspective of the images they produce. In doing so, they run the risk of imposing on a space or volume created by an architect, an image that contradicts its nature. This is exactly what Fernand Pouillon's warning in the above-mentioned text is all about.
Photographic objectivity was supposed to promote modernism in architecture, but has reduced it to a style.
After having amply dramatized the virtues of the "scientific" sobriety of the quasi-industrial plan, notably on the occasion of the controversy surrounding the rendering of the competition for the Palace of the League of Nations (1927), the modernist propagandists, of whom Le Corbusier was the poster boy, set about appropriating and controlling the photographic representation of their works. For the Master, the architectural photographer was a subordinate technician whose work was strictly technical and commissioned. This posture has been criticized as arrogant, but for Le Corbusier it was essential to control the image produced. It is also the reason for the intense retouching activity that goes into the production of the icons of European modernism[7] . It goes without saying that such efforts are made only to impose a model.
All that remained for someone like Philip Johnson to do was to orchestrate the display of modern architectural photography at MOMA, to turn modernism into a "style", duly attested by the photographs whose circulation he controlled. He could then build New Canaan (1949), a problematic pastiche of "modern style", so that the ideological function of the image would regain its place as the keystone of the device for recognizing and valorizing architecture
Image and representation of architecture, from easel to drawing board, from drawing board to computer screen, CAD & WYSIWYG.
The painter Hubert Robert (1733-1808) is best known for his Vedute paintings of ruins, particularly in Rome. His mastery of planes and perspectives in make him a virtuoso of genre scenes set against a backdrop of monumental architecture. As a producer of images, he is undoubtedly a virtuoso of architectural painting. He belongs alongside such elders as Canaletto (1697-1768) and Piranesi (1720-1778). Along with many others, they provided the backdrop against which Beaux-Arts academism later flourished, and which led to the breakthrough of stylistic eclecticism in architecture. To the bourgeois upstarts, the architects' clients, he offered an abundant catalog of picturesque models, which could be seen as a sign of their lack of culture.
As noted above, Walter Gropius's episode of radical rational modernism lasted only a moment. The need for images, and the ease with which they reproduce themselves in the industrial age, causes them to surge like a flood on the high seas of the equinox, most often unbeknownst to those who consume them.
In the twentieth century, the most enduring legacy of modernism in architecture will be that it delivered this liberal art form to the reign of industry, inexorably reducing the role of the master builder and stimulating, in inverse symmetrical proportion, the demand for images. In agencies, the black pencil, graphite and line pen have long since given way to the computer, and the AutoCAD donkeys have forgotten even the idea that architectural renderings can be broken down into as many scales as the site requires levels of precision. The computing power available in the smallest of machines made it practically possible, from a few straight lines and 2 or 3 angles, to infer a complete building, to determine its appearance from all angles and under all lighting conditions: "What you see is what you get", promised a computer software advertisement. Pure images could now be built. This process claimed two victims: scale and point of view. The architectural object thus conceived is suspended in a void. Clients, designers and observers hover around it as if weightless. The problem is that, instead of the promised ubiquity, they find themselves faced with an indeterminate abstraction that essentially boils down to its forms. The architect has long since been excluded from the materialization of the production process (general contractors, materials suppliers), and has been reduced to a producer of colored vignettes. This makes it easy to understand why he prefers to set up shop on the street, between hair salons, nail salons and tattoo parlors. End-users, on the other hand, are only invited to participate in participatory processes, as a means of controlling and monopolizing their voice.
The constantly renewed invention of a market for architectural photography.
This evolution, which has been underway for less than 50 years, has unfurled its effects like a devastating explosion. Agency architects fought desperately to find a way out. Exciting initiatives have emerged from these efforts, and some agencies have found ways to salvage substantial parts of the activities that made them who they are. They stand out as exceptions to the rule. In Switzerland, the importance of land rent in GDP, credit conditions and spatial planning have sustained a real estate prosperity that has facilitated the emergence of these parallel paths. A large number of small and medium-sized agencies still exist, often specializing in areas such as the renovation of existing buildings, the use of alternative materials, multi-media communication and curatorial activities. All are faced with the need to secure visibility. Initially, they supplied the clientele of computer-savvy rendering agencies, which enabled them to produce renderings deemed bankable by competition juries and magazines, and now find themselves clients of self-proclaimed "architectural" photographers and their promises of distinction. The media, technical journals, architectural book publishing, cinema and television provide them with a platform and a market in which they need to make their mark. This market, like all others, is opaque, and information circulates through complex channels. The status of the architectural image is labile. In Switzerland, the three major schools of architecture, followed by the universities of applied sciences (some of which have nothing to envy their predecessors), museums, archives, forums and magazines prescribe what is to be seen and what is to be considered, attributing more or less value to one trend or another. But the days of monopoly and authoritative posturing are over, clearing the way for initiative. This is the context in which a particular aesthetic has carved out a place for itself. Basically, there's nothing new here, just a commercial offering of architectural photography that has established itself by attempting to accredit a specific mode of representation. Its style is highly formalist, based on the least sought-after perspective, the symmetrical one, centered on a central vanishing point located high above the ground, where the eye of no known mammal can be found. This is the kind of perspective made possible by large-format cameras. This technique is costly, which is an advantage when it comes to fetishizing it, and it is implemented with a luxury of maniacal precautions. This architectural photograph has taken the decision to display itself as pale, as if bleached. Since 2018, its author has saturated magazines, forums and galleries with images of Fernand Pouillon's Algerian and French architecture. The point of view proposed, we should say prescribed, as a specimen of the commission he is willing to carry out for his contemporary clientele. The medium being, as it should be, the message, Pouillon's work, the pretext and hostage of this promotional campaign, is methodically hijacked and mishandled.
The very counter-sense Pouillon defended himself against
Fernand Pouillon's La photographie d’architecture provoque d’immense déceptions[8] is prophetically intelligent, and should have warned anyone about venturing into such a minefield. Stéphane Couturier understands this well, as he is careful to point out that, while he concentrates on a central perspective, most of the time he takes care to tighten his shots so as to create an almost painterly image of one of Pouillon's façades, a geometric abstraction capable of meaning in its own right.
On the contrary, the photographic campaign in question here throws itself into the trap, assigning Pouillon's buildings that it intends to document the black hole of the viewpoint at the geometric center of the facades, and straightening all perspectives accordingly. The result is a spectacular contradiction in terms, and a direct affront to the approach of this master builder, who sought above all to offer built landscapes that would be comfortable to the eye, the mind and the perceptions of the people who would live in his housing estates.
This fault alone would be crippling, but it happens to be combined with a historical fact, namely that perspective in general was imposed on the modern world from the West, and that applied to North Africa, to a universe that traditionally has a fundamentally different conception of the image and its use, the visual proposition of this Swiss photographer simply happens to be substantially colonial or neo-colonial.
These cumulative elements are overwhelming, but they are not the whole story. The white room aesthetic of this photography exudes a literally anato-pathological climate, displaying with the shamelessness of voyeurism the wounds affecting Algeria in some of its most distressing urban situations, and, in short, preventing the public from forming an idea of what the intentions of the master builder or project manager of these housing estates had been. In this sense, these images are a betrayal.
Pierre Frey, November 8, 2022
Stéphane Couturier is a photographer and visual artist who lives and works in Paris.
The three photographs we are publishing are taken from a series devoted to the great architects of the 20th century, in which he endeavors to render both the current state of certain emblematic achievements as they are used, and the main architectural features that make them masterpieces.
Having become a multidisciplinary artist, the latest developments in his work involve tapestry, ceramics and multimedia installations.
[1] Martel Andreanne, Haus Auesrbach by Walter Gropius, a phenomenology of architecture, https://histoirearchitecture19.uqam.ca/haus-auerbach-de-walter-gropius-une-phenomenologie-de-larchitecture/
[2] Walter Gropius, Architecture et société, éd. Du Linteau, 1995.
[3] On this subject, please refer to: Stephanie Sonette, Rendus d'architecture, les nouvelles icônes épinglées, in: CRITICAT 20, 2018, pp.3-17. In it, she provides an overview of the photorealistic 3D aesthetic and the alternative modes of representation that have attempted to differentiate themselves from it, and ends by highlighting the empowerment of the image produced for collectors and galleries.
[4] The author thanks Bernard Gachet for mentioning this work.
[5] Ibid. p. 31
[6] Ibid. p. 32
[8] Untitled text, signed Fernand Pouillon, from “Les Baux de Provence”, published in 1960.