Abstract
In the first decade of the 20th century, French illustrated news journals — and especially L’Illustration — published articles on the skyscrapers of New York. Through the diachronic analysis of word-image relations at work in these journals, this article reveals how the publishing of this new building type — within an equally new cityscape — moved within a single decade towards new forms that were the product of inverted hierarchies between the written and the graphic. The spectacular double-page photographs taken with an unusual viewing axis gave the clearest expression of it. These photographs, preceding those famously taken by Alvin Coburn, were a means developed by the journal editors to convey strong sensations to its readership. With this evolution towards architecture as sensational news in which the reader became the protagonist, the general-interest journals offered a completely different approach visually compared to the conventional way architecture journals published the same skyscrapers. This episode in publishing New York buildings represented the beginning of an important rift between the general public’s and the architectural expert’s ways of perceiving and experiencing architecture and the city.
Highlights
Patrick Leitner*In the first decade of the 20th century, French illustrated news journals — and especially L’Illustration — published articles on the skyscrapers of New York
Since the words and the images used for this approach kept the reader outside of the buildings and in the position of a distant observer, the news provoked no particular emotional response. This fact-based reporting would change with the reports on New York skyscraper disasters — potential and real — that appeared in both L’Illustration and La vie illustrée in the same period
La vie illustrée published a photograph of Manhattan taken from New York Bay
Summary
In the first decade of the 20th century, French illustrated news journals — and especially L’Illustration — published articles on the skyscrapers of New York. The spectacular double-page photographs taken with an unusual viewing axis gave the clearest expression of it These photographs, preceding those famously taken by Alvin Coburn, were a means developed by the journal editors to convey strong sensations to its readership. With this evolution towards architecture as sensational news in which the reader became the protagonist, the general-interest journals offered a completely different approach visually compared to the conventional way architecture journals published the same skyscrapers. This episode in publishing New York buildings represented the beginning of an important rift between the general public’s and the architectural expert’s ways of perceiving and experiencing architecture and the city
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