Picturing Architecture Otherwise: the voguing of the Maison Mallet‐Stevens

Abstract

This essay pursues the answer to a simple question: How was it that Robert Mallet‐Stevens’s career masterpiece, the Maison Mallet‐Stevens, built in Paris in 1927, found its way into a 1929 Hollywood movie vehicle for Greta Garbo? To respond to this query, this essay confects an understanding of the Maison Mallet‐Stevens as photographic image. It explores the designer’s longstanding involvement with the French film industry, and his understanding of set décor as photogenic and fully geared to its reception by the camera. It also probes Mallet‐Stevens’s view of his architecture as publicistic, that is, as presented within the press and as capturing specific visual operations of publicity, especially montage. To make the argument, this essay describes Mallet‐Stevens’s collaboration with Thérèse Bonney, the Paris‐based American photographer and press agent. Bonney apprised Mallet‐Stevens of photography’s informational value and especially its propagandistic potential, fostering in him an understanding of his craft as engaged in an exchange with other visual industries, particularly fashion and film. As he came to acknowledge the productive capacities of these proximate realms, Mallet‐Stevens also indexed their specific production modes to his increasingly image‐attuned architecture. Doing so, the designer challenged a time‐honoured understanding of architecture as autonomous professional activity. Instead, Mallet‐Stevens came to see his architecture as a manifold, mutable, visual world capable of colonizing and annexing allied industries, vastly expanding its scope, allure and desirability – the very functions, coincidentally, it served for Garbo.