Review: Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century, by Claire Zimmerman

Abstract

Claire Zimmerman Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 416 pp., 158 b/w illus. $35 (paper), ISBN 9780816683352 Architectural scholar Claire Zimmerman, author of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (2007) and coeditor of Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (2010), has written another important book that extends her research on German and British modernism into the burgeoning field of visual media studies.1 An impressively researched book, Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century explores the complex reciprocal relationships between buildings and photographs before, between, and after the two world wars. Zimmerman uses the term photographic architecture to describe two types of interrelated cultural production: photographs of buildings for either commercial or avant-garde purposes, and buildings whose design and reception are informed by the logics and effects of photographs. She aims to “historicize those effects, and to make them relevant to the present and future” (5). Zimmerman constructs a compelling alternative history of modern rationalism by tracing a range of productive tensions between buildings and photographs. She begins with a discussion of German modernism before World War I, carefully surveying a series of little-known PhD dissertations written between 1910 and 1914 by Walter Curt Behrendt, Adolf Behne, Paul Frankl, Paul Zucker, Walter Muller-Wulckow, and Siegfried Kracauer.2 Zimmerman convincingly argues that these six early scholars were able to conduct pioneering research on different models of Bildarchitektur —image surfaces on or in buildings—because architectural structure and skin were beginning to technologically and conceptually delaminate. Just as building envelopes attained freedom from structure, photographs of buildings began to circulate rapidly. This was no innocent coincidence. One of Zimmerman's most intriguing observations is that this trajectory of early modern operative history celebrated surface before World War I, but it “died out after 1918” (31) and was replaced by theories of space . Subsequent sections analyze the “intermedial” relationships between buildings and photographs in the interwar architecture of the Bauhaus …