In our image-conscious culture, certain buildings-just like certain celebrities-become famous through famous photographs. Think of that black-and-white picture of another glass house, this one from 1960, ultramodern and cantilevered off the edge of a hillside, high above the Los Angeles basin at night. It’s been printed in magazines, books and advertisements again and again. Through the glass walls you can see two women in full skirts, sitting on sleek chairs, the orbs of the ceiling fixtures hanging down like full moons, the lights of the city glittering for miles beneath them. You know the image-it’s much better known than the architect of the house (Pierre Konig) or the photographer (Julius Shulman).
Or there’s that celebrated color photograph of a house designed by Rem Koolhaas just outside Paris, the Villa Dall’Ava. It’s got a rooftop swimming pool, and in the picture, taken at night, a woman is poised to dive in, while in the background looms the Eiffel Tower, all lit up.
Both these pictures, while elegant and dramatic, are incredible distortions of architecture. In the L.A. photo, you only see a small corner of the house; if someone showed you the front door, you’d never recognize it. In the Paris picture, you don’t see the house at all, though the photo’s frequently been published to illustrate the architecture-against the wishes of Koolhaas who, naturally, dislikes it. Yet each photograph does evoke a wonderfully romantic spirit. Houses do have many moods, and you could argue that each image captures at least one facet of the experience of the architecture. And after all, architecture isn’t just about how a building looks, it is about experience-how it feels to be inside a space.
Yet in a small photograph, printed on the page of a book or magazine, those experiences are the hardest to capture: it’s impossible to feel the awesome vastness of, say, the Pantheon in Rome, or Grand Central Station in New York City. Huge scale defeats the limits of most photography. And while a flat picture can convey the graphic power of the downward spiral of a staircase in a still frame-not unlike Hitchcock did with moving images in his films-to really experience the full wooziness of vertigo, you’d have to lean over the staircase yourself.
Nonetheless, architectural photography continues to be a prime content provider for art books. Veteran photographer Ezra Stoller has been scouring his archives to bring out a series of modest little books (published by Princeton Architectural Press), each devoted to his black-and-white photographs of one modern building-the gleaming United Nations, the winged TWA terminal at JFK, the elegantly spare Seagram Building on Park Avenue. His aim with all the details and overviews of each project is documentary. Meanwhile on the West Coast, Julius Shulman (of the cantilevering L.A. house) has been exalting classic modernist California design in several big glossy volumes for Taschen.
Shulman’s best pictures, in black and white, are rich in effects-the stark contrasts of deep shadow and brilliant sunshine, and the more diffuse glows of twilight and night. Some of his photographs of modern glass houses in Palm Springs and L.A. in the ’40s and ’50s-with their sleek patios and shimmering swimming pools-are so redolent of the era in which they were built you can practically hear the Sinatra tunes wafting in the air and the ice clinking in the cocktail glasses.
Some buildings, like supermodels, always photograph well-they just have good bones-no matter what they really look like in person. And though a single image can become the enduring expression of one work of design, most great buildings defy definition in an iconic shot.
I know a historian whose passion is the Empire State Building. She spent a year photographing the skyscraper from a tripod placed on a balcony-the same view, in every kind of weather, in every kind of light. I once saw her project: 200 slides of the building, one clicking by about every three seconds or so, while “Rhapsody in Blue” played on the stereo (the Gershwin piece, like the building’s design, is from the 1920s). It sounds boring, but it wasn’t. The building never looked the same, or gave off quite the same feeling, from one picture to the next. The message here? Just this: don’t forget that an image, no matter how powerful, is merely a representation of one moment, one view. If you want to experience the real thing, you have to see it for yourself.
