A Brief History of Architecture Through Photography
A Brief History of Architecture Through Photography
On August 19th, the world photography day is celebrated, a fundamental tool for the imagery record of our society. If, on the one hand, photography is the protagonist in dialogues that involve architecture and the city, portraying historical moments and enhancing buildings, on the other hand, it guides us through the context and backstage of the moment, eternalizing the process.
The first image recorded on paper was produced by Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, a French inventor born in 1765 who was interested in Leonardo Da Vinci’s teachings on the methods and effects of the camera obscura. At the beginning of the 19th century, after several painters and draughtsmen used the inverted image resulting from the camera obscura to reproduce reality in their drawings, The inventions and discoveries related to the Industrial Revolution made it possible to fix an image projected from this tool on paper or metal. At the beginning of the 19th century, using a wooden box pointed towards the garden and a chemically treated paper, Niepce managed to print the image of his backyard on the sheet, resulting in what is considered to be the first photograph in history – which had as its main object the architecture of a residential garden.
The technique improved over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries when prints began to be made on photographic paper and the technology of the devices also evolved. With the 21st century, printed photography fell into disuse and we finally reached the digital age, with digital cameras and cell phones. With its popularization, photography has become a tool both for recording iconic family moments and great historical scenes, as a means of perpetuating the banal, everyday life and context, becoming an almost investigative object of the past, which is also seen by the history of architecture. Besides recording the great buildings as objects and works of art to be admired, photography was also able to record the constructive processes of emblematic works.
The Empire State Building, for example, began construction in 1930 in New York, marking a fundamental advance in architecture with the use of concrete and steel that, combined, allowed buildings to grow vertically, initiating a new global process of urban densification. Under the guidance of architecture firm Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Associates and construction company Starrett Bros. & Eken, the structure went up at a rate of 4.5 floors per week, completing the 102 floors in just 1 year and 45 days of construction. Photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine recorded the process of building the Empire State in iconic photographs that show the risks that this technique would bring to construction since then.
From the 1940s onwards, modern architecture was consecrated worldwide with names such as Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. The construction of Brasília, in the late 1950s, showed the use of reinforced concrete in ways never seen before. With a construction site literally the size of a city, the odyssey attracted workers from all over the country to a remote region, creating urban clusters that would later become the well-known satellite cities. The French-Brazilian photographer Marcel Gautherot captured in images the construction site of that period, registering the immensity of the challenge of building an entire city in 4 years.
At the same time that Gautherot’s photography recorded modern architecture being literally built, other photographs mark what would be considered its end. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the iconic Pruitt-Igoe housing estate is considered a landmark of modernist architecture: with almost 3,000 units, the project intended to meet almost half of the housing deficit signaled by the government in the 1950s in St. Louis, in the United States. The decline of the project began after the works were completed, in 1955, and less than 20 years later, in July 1972, the first stage of demolition of the complex was completed, widely recorded in videos and photographs.
The development of digital technology linked to architecture in the postmodernism of the 1980s also impacts the way of building and construction sites. During the early 2000s, photographer Iwan Baan captured what this more streamlined construction site would look like in the CCTV project in Beijing, China, conceived by Rem Koolhaas’ OMA. In addition to photos of the construction site, Baan also records in images the impact of the building on its surroundings, highlighting the contrast between the scale of CCTV and all its technology and the small houses in the neighborhood.
Based on the images of Baan, Gautherot, Hine and many others, we perceive the potential of photography beyond the descriptive register; they show us how photography informs and provokes debates, being able to stimulate reflections about its objects and historical moments.
