The Avions Voisin C7 was manufactured between 1924 and 1928 and featured a groundbreaking design for the time. The extensive use of glass, aluminum bodywork, and sharp angles hinted at the shapes of an aircraft. This was the car that Le Corbusier liked to park in front of his buildings - the architect considered this car to be the ultimate translation of modern age and technology combined into a single object. He was convinced that architecture had much to learn from this machine.
With 3 gears and a 30-horsepower engine, it is hard to imagine anyone using this car today since the automobile industry has experienced countless innovations since that time. Corbusier's architecture, however, doesn't seem so outdated, but the cars pictured alongside the brand new buildings are actually what reveals how old the photograph is. Locating elements that can point out the time period of a photograph is very effective, especially in architecture. Some elements can make this task much easier, for example, household appliances, computer monitors, or other particular details.
The subject of documenting the period of time in which an architectural image was created has been on the table for a long time now. However, it is not only about what the photographs show, but how they show it. Ignasi de Solà Morales, in his book Territorios (2002), offers an interesting insight into the relationship between the city and its images. According to him, the way of representing a city - and, therefore, its architectures - changes as technology develops and, more importantly, when the current media aesthetics no longer respond to the complexities of the city and urban life.
Paris, London, and Vienna, which the author refers to as capital cities, have shown intense urban and industrial development since the mid-19th century. Not surprisingly, the most common form of visual representation of the world up to then - paintings - was gradually replaced by photography, a technology from that era that becomes a tool for capturing the great transformations that took place in those urban centers. "Images of accumulation, of agglomeration, of the masses on the streets," marked the period. The author goes on to say that "the capital city presents itself in these ways. Distant perspectives focusing on a public monument, a railway station, or an opera theater replace the picturesque aspect of the 18th-century veduta."[1]
Cities like Barcelona and Berlin experienced rapid growth and structural changes in the first decades of the 20th century, together with a shift in the forms of representation of urban life. Photographs that focused on monuments or architectural masterpieces no longer managed to portray these cities that were fragmented throughout the territory so the pictures started to be replaced by photomontages and collages that didn't focus on a specific subject but instead revealed a blurred, uncentralized view of the cities. Collages by Paul Citroën, László Moholy-Nagy, and El Lissitzky, just to name a few, contribute to an outlook that not only portrays the city's growth but also the social and cultural atmosphere of that historical moment.
These transformations in the styles of representation of the city, as a result of the particularities of the current times, took place throughout the entire 20th century and can also be observed in architectural images. The photographs of the Case Study Houses by Julius Shulman are a fine example. The project was sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine between 1945 and 1966 and had internationally renowned architects to design functional and affordable single-family residences that would embody the spirit of that time - a period marked by the end of World War II and the intense growth and sprawl of American cities. Some of these projects became emblematic works of the so-called International Style.
These houses represented more than just architecture, but a lifestyle - a dream -, and the images should express this desire. Shulman's photographs of Houses #9, #20B, #21B, and #22, for example, are not merely a documentation of architectural materials - walls, floor, ceiling -, they reflect a modern space that is experienced and occupied by its inhabitants, who are also modern. Furniture, clothing, and sometimes even colors can transport us to a time around the 1940s and 1960s when smoking was not bad for your health and the dream of every American citizen was to have their own house in the suburbs with a swimming pool and a car - far more modern than Le Corbusier's Avions Voisin C7 - in the garage. Nowadays, the images of Shulman are outdated. However, his ability to represent not only space but also time is undeniable.
Another way of capturing time can be seen in the extreme long-exposure photographs of Michael Wesely. The German artist created cameras that allow the same negative film to be exposed for long periods: hours, days, or even years. The result is an overlapping image with many layers, sharp and blurred, that somehow depicts everything that went through the frame while the shutter was open. His most famous series is probably the reconstruction of Potsdamer-Leipziger Platz in Berlin between 1997 and 1999, which resulted in images that blend the city landscape in the background, scaffolds, and smudges of new buildings. Guilherme Wisnik states that "the disruption of the sharpness in the scenes casts light on the fact that every synthetic image is an illusion since they always carry countless hidden aspects that we cannot grasp, or that we prefer not to see." [2]
Many aspects of the present-day, i.e. the times we live in, have been increasingly incorporated into the images of a space, either through an aesthetic approach - the collages of Moholy-Nagy and the extreme long-exposure photographs of Wesely for instance - or through elements and objects displayed in the picture - remember Le Corbusier's car and Shulman's photographs. Most recently, in the course of 2020, many projects submitted for publication in ArchDaily have shown people wearing masks. These people are more than just human-scale figures, they are actors in these images, witnesses of the historical period in which these works were photographed. Whether in residential environments such as the RM House by Pedro Miguel Santos, commercial spaces like the Apple Marina Bay Sands by Foster + Partners, or urban areas such as a renovation project in Shenzhen, this decision to incorporate them into the architectural image is proof of how the virus has changed everyday life, changed how we live and how we relate to spaces.
Masked, 1.5m away from each other, these human figures have unveiled the astonishing truth that we are not living an exception: coronavirus is already our history; coronalife [3], it’s our present.
Notes
- [1] Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. Territorios. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002 / 62 pp.
- [2] Wisnik, Guilherme. Dentro do Nevoeiro: arquitetura, arte e tecnologia contemporânea. São Paulo: Ubu Editora, 2018 / 352 pp.
- [3] Beiguelman, Giselle. Coronavida: pandemia, cidade e cultura urbana. São Paulo: ECidade, 2020.
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topic: Human Scale. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and projects. Learn more about our monthly topics here. As always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.
