roel Griffioen is a student in the Visual Arts, Media & Architecture MPhil programme at

VU University Amsterdam and editor of Kunstlicht.

The rhetoric of the photographic image in Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture

IMAGInG PUrItY roel Griffioen

12 Kunstlicht · jrg. 32 · 2011 nr. 3 · medialiteit / mediality

During the interbellum image production, and more specifically photography, became a vital tool in the dissemination and promotion of modern architecture. roel Griffioen shows how le Corbusier rhetorically deployed imagery in his key publication Vers une architecture (1923), in order to establish the ideal of a ‘pure’ architecture. What effect did this have on the ontological relationship between the image and the object?

A man who had his portrait painted by Trübner asked the artist not to forget the wrinkles and folds on his face. Trübner pointed to the window and said: ‘Cross the way there’s a photographer. If you want to have wrinkles and folds then you’d better hire him, he’ll put ‘em all in; me, I paint history.’1

— Siegfried Kracauer Photography draws pictures, pretty or not so pretty. The effect is to distract people from the thing itself. […] Photography deceives.2

— Adolf Loos

i One does not have to be an architectural history buff to recognize the building pictured in the most famous faux ad of the series Advertisements for Architecture produced by Bernard Tschumi in 1978 (fig. 1). The ramp that forms a sharp arrowhead shape in the foreground and the characteristic curve of the sunscreen on the roof instantly reveal that we are looking at Villa Savoye (1928-1931) by Le Corbusier, one of the most canonical structures of modern architecture. Although recognizable, the image presented in this Advertisement is at the same time elusive. The photograph shows a neglected, worn-out building, the plaster peeling off the formerly smooth surfaces exposing brick-work that is meant to be concealed. Barely three-and-a-half decades old (the photograph was taken in 1965), the building looks incredibly aged; not at all like the villa we have encountered in countless books on architecture, handbooks, and magazines. In fact, it is not only the disintegration of the façade we are observing, it is also the disintegra-tion of an image; a powerful composite-image that has been constructed through exposure to innu-

merable photographs in innumerable publications and has nestled itself into the collective mind. It is this image – this cavity in time in which the building will always be presented as freshly whitewashed, clean and radical – that Tschumi attacks. The slogan of the poster declares in bold white letters: ‘The most architectural thing about this building is the state of decay in which it is.’ ‘How sad it is!’ Oscar Wilde lets Dorian Gray exclaim, ‘I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. […] If it were only the other way!’3 Dorian, as we know, had his way. He stayed young and innocent, while his portrait – the imprint of his condition on ‘a particular day of June’ – grew old, weary and vile. Dorian went out, invaded life, and immersed himself in its many attractions, while the artwork was locked up in the attic, where it silently absorbed the consequences of its master’s actions. The relation between Dorian Gray and the picture of Dorian Gray is – to borrow from the idiom of photography – a negative image of the relation between Villa Savoye and the composite-image of Villa Savoye. The house is confined to its particular location and degenerates, while the picture goes out into the world, performs, and produces meaning, status and publicity. It goes without saying that the physical building facili-tated the composite-image – conceived it, so to speak. But after the birth of the image, the building devolved into a redundant appendix of the image-building.4 The physical Villa Savoye was declared uninhabitable by the owners in the early thirties, abandoned in the late thirties, occupied by the Germans in the forties, transformed into a barn in the fifties.5 It was defaced, disgraced, desegregated. Meanwhile, the image-building confidently

13 Roel griffioen · imaging purity

the ‘image’ of architecture increasingly mobile and protean. As Walter Benjamin remarked, techno-logical reproduction placed ‘the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain’ and allowed ‘the cathedral [to leave] its site to be received in the studio of an art lover’.6 Avant-garde architects were quick to realize the possibilities created by this development. For them, photography became a vital tool to disclose, explain and propagate their ideas and projects. Often, the ‘image’ of a building proved a more potent medium for self-promotion than the actual building. Not concrete, glass or steel, but paper became the most important construction material in what architecture historian Beatriz Colomina dubbed ‘architecture production’: the construction, distribution and consumption of ideas, ideology and style through channels (i.e., media) like manifestoes, specialist and avant-garde magazines, portfolios, critical books, lectures, exhibitions but also radio, film, literature and theatre.7 In the forefront of this development was Le Corbusier – ‘the first architect to fully understand the mass media,’ according to Colomina.8 Remedi-ating his architecture through all the channels he had access to, Le Corbusier ‘literally reengineered the way we access and experience architecture. […] In that sense, he brought architecture into the twentieth century.’9 Thanks to the writings of Colomina and other scholars interested in the broad field of ‘architecture production’, the effect of the partisan mobilisation of the photographic image by Le Corbusier and modern architects on architectural history has become a serious re-search theme.10 What remains largely uninvesti-gated is how this mobilization of the image affected ideas about the ontological relation between the photograph and the building, the image and the object. By focusing on Vers une architecture (1923), arguably Le Corbusier’s most important book and indisputably a key document in the historiography of the Modern Movement, I will show how Le Corbusier mobilized photogra-phy to establish the ideal of a ‘pure’ architecture. Secondly, I will try to explore how this strategy changed the status of the building itself. Was it the actual architecture that the photographs made accessible, or merely images of architecture?11

multiplied itself, performed on many stages simultaneously, testified from behind the countless pulpits of modern architecture, successfully negoti-ated a key position in the canon, became famous, and all of this without obtaining a single wrinkle or grey hair. The Villa Savoye we know is the image, not the building. iiThis allegorical first paragraph is meant to make clear just how important image-production, and more specifically photography, is for our experi-ence of architecture. After a long take-off roll in the nineteenth century, the definite establishment of this new regime took place in Europe during the interwar period. It was there and then that evolving printing technology and distribution infrastructure, combined with the internationaliza-tion of intellectual and cultural discourses, made

1. Bernard Tschumi, Advertisements for Architecture, 1975. Source:

B. Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1994,

p. 64.

14 Kunstlicht · jrg. 32 · 2011 nr. 3 · medialiteit / mediality

– would be wholesome and unpolluted, as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown already observed in their 1972 classic Learning from Las Vegas: ‘Purist architecture was […] a reaction against nineteenth-century eclecticism. […] The mixing of styles meant the mixing of media.’14 Influenced heavily by the theories of archi-tecture historian Siegfried Giedion, one of the leading ideologues of the modern movement, Benjamin follows this teleology of purification. To him, eclectic architecture proved that indicators of the future are often camouflaged as relics of the past. Nineteenth-century architects mimicked the ‘pillars of Pompeian columns’ as ‘factories mimic private villa’s, as later the first railroad stations are modelled on chalets.’15 The crust of ornamentation employed on the façades of these temples of progress (factories, train stations) masked both their function and their structural originality. Hidden behind a veil of decoration, technology awaited ‘emancipation’.

iiiTraditionally, the history of modern architecture is pictured as the ascension of Mount Purgatory. Architects actively took part in this mystification. Already in 1908, Adolf Loos exemplified such a teleological notion of architectural history in his famous book Ornament und Verbrechen (Ornament and Crime). To him, ‘the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use. […] We have outgrown ornament. […] Soon the streets of the cities will glow like white walls!’12 Similarly, Le Corbusier wrote: ‘Culture is the flowering of the effort to select. Selection means rejection, pruning, cleans-ing; the clear and naked emergence of the Essen-tial.’13 Loos, Le Corbusier, and other modernists proclaimed that architecture had to be cleansed, liberated from ornament, from historical and contextual ballast, from narrative, symbolism, and sensationalism. The objective was to arrive at a state in which the ‘medium’ architecture – to use the word medium somewhat anachronistically

2. Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture. Nouvelle édition [...], Paris 1966, pp. 106 -107.

15 Roel griffioen · imaging purity

and vehicles are boldly juxtaposed with photo-graphs of Greek temples and pyramids (fig. 2). As if to say (and indeed, he does so several times): if you want to see what architecture will look like, look at engineering. To Le Corbusier, the engineer represents science, ratio, determination, while the architect is ‘an artist’ – to put it bluntly: a decorator. Engineer-ing embodies the ideal union between form and function, between structure and utility.19 The engineer is detached from history and has no interest in applying narrative, symbolism or ornament to his creations and therefore is perfectly equipped to create ‘clean’ structures. To conceive the engineer as such fitted perfectly with the functionalist agenda of modern architecture in the 1920s. Yet it is safe to state that Le Corbusier’s fascination with engineering arose from an aesthetic, even an artistic interest. The elegant and clear-cut looks of bridges, grain silos, cars, and steam liners foreshadowed the fresh and uncon-taminated aesthetics he envisioned for modern architecture. While architecture had degenerated into a historically polluted, semiotically over-strained, vulgar enterprise, engineering uncon-sciously obeyed the laws of universal beauty: ‘The engineers of today find themselves in accord with the principles that Bramante and Raphael had applied long ago.’20 It is this visual quality of bridges and grain silos that Le Corbusier called ‘the Engineer’s Aesthetic’.21 This phrase immediately discloses the incongruity in the architect’s fondness for engi-neering: it is a visual appreciation for structures that are not meant to have formal qualities; it glorifies the appearance of these structures but shows no interest in the functionalist cause of their particular look. In that sense, it is a photographic appreciation: it is superficial. The photographic gaze cannot penetrate the outer shells of a machine to permeate the machinery (fig. 3). This problem is also touched upon by Benjamin, when citing Brecht: ‘A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about these institutions.’ A ‘simple reproduction of reality’ does not neces-sarily tell us anything about the workings of reality.22 The photographic gaze easily bounces back from the surfaces of things, aestheticises appearances and transforms the object into an image.23

Despite the tendentious historical view underlying his words, Benjamin does point out the challenge set by modern architecture: how to visualize the not-yet-known, the shape of things to come? ‘Just what forms, now lying concealed within machines, will be determining for our epoch we are only beginning to surmise?’ Ben-jamin asks rhetorically.16 Years later, he rephrases the question: ‘Do not all great triumphs in the area of form come into existence […] as technological discoveries?’17 iVIt is hardly surprising that in search for new models and a new imagery, Le Corbusier turned his attention to objects outside of the realm of architecture. ‘The lesson of the machine lies in the pure relationship of cause and effect. Purity, econo-my, the reach for wisdom. A new desire: an aesthetic of purity, of exactitude […]’, Le Corbusier wrote in 1926.18 Three years earlier he published his manifesto Vers une architecture, a book famous for showcasing the works of engineers rather than architects. Images of machines, industrial edifices,

3. The gaze cannot penetrate the outer shell of an object. Source:

Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture. Nouvelle édition [...], Paris 1966, p. 236.

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hundred photographs and drawings, the book is as much a visual exercise for the reader – or in this case the ‘optique lecteur’26 – as it is a textual one.27 At the time Vers une architecture was pub-lished, the imagery was already heralded as one of the main selling points of the book. In a publicity brochure, Le Corbusier claims that in the book he avoids ‘flowery language, ineffectual descriptions’, and that his argument relies instead on ‘facts exploding under the eyes of the reader by force of images.’28 The idea that images can disclose evidence (‘facts’) seems to point towards a firm belief in the transparency of the medium photogra-phy. Although it is hard to say just how widely accepted this confidence in the medium was during the interbellum, the suggestion of a correlation between photography and truth was certainly not alien to many writers on the subject.

VVers une architecture was not conceived as a book-in-one-piece, but is a compilation of essays published in L’Espirit Nouveau in 1920 and 1921, complemented with a final chapter. Nevertheless, because of the overall organization of the text into short paragraphs, the mantra-like repetition of statements and aphorisms, and the rhetorical interlacing of visual and textual arguments, the reader experiences the book as a single, unequivo-cal, throbbing manifesto in defence of modern architecture, and more particularly Le Corbusier’s specific understanding of modern architecture. According to some recent exegeses, the publication of Vers une architecture marked the turning point in the development of architectural theory from a mainly text-based enterprise into a primarily visual phenomenon.24 Indeed, it seems justified to affirm that Vers une architecture owes much of its influence and reputation to its revolu-tionary ‘visuality’.25 Illustrated with over two

4a-c. Le Corbusier’s Villa

Schwob (1916) as pictured

in L’Esprit Nouveau and the

actual status (right, bottom).

Source: B. Colomina, ‘Le

Corbusier and Photography’,

Assemblage 2 (1987) 4, pp.

6-23.

17 Roel griffioen · imaging purity

For instance, the American photographer Edward Weston wrote: ‘Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium.’ To Weston, photographic vision symbolized a new morality also present in ‘honest’ architecture: ‘And contemporary vision, the new life, is based on honest approach to all problems, be they morals or art. False fronts to buildings, false standards in morals, subterfuges and mummery of all kinds, must be, will be scrapped.’29 Weston and other theorists regarded a photograph to be a mechani-cally generated chemical inscription of reality. In their view, photography overcame the subjectivity of painting and other forms of representation.30 Photography was not obscured by experience, narrative and expectation, hence could offer an objective view on the world.31 This, in our view, obsolete equation of photography with reality is perhaps less innocuous

than we might expect. Roland Barthes for instance agrees that prima vista a photograph seems to have the status of ‘message without code’, functioning as a ‘perfect analogon’ and a ‘mechanical analogue of reality’.32 Ironically, Barthes writes, it is due to this suggestion of unfiltered denotation that the photograph is actually highly suited to transmit an inscribed message. ‘Trick effects’ like framing, composition, selection, retouching, montage and captioning intervene in the plane of denotation without any warning because this ‘treatment’ takes place in production stages that are concealed from the viewer.33 Many of the photographic images used by Le Corbusier in his publications from the 1920s received a heavy ‘treatment’, but the traces of this treatment were almost always carefully effaced to maximize the suggestion of immediacy. Profiting from the myth of transparency, the illustrations

5. Taken from S. Von Moos, Le Corbusier:

Elements of a Synthesis, revised and expanded

edition, Rotterdam 2009, p. 58.

18 Kunstlicht · jrg. 32 · 2011 nr. 3 · medialiteit / mediality

conceal their powerful rhetoric charge. Le Cor-busier, self-trained in darkroom-alchemy, could even make a non-modern structure look modern. Rayner Banham has already pointed out that the articles in L’Esprit Nouveau that were to be reprint-ed in Vers une architecture had all appeared by January 1922, months before Le Corbusier would start working on ‘his first Modern house’.34 The work made in earlier stages of his career was ‘suppressed’ by Le Corbusier with the exception of ‘the latest of his early works’, Villa Schwob in Chaux-de-Fonds from 1916. This house, designed in a ‘brisk, up-to-the-minute eclecticism’ (Banham) that looked already slightly outdated in the 1920s, was published extensively in L’Esprit Nouveau in 1922 and also plays a minor role in Vers une architecture. In order to partake in Le Corbusier’s new argument, it had to be re-appropriated by the author-architect.35 By comparing the published images with archive material depicting the actual status of the house between 1916 and 1920, Beatriz Colomina shows that the photographs are heavily manipulated in order to suggest a certain proto-purist aesthetic (fig. 4a-c).36 The gardens have been cleared of plants, bushes and other sources of visual noise. The pergola leading to the vestibule is completely erased and the dilapidated window of the vestibule is replaced by a clear-cut rectangular opening. Air brushing the outer wall created an arrow directing our gaze towards the house, itself composed of well-defined, distinct forms and lines. By removing the entire background, a visual vacuum is created in which the ‘idea’ of the house can freely operate, not burdened by context or time, disconnected from what Benjamin dubbed ‘the Here and Now’.37 Accordingly, Le Corbusier retrospectively reworked Villa Schwob into a prefiguration of the architecture to come.

ViThis example is by no means unique. Stanislaus von Moos was right in stating that to Le Corbusier, architecture belonged to the realm of ideas.38 Consequently, the moment the pure ‘idea’ material-ized into an actual building it was instantly impaired with entropy. Photography – or rather, the production and manipulation of photographic images – offered a possibility to restore this ideal state, to undo the idea from all the ‘dust and grime’ of the world of phenomena. Le Corbusier’s method

can be described as delving for the desired image in existing photographs in order to bring the ‘idea’ to surface. The pictures in Vers une architecture are for the most part second-hand materials: cuttings from advertisements and commercial brochures, postcards, images derived from machinery catalogues, photo books et cetera. Photographer, author or source are never mentioned; the images appear in an outwardly neutral and depersonalized and thus seemingly objective space on the page. The photographs of the Parthenon for instance are taken from the albums of Frédéric Boissonnas but are not attributed to him and are rigorously cropped and reframed by Le Corbusier.39 Likewise, the photographs of American and Argentinean grain silos were ‘borrowed’ from Walter Gropius’ 1913 publication Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbund (fig. 5).40 These silos are presented in a similar mode as Villa Schwob was some years before in L’Esprit Nouveau: in full clarity, with freshly traced lines, in a vacuum. In one case, an entire top level has been erased to develop the lucidity necessary for the argument. It is important to note – as for instance Banham and Colomina did – that neither Le Corbusier nor Gropius ever saw these particular industrial buildings with their own eyes. The images are orphaned, products of the very ‘Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ that they helped reinforce in the service of Le Corbusier.41 ViiThe use of images as ‘visual arguments’ was not a strategy introduced by Le Corbusier. One only has to recall the famous book Contrasts (1836) by the Victorian architect August Pugin, which consisted entirely of juxtapositions of drawings depicting ‘good’ and ‘bad’ architecture. One illustration may for instance show a depleted, industrialized city, a visually unstable collection of constructions, including smoking chimneys and a prison, where-as the other may well depict the same city in the Middle Ages, as a stylistically harmonious architec-tural environment, hinting at an equally harmoni-ous social and moral environment. Le Corbusier’s exploitation of images is less straightforward. Rather than illustrating clear dichotomies (‘good’ versus ‘bad’), Le Corbusier tied text, typography, images and composition together into firm knots – not unlike the epistemic mon-tages Walter Benjamin called ‘dialectical imagery’.

19 Roel griffioen · imaging purity

A powerful example of how meaning is generated through these montages can be found in the chapter La Leçon de Rome (The Lesson of Rome). According to Le Corbusier, Rome (the city in general and its architecture in particular) lacks ‘verbosity, good arrangement, a single idea, daring and unity in construction, the use of elementary shapes’; in other words, ‘a sane morality’.42 This so-called lesson culminates in the last paragraph (IV) titled Rome and Ourselves, a short text accom-panied by a table with four illustrations (fig. 6). If we run a Barthesian analysis of this paragraph, we notice that the two structures (i.e., text and image) reciprocally reinforce and intensify one another. ‘Rome is a bazaar in full swing, and a picturesque one’, Le Corbusier writes with disgust. ‘There you find every sort of horror (see the four reproduc-tions here given) and the bad taste of the Roman Renaissance.’43 The parenthesis is significant as a textual device wedged into the sentence, suspend-ing the continuum of the running text, command-ing the reader to study the images. A particular reading of the images is evidently already antici-pated – or even primed – by the words preceding the parenthesis: ‘There you find every sort of horror’. ‘There’ refers to the word ‘Rome’ in the previous sentence, but – functioning as a double agent – also to the Rome one expects to encounter in the images. The first sentence itself (‘Rome is a bazaar in full swing, and a picturesque one’) provokes an image in the mind; a ‘bazaar in full swing’ suggests the hustle-bustle of a crowded

marketplace, with all its clatter and commotion. Before closing in on the images themselves, let us linger around them somewhat longer and consider what Barthes called ‘anchorage’, the contextual embedding of the images. Several tricks have been pulled at this level to suggest objectivity, or rather, transparency. First of all, there is the methodical arrangement of the images in a table divided into parts – a neat, quasi-scientific organi-zation. The word ‘reproduction’ (in the parenthesis mentioned above) implies a certain neutrality, as if the images are simply reproduced and can speak for themselves. The dry and factual captions accompanying the ‘reproductions’ (for instance: ‘Renaissance Rome. The Palazzo Barberini’) aim at the same effect. These captions can be seen as signifiers of a certain connotation, paradoxically the connotation of ‘pure denotation’, in other words: objectivity. Now, let us consider the images themselves. As we have seen with the case of Villa Schwob, Le Corbusier presents ‘good’ architecture in full clarity, with the depicted structure sitting comfort-ably in the centre of an otherwise almost empty image. How different the ‘horrors of Rome’ are portrayed. Here every means is employed to make the image diffuse, or even destabilizing. Since most photographs in Vers une architecture are pictures of the exteriors of buildings and structures, it is telling that in this table three out of four images show interiors. The only building pictured from the outside, the Palazzo di Giustizia is imaged in

6. Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture. Nouvelle

édition [...], Paris 1966, pp. 138-139.

20 Kunstlicht · jrg. 32 · 2011 nr. 3 · medialiteit / mediality

such a way that it cannot meet Le Corbusier’s definition of architecture as ‘the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light’.44 There is no ‘play of masses’, just a belle façade: a flat screen with ornaments applied to it. The top-right image displays a similar flatness. A wall with frescoes (painted by the sixteenth- century artist Pellegrino Tibaldi, not mentioned in the caption) is viewed in a mercilessly frontal manner, cropped in such a way that any indicator of depth is absent. We see ‘real’ architectural elements (two doors), but know that the scene depicted could never pass for architecture. It is painting, and even in its worst incarnation: trompe-l’œil. But the picture evoking Rome’s horrors most vividly is the one at the bottom on the left. Chaos reigns inside the picture frame: there are no outlines, borders or architectural elements to hold on to. The eye has no place to rest, to use a Corbusian metaphor. Distinguishing the parts from the whole is made utterly impossible. In fact, it takes a while to discover that this whirlpool of entangled bodies is The Allegory of Divine Provi-dence and Barberini Power, the famous ceiling fresco by Pietro da Cortona. Witnessing these representations of constructional terrors and architectural anathemas, it is hard not to agree with the last sentences of the paragraph: ‘Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life. The Grand Prix de Rome and the Villa Medici are the cancer of French architecture.’45 ViiiIn 1924, a year after the publication of Vers une architecture, Adolf Loos wrote a polemical text warning against the ‘deceptive methods’ of some of his contemporaries who ‘base their reputation on pretty drawings and fine photographs’.46 Although it is unknown if Loos specifically had Le Corbusier in mind when writing this, it is interesting to note his fear that representations of architecture would gain dominance over the architecture itself. Judging from the success and impact of Vers une architecture, this apprehension was not unground-ed. It would be unfair and even ignorant to discard the Le Corbusier of the 1920s as simply a manufacturer of a Potemkin-like version of

modern architecture. Yet it seems plausible that his sensitivity to the possibilities of photography had a strong effect on his building designs. The photo-graphic gaze, with its concentration on surfaces, stimulated the migration of architectural meaning to the outer shell, to the appearances of things. Despite Le Corbusier’s insistence on medial purity and structural and material integrity, his architec-ture was thoroughly photogénique: geared to the camera.47 Moreover, his villas, like the 1920s private buildings designed by fellow avant-garde architects, transcended their building status to function as pamphlets, statements on architectural theory. Villa Savoye, designed half a decade after the publication of Vers une architecture, was conceived as a ‘wish-image’ (to loosely use a term by Ben-jamin) of the not-yet-known. The villa was certainly not mimicking the past, like the nine-teenth-century architecture described by Benjamin, but it was, paradoxically, mimicking the future. The walls were whitewashed to give the impression that the construction was not made of bricks, but of concrete – a material that was most likely too expensive to use. When the plaster on the walls began to release, the picture-surface crumbled with it and the true construction came to the surface. Between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, Villa Savoye underwent several renovations. During this chain of renovations the house was cosmetically remodelled on an ideal that perhaps previously only existed in photographs. Following Tschumi, we could argue that in ruinous and neglected condition Villa Savoye instructed us on the difference between the embalmed idea-building and the actual ‘architecture’.48 Now, in an act of architectural taxidermy, the actual building has been perversely moulded to this embalmed state. The mounted villa confirms that a major power change took place between ‘architecture’ and ‘representations of architecture’. Posthumously, the object is placed under command of the Image.

21 Roel griffioen · imaging purity

1 s. Kracauer, ‘Photography’, Critical Inquiry

12 (1993) 3, pp. 421-436 (427).

2 A. loos, ‘regarding economy’, in: M. ris-

selada (ed.), Raumplan versus Plan Libre:

Adolf Loos / Le Corbusier, rotterdam

2008, pp. 173-177 (175).

3 O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, new

York 2003, p. 28.

4 Prima facie the relation between the depic-

tion (the content of the photograph, e.g. the

image of the building) and the depicted (the

object to which the photograph refers, e.g.

the actual building) seems straightforward

enough. the depiction is quite simply an ef-

fect of the object, like an imprint of a foot in

the sand, and is therefore dependent on the

depicted. However, the moment light parti-

cles are chemically recorded on film and the

image of the building emerges inside the

body of the camera, an ontological fracture

occurs severing the depiction and the

depicted. ‘ [C]ool, unchanging photographs

leaving their built counterpart alone and in

peace to fight the messy battles of budget

shortfalls, good or poor construction, in-

habitation, aging, and other trials of history,

all by itself,’ architecture historian Claire

Zimmerman writes about modernist archi-

tecture photography. see: C. Zimmerman,

‘Photographic modern architecture: inside

“the new deep”’, The Journal of Architecture

9 (2004) 3, pp. 331-354 (349).

5 see: K.D. Murphy, ‘the Villa savoye and the

Modernist Historic Monument’, Journal of

the Society of Architectural Historians, 61

(2002) 1, pp. 68-89.

6 W. Benjamin, ‘the Work of Art in the Age

of its technological reproducibility. third

version’, in: W. Benjamin, H. eiland, M.W.

Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writ-

ings, Volume 4 1938-1940, Cambridge, MA

2003, pp. 251-283 (254).

7 see: B. Colomina, J. Ockman (eds.), Archi-

tectureproduction, new York 1988.

8 B. Colomina, ‘le Corbusier and the Media’,

Journal of the Society of Architectural

Historians 68 (2009) 1, p.125, an introduc-

tion to V. Boone, ‘the epic of the Marseilles

Block through the eye of the Camera’,

Journal of the Society of Architectural

Historians 68 (2009) 1, pp. 125-128.

9 Ibidem.

10 literature on le Corbusier and photog-

raphy: B. Colomina, ‘le Corbusier and

Photography’, Assemblage (1987) 4, pp.

6-23, later republished in B. Colomina, Pri-

vacy and Publicity. Modern Architecture

as Mass Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts

1994; D. naegele, Le Corbusier’s Seeing

Things: Ambiguity and Illusion in the

Representation of Modern Architecture,

dissertation University of Pennsylvania,

1996; D. naegele, ‘Object, Image, Aura. le

Corbusier and the Architecture of Photog-

raphy’, Harvard Design Magazine (1998)

6, pp. 1-6. literature on other modern archi-

tects and photography: r. Becherer, ‘Pictur-

ing Architecture Otherwise: the voguing of

the Maison Mallet-stevens’, Art History 23

(2000) 4, pp. 559-598; A. Herscher, ‘the

Media(tion) of Building: Manifesto Archi-

tecture in the Czech Avant-Garde’, Oxford

Art Journal 27 (2004) 2, pp. 193-217; C.

Zimmerman, op.cit. (note 4). On the uses

of photography in architectural history: I.

Borden, ‘Imaging Architecture: the uses of

photography in the practice of architectural

history’, The Journal of Architecture 12

(2007) 1, pp. 57-77.

11 s. sontag, ‘It is not reality that photographs

make immediately accessible, but images’,

in: s. sontag, On Photography, new York

1977, p. 165.

12 Cited in M. Wigley, White Walls, Designer

Dresses. The Fashioning of Modern Archi-

tecture, Cambridge, MA 2004, p. 10.

13 le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture,

new York 1986, p. 138; all english citations

from Vers une architecture in this paper are

taken from this edition (a republication of

Frederick etchells’ 1931 translation).

14 s. Izenour, D. scott Brown, r. Venturi,

Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten

Symbolism of Architectural Form, Cam-

bridge, MA/london 1977, p. 7.

15 Cited in: s. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of

Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades

Project, Cambridge, MA/london 1989, p.

111.

16 Idem, p. 115.

17 Idem, p. 149.

18 Cited in n. rosenblatt, ‘empathy and

Anaesthesia: On the Origins of a French

Machine Aesthetics’, Grey Room 2 (2001)

Winter, pp.78-97 (79).

19 typically emphasizing by using capitals, le

Corbusier writes in Vers une architecture :

‘tHe AMerICAn enGIneers OVer-

WHelM WItH tHeIr CAlCUlAtIOns

OUr eXPIrInG ArCHIteCtUre.’ le

Corbusier, op. cit. (note 13), p. 31.

20 Idem, p. 41.

21 ‘the engineer’s Aesthetic’ is also the title of

the first chapter in Vers une architecture.

22 W. Benjamin, ‘A short history of photogra-

phy’, Screen 13 (1972) 1, pp. 5-26 (24).

23 Kracauer writes: ‘For in the artwork the

meaning of the object takes on spatial

appearance, whereas in photography the

spatial appearance of an object is its mean-

ing.’ s. Kracauer, op.cit. (note 1), p. 427.

24 see for instance: A. van der Woud, Ster-

renstof. Honderd jaar mythologie in de

Nederlandse architectuur, rotterdam

2008, p. 15.

25 significant in this respect is that the ‘visual-

ity’ of the book is not confined to the den-

sity in which it is illustrated, but is extended

to the very style it is written in. One only

has to look at the ‘optical’ imagery that is

interlaced throughout the text, most notably

the ‘eyes which do not see’-metaphor.

Variations on this metaphor – discerned

eyes, closed eyes, blinded eyes – are

habitually implemented in the text, mainly

to stress man’s unawareness of what his

era actually looks like. le Corbusier, op. cit.

(note 13).

26 the term optique lecteur is taken from M.

Jay, Downcast eyes: the denigration of

vision in twentieth-century French thought,

Berkeley 1993, p. 1.

27 As stanislaus von Moos observed, ‘the

elaborate manipulation of typeface, text and

illustration made it easy for even the most

superficial reader to recognize the argu-

ment’s salient points’. Van Moos is quick to

point out that this ‘didacticism’ also resulted

in a ‘myriad of misunderstandings’ in the

reception of the book. see: s. Von Moos,

Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis,

revised and expanded edition, rotterdam

2009, p. 60.

22 Kunstlicht · jrg. 32 · 2011 nr. 3 · medialiteit / mediality

28 Cited in: D. naegele, ‘Object, Image, Aura.

le Corbusier and the Architecture of

Photography’, Harvard Design Magazine

(1998) 6, pp. 1-6 (3).

29 Cited in: s. sontag, op. cit. (note 11), p.

186. similarly, le Corbusier also connects

architecture with truth: ‘A QUestIOn of

morality; lack of untruth is intolerable, we

perish in untruth.’ le Corbusier, op.cit. (note

13), p. 13.

30 see for instance A. Bazin, ‘the Ontology of

the Photographic Image’, Film Quarterly 13

(1960), pp. 4-9. ‘For the first time an image

of the world is formed automatically, without

the creative intervention of man.’ Whereas

human vision by definition is obscured

by experience, narrative and expectation,

photography offers an objective view on the

world, Bazin argues. ‘Only the impassive

lens, stripping its object of all those ways

of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions,

that spiritual dust and grime with which my

eyes have covered it, are able to present it

in all its virginal purity to my attention and

consequently to my love.’ A. Bazin, p. 8.

31 see for a discussion on Bazin’s ontology

of photography: J.D. Bolter, r. Grusin,

‘remediation’, Configurations 4 (1996) 3,

pp. 311-358 (320).

32 r. Barthes, ‘the Photographic Message’, in:

r. Barthes, s. Heath, Image – Music – Text,

london 1977, pp. 15-31 (17, 19).

33 Idem, p. 21. see also: r. Barthes, ‘the

rhetoric of the Image’, in: r. Barthes, s.

Heath, Image – Music – Text, london

1977, pp. 32-51.

34 r. Banham, Theory and Design in the First

Machine Age, london 1978, p. 220.

35 Ibidem.

36 see: B. Colomina 1987, op.cit. (note 10).

37 see: W. Benjamin, op.cit. (note 6), p. 254.

38 s. Von Moos, op.cit. (note 27), p. 299; see

also: B. Colomina 1987, op.cit. (note 10), p.

14.

39 B. Colomina 1987, op.cit (note 10), p. 16.

40 s. Von Moos, op.cit. (note 27), p. 58.

41 B. Colomina 1994, op.cit (note 10), p. 153.

42 le Corbusier, op.cit. (note 13), p. 158.

43 Idem, pp. 172-173. For the French edition,

see: le Corbusier, Vers une architecture.

Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, Paris

1966, pp. 139-140.

44 Idem, p. 29.

45 Idem, p. 173.

46 A. loos, op.cit. (note 2), p. 175.

47 the modern architect robert Mallet-

stevens, a contemporary of le Corbusier,

called his own buildings ‘photogénique’.

see: r. Becherer, op.cit. (note 10).

48 In an essay appropriately titled ‘the Ontol-

ogy of the Photographic Image’, the French

theorist Andre Bazin compared photogra-

phy to the practice of embalming the dead.

embalming is to ‘snatch’ the bodily appear-

ance ‘from the flow of time, to stow it away

neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life.’ the

same can be said about photography, Bazin

argues. Both aim at ‘the preservation of life

by a representation of life’. By halting a ‘life’

at ‘a set moment in [its] duration’, photogra-

phy frees it from its ‘destiny’. A. Bazin, op.cit.

(note 30), pp. 4-8. siegfried Kracauer, a

friend of Walter Benjamin, writes: ‘the

phrase “lie together, die together” applies to

the multiply reproduced original; rather than

coming into view through the reproductions,

it tends to disappear in its multiplicity....’

s. Kracauer, op.cit. (note 1), p. 432.

23 Roel griffioen · imaging purity