Photographic accounts of architecture for a readership of specialists and for the general public can be strikingly different. Given the same building, two competing forms of depic-tion coexist in the pictorial reproducdepic-tion of the artefact: the former is documentary, tech-nical and celebratory; the latter suggests occupancy, consumption and lifestyle.
To examine this dichotomy in representational practice and its consequence in the appreciation of architecture, this essay chronicles the iconographic trajectory of Case Study House #22 in Los Angeles, California, and of its acceptance in architec-tural culture. This project, designed by Pierre Koenig and photographed by Julius Shulman, acquired an iconic force in West Coast Modernism through a night-view photograph of the living room, which gradually made its way into mainstream architec-tural culture. The shot shows two women, dressed in white, sitting on a glass and steel structure suspended on a cliff over the Los Angeles lights. For most, this particular print epitomises a glittering period in California Modernism. If today this marker constitutes the defining image of a key building of this time, it is a unanimous consensus that is a relatively recent achievement in the memory of the architectural discipline.
Publications targeted at architects present illustrations that are analytical, abstract, emphatically editorial and self-referential in nature. Their purposes are mani-fold: to describe and catalogue the geometry of a structure; to inform peers of the latest advances in the discipline; to reinforce the professional identity of designers within the larger population of experts in the building industry; to set normative benchmarks in the value judgement of a particular scheme; and to establish paradig-matic norms of spatial representation. For this specialised audience, architectural photography draws from a repertoire of fixed conventions, crafting a highly exclusive visual rhetoric for architects’ own understanding and use. In particular, it often tends to obey the representational principles of architectural drawings. For instance, camera posi-tions are often parallel to the planes of the built form, in mimicry of architectural elevaposi-tions.
For lay readers, a different set of pictorial traits apply, making architectural photography for the general public a genre in its own right. The migration of a building from a specialised to a consumer periodical entails a dramatic revision of the philo-sophical underpinnings of a photographic composition. Settings are transformed into
displays of objects of desire for the specific class they are geared to. Space is staged to appeal to the palate of the social élite, for whom design is a vehicle for social distinction. The history of architectural photography in the popular press parallels the history of middle- and upper-class taste.
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Julius Schulman’s photo of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22. No girls: the architec-tural editor’s preference was for naked architecture.
Photography is a flexible field serving large numbers of purposes, where the attitude towards the framing of the scene stems from the intended scope of the cover-age. In architectural literature, pictures of all kinds share commonalities that are for-eign to other domains. A particular level of description permeates the record of a design. Following the powerful and strict conventions of architectural drawings, archi-tectural photographs display structures devoid of human traces, often captured under fair-weather conditions, in a pristine state untainted by their everyday use. The camera brings perceptual order to what is frequently a chaotic environment.
Traditionally, the photographer gains access to a building once it has just been completed and ideally landscaped, yet before it has entered its normal life cycle in the social and physical fabric of the city. The freezing of this metaphysical condition on the film characterises the bulk of images in design publications.
It follows that architectural picture making raises provocative issues relevant to the absorption of information about ‘design’ by architects themselves. On one side, photographs serve a documentary function; on the other, they provide the readership with the opportunity for comparative exercises and critical reflection on diverse designs. Decontextualised from their physical adjacencies and severed from the soci-etal circumstances that determined their own production, projects of different scales and types are presented to the reader in publications and reconfigured in a new visual relationship. Such juxtaposition is routine in magazines and newspapers all over the world. Yet the impact on the reader in the value judgement of various architectural propositions should not be neglected.
Pictures bear the interpretative signature of their authors. Through their camera, photographers bring a consistency of visual representation – on which archi-tects capitalise. Photographers craft a pictorial homogeneity among dissimilar spatial configurations. To hire a particular photographer means to buy a distinct ‘vision’ for the advertising of the designer’s work, in the pursuit of media branding. Given a partic-ular assignment, each photographer brings a unique approach, according to the hier-archy of philosophical and aesthetic priorities that he or she brings to the viewfinder.
A case in point is Julius Shulman. The photos of Shulman, who fell into architec-tural photography largely by accident and became the favourite and most extensive chronicler of West Coast Modernism, have strong and specific characteristics. His frames are characterized by an alignment of architectural elements in a constructed scene and under controlled lighting conditions. Radically, he often uses not only props but people, usually excluded from all architectural photography, and he arranges them to emphasise – sometimes to hide – various aspects of the building: to mimic a canti-lever or to hide a shadow. His goal is to suggest occupancy and to activate desire in the viewer for a comfortable lifestyle in a modern home. To file down the sharp ideo-logical edges of Modernism for the palate of the general public, Shulman frames
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together domesticity and steel – such as by placing a cocktail in the foreground of his compositions. ‘Wouldn’t you like to have a martini here?’ Shulman likes to ask when he explains his photographs to viewers.
John Entenza, publisher and editor of the magazine Arts & Architecture as well
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Shulman’s photo of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22. ‘Two Girls’: the photograher’s interpretation of both architecture and lifestyle.
as mastermind of the Case Study Program, an enterprise to publicise innovative modern design to the American scene, first published Pierre Koenig’s scheme in May 1959. The project was presented as a steel shelter open to a 240° view of the surrounding panorama. Two overall drawings of the house, an interior close-up and a floor plan, delivered the vision of this modern domestic temple to an audience educated in the tenets of the International Style. In October 1959 the editor printed a progress report of the construction site showing the previously published floor plan and five photographs of the steel framework. In the February 1960 issue, a one-page piece with four recent pictures provided the readers with the latest developments in the assem-blage of the structure. These photographs were technical in content – and somewhat analogous in viewpoints to the wire-frame perspectives shown in the May 1959 article.
On its completion in June 1960 Case Study House #22, known also as the Stahl Residence, received an eight-page spread in the pages of Entenza’s magazine. Shulman carried out the assignment on 9 May 1960 in the presence of the architect. Koenig remembers that the shooting session took five days. At the time the house was just finished, and its interior was still unfurnished. To meet the deadline for the Arts & Architec-ture coverage, the Californian photographer did a first whole day of shooting, retaining complete control over the construction of the photographic compositions. Temporary furniture was supplied specifically for the job and arranged by Shulman himself. It is worth noting the presence of the Van Keppel-Green chaise longue outside the house in the lower part of the second photo. That same piece of furniture was already familiar to the readers through the iconic picture Shulman took in 1947 of Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, California. Thirteen years separate the two images, yet that same chair was positioned in the frame to send the viewer a message of modern living. Shulman placed the chair out on the patio next to the plant to suggest the inhabitability of the outside area as well as the interior – characteristic of the modern house.
The two women dressed in white, called in for the shoot later in the afternoon that first day, were the girlfriends of two students at the University of Southern Cali-fornia who were helping with the shooting. This image, currently among the most published visions of modern architecture, was to become a template of perception for generations of architects to follow. However, complying with the orthodoxy of his architectural ideology, Entenza instead picked sixteen black and white unadorned photographs from that assignment, leaving out the well-known exposure of what both Koenig and Shulman today call the ‘Two Girls’. The visual features of the images in Entenza’s selection expressed the minimalist geometry of the artefact, the notion of transparency of the interiors to the distant landscape and the tectonic aspects of the construction. Little can be deduced about the owners, their way of living and their experience with the architecture, let alone the immediate surrounding context. For a
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long time, the Arts & Architecture article provided the most comprehensive coverage in the specialised literature of Koenig’s project.
Later that summer Shulman returned to photograph the house after the Stahls had taken possession of the house and had placed the furniture according to their own liking.
On 17 July 1960 Dan MacMasters, future editor of the Los Angeles Times’ Home Maga-zine, featured the residence in the ‘Pictorial Living’ section of the Los Angeles Examiner, the Sunday supplement of a newspaper that stopped publication in 1989. The colour version of the ‘Two Girls’ made its first appearance on the magazine’s front cover.
The supplement’s five-page description of the project produced a radically dif-ferent account of its design attributes through the reorganisation of photographic rela-tionships. Many of the pictures exhibit a staged integration of architecture and lifestyle, presenting the design in its socio-physical context. The main points of inter-est were the users and the activities for which the building was created. People posing while apparently performing daily tasks animate the space, and the beholder is allured by the comfort of modern domestic space. The severity of the steel lines is bal-anced by the arrangement of items and commodities, which elicit ease of use as well as a way of living. The building functions more as the backdrop to the unfolding of family life than an artefact on its own terms. Hints, such as particular magazines, gad-gets and fashionable commodities, are consciously disseminated within the frame to engage the observer in a game of psychological reconstruction of the before-and-after of that exposure. The reader’s consumption of that photograph was not only a way to enter into a privileged community, but also an opportunity to indulge in a form of virtual voyeurism. As newspapers and their Sunday supplements are not listed in the architectural databases, this publication quickly became invisible to architects, disap-pearing from the professional radar screen.
That same year the colour version of ‘Two Girls’ was accorded a first prize in the colour category of the American Institute of Architects’ 1960 National Award Competition for Architectural Photography. This recognition granted the image large-scale circulation in periodicals and newspapers throughout the country. On 25 December 1960 the real estate section of The New York Times published a black and white version of the photograph on its front cover. The dramatic illustration was pointed out as a felicitous blend of architectural and contextual information. In Febru-ary 1961 the AIA Journal made the picture the first image in its four-page report on the photography competition. The colour image reappears in the February 1961 issue of the National Photographer, a magazine geared to photographers, as part of the news about the AIA award. That same month the house was shown with a short descriptive text in the pages of Sunset, a monthly periodical on West Coast architectural culture for lay readers. In this instance the residence was part of an advertisement for the products of Bethlehem Steel. The selected picture, driven by the sponsor’s interests,
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displays in the foreground the metal decking and the I-beams. Case Study House #22 was later featured in the Arizona Republic newspaper on 17 December 1961.
In 1962 Shulman published his first book, Photographing Architecture and Interiors, under the sponsorship of the Whitney Library of Design. The publication was a primer on camera and darkroom technique as well as an exposé of Shulman’s approach to architectural photography. In the middle section of the book, the black and white and the colour versions of the ‘Two Girls’ are placed next to each other on a double-page spread to demonstrate the disparity of their visual impact. In March 1962 Peter Blake, architect and at the time chief editor of Architectural Forum, wrote a four-page article on the Stahl Residence for Holiday magazine. In that instance the colour image reveals a slight variation from the black and white twin image: the girls have switched seats, yet the composition and lighting are clearly the same. In this first round of publications, the last appearance of the ‘Two Girls’ composition was in the February 1963 issue of Designers West, a magazine popular among interior design-ers. Here the photograph was published as part of an interview with Shulman on how to harness the language of photography for the promotion and advertising of products of the building industry.
In the architectural press, it was Esther McCoy who wrote, in 1962, the first comprehensive account of Entenza’s experiment. The book, Modern California Houses; Case Study Houses, 1945–1962, showcased the canonical work of the Modernist pioneers using many of Shulman’s photographs. Case Study House #22 was there, illustrated just as it was in Arts & Architecture. The same choice of photo-graphs was made in the 1977 reprint for a local Los Angeles publisher.
Following these first three years of the project’s existence in the pages of archi-tectural and general periodicals after the 1960 shooting, a first long period of absence from the media ensued. In the late 1960s Reyner Banham, British architectural histo-rian and critic, undertook what was later acclaimed as a classic in the literature on the built environment and the urban culture of Southern California, Los Angeles: Architec-ture of Four Ecologies. When Banham visited Shulman’s studio to ask for material for his book, the photographer presented him with, among much other material, the shot with the two girls. The volume was published in 1971. In the concluding chapter, Banham argues for the stylistic contribution of Los Angeles to the Modern Movement in the United States. Koenig’s project is positioned between the work of Charles Eames and the production of Craig Ellwood. Banham’s book provided the first critical introduction of the spectacular night image to a readership of architectural adepts.
This brief literary resurrection of the photograph was followed by a second, longer period of editorial oblivion. In 1981 Paul Gleye produced The Architecture of Los Angeles, an influential outline of architectural movements in Southern California.
Case Study House #22 reappears in one image, one that matches the photo on the
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opening page of the 1960 article in Arts & Architecture. It was only in 1985, when architectural historian Mark Girouard’s Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History was published, that the picture was brought once again to the readership’s attention. Although the intellectual focus of this book was on urban environments in Europe and in the US, the black and white exposure with the two girls was used as the pictorial prelude for the concluding reflections on modern cities. Those years marked the beginning of a renewed interest in post-war architecture of Los Angeles.
Inevitably many of these publications tapped into the archival sources of Julius Shulman, considered the most authoritative photographic recorder of 50 years of West Coast Modernism. Sooner or later the authors were introduced to that image, which would find its way in the pages of their volumes. The ‘Two Girls’ in black and white opened the chapter on the 1950s in Sam Hall Kaplan’s L.A. Lost and Found: An Architectural History of Los Angeles, printed in 1987. That same year, Dominique Rouillard reprinted, in black and white, the cover of the 17 July 1960 Los Angeles Examiner ‘Pictorial Living’ section in his Building the Slope: Hillside Houses, 1920–
1960. The catalogue of the exhibition organised in 1989 by Elizabeth A.T. Smith at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and titled Blueprints for Modern Living:
History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses, further consolidated in architectural discourse the ‘Two Girls’ as representative both of the house and the whole era. Since then, the frequency of the publication of the image in the literature has increased expo-nentially with the numerous studies on Californian Modernism and on Shulman’s work.
When asked why it took so long for the ‘Two Girls’ to emerge as the paradig-matic illustration of Case Study House #22 in the design debate, both Koenig and Shulman maintained, in informal talks, that the times were not ready for that shot. In those days the Modernist ideology seemed to inhibit pictorial interpretations of build-ings aimed at pleasing the popular taste. Hardliners were likely to deem that type of photography too ephemeral to serve the timeless values of the modern revolution. A Cartesian zeitgeist informed the elitist vision of how architecture was to be repro-duced and expounded in the media: abstract, positivist, empty, unaffected by the state of affairs in the world, mimicking the formalities of perspective. The publishing forum certainly subscribed to this theoretical theme and manufactured a specific pattern of graphic representation that is still prevalent in editorial policy nowadays. The Post-Modern age helped to loosen up the inflexible position of the hard-core Post-Modernists, leaving room for alternative readings of architecture. Shulman’s rendition of Koenig’s project generated a mystique about the post-war period that also brought to the fore a lasting focus on the agency of the photographer in manufacturing a consensus around architects’ work and the marketing of their ideas. Capitalising still on the popu-larity of that image, Case Study House #22 today enjoys the unconditional support of the cultural infrastructure at a global scale.
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The ‘Two Girls’ images are a rare crossover between two independent, almost parallel forms of photographic representation of architecture. Broadly speaking, differ-ent attitudes inform the taking of a picture according to whether the receivers of the photographic message are architects or the lay public. When photographers shoot
The ‘Two Girls’ images are a rare crossover between two independent, almost parallel forms of photographic representation of architecture. Broadly speaking, differ-ent attitudes inform the taking of a picture according to whether the receivers of the photographic message are architects or the lay public. When photographers shoot