Collaborations: The Private Life of Modern Architecture Author(s): Beatriz Colomina Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 3, Architectural History 1999/2000 (Sep., 1999), pp. 462-471 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991540 Accessed: 25-09-2016 19:05 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Society of Architectural Historians, University of California Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians This content downloaded from 204.168.144.216 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 19:05:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Collaborations The Private Life of Modern Architecture BEATRIZ COLOMINA Princeton University bout a year ago, I gave a lecture form in the Madrid, space-and how the there city is nothing in Mies's work, where I was born. The lecture was on the work of prior to his collaboration with Reich, that would suggest Charles and Ray Eames and, to my surprise, most such a radical approach to defining space by suspended sen- of the discussion at the dinner afterward centered around suous surfaces, which would become his trademark, as the role of Ray, her background as a painter, her studies with exemplified in his Barcelona Pavilion of 1929. I was, of Hans Hofmann, her sense of color, and so on. I say "to my course, astonished because, while I had long believed this surprise" because, first of all, there were not many women was the case, I had not yet dared to write about it-even if at that dinner table-I was surrounded by very well known my students had heard me say things like that for years. And Spanish architects, all of them men-and also because I had then Juan said, "It is like a dirty little secret that we-all not brought up the subject of Ray's contribution at all in my architects-keep. Something that we all know, that we all talk. I would not have thought that there was an interest in see, but we don't bring ourselves to talk about it." and audience for this kind of topic in Spain, and besides, The secrets of modern architecture are like those of a Ray's role was not the focus of my research. The conversa- family, where everybody knows about things that are never tion drifted, as usually happens on these occasions, and acknowledged. And it is perhaps because of the current fas- before I knew it, we were talking about Lilly Reich and what cination with the intimate that the secrets of modern archi- an enormous role she must have played in the development tecture are now being unveiled, little by little. If one is to of Mies van der Rohe's architecture; how Mies might never judge by the publications of recent years, there appears to have been Mies without her and so on (Figure 1). Again, it be an increasing interest in how the practice of architecture is important to insist that it was not I who was making these works. It is as if we had become more concerned with the points, but these middle-aged, extremely accomplished, and how than the what. And the how is less about structure or cultivated architects, whom one would be hard pressed to building techniques-the interest of other generations of characterize as feminist. At a certain point, one of them, historians-and more about interpersonal relations. The Juan Navarro Baldeweg, said something that has stayed with previously marginal details of how things actually happen me since. We had been talking about the importance of such in architectural practice are now coming into focus. projects as the Silk and Velvet Caf6-a collaborative work Critics and historians are shifting their attention from of Reich and Mies's for the Exposition de la mode in Berlin the architect as a single figure, and the building as an object, (1927), where draperies in black, orange, and red velvet and to architecture as collaboration. Attention is paid today to black and lemon yellow silk were hung from metal rods to all professionals involved in the project: partners, engineers, This content downloaded from 204.168.144.216 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 19:05:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms landscape architects, interior designers, employees, ~-_-__:-~--~-~:i,:::~i;l-l:--: -';ri'iii:-iiii;i-i-iiii'i-iii-:iiiii?i builders. With this shift, methodologies of research neces- sarily change. Pat Kirkham's book Charles and Ray Eames, Designers of the Twentieth Century (1995), for example, is extensively based on oral histories. In the course of her ~i:r~;i~ii~:iiiri.--i$~i;-ri:~~ ~i'~,,~~, ~iti-i~i-?iii~:~;~-_i:i-i-i~~iYriii~iiii research, she interviewed an extraordinary number of asso- s~iii~~i:ili;iii-/iijij~i__~ii-_iYj: ii:ii:~_P;-~iiiii:i6:i - ciates, employees, and clients in an attempt to reevaluate the nature of the collaborative work of the Eames office and, in particular, the role played by Ray in what is proba- r ~$8sg~$~B~'~si?.:.'~.: bly the most famous design partnership of the century. Likewise, Donald Albrecht incorporated extensive testi- monies from associates as videos in the international trav- eling exhibition The Work of Charles and Ray Eames, ?..?~I ~?. organized in 1997 by the Library of Congress in partnership with the Vitra Design Museum. Engineers write books that :???:_?ii.i.?~~?.,.lI?~I? are no longer textbooks about how to solve technical prob- lems but are instead intimate accounts of their practice. Peter Rice's An Engineer Imagines (1994) is half memoir, half reflection on the many aspects of the collaboration of the engineer with contractors, architects, clients, even with photographers and critics. Garden designers and landscape architects, for a long time largely ignored in histories of modern architecture, are now carefully studied in books such as Dorothde Imbert, The Modernist Garden in France (1993), and Marc Treib and Dorothde Imbert, Garrett Ekbo: Figure 1 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich on board an Modern Landscapes for Living (1997). Builders, forever the excursion boat on the Wannsee, a lake near Berlin, 1933. Photograph ugly ducklings of architectural history, and only of interest by Howard Dearstyne, one of their students, from Ludwig Glasser, to sociologists, are now being acknowledged in academic Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (New York, 1977) conferences, books, and exhibitions, including the recent traveling exhibition on Joseph Eichler (a developer of low- cost, mass-produced, postwar modernist houses in north- ern California), The Eichler Homes: Building the California en-scene. As Rosa points out, Neutra-as the only archi- Dream, organized by Paul Adamson and Kevin Alter and tect included in Modern Architecture-International Exhibi- sponsored by the Center for the Study of American Archi- tion at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 who was asked tecture at the University of Texas and the Graham Foun- to have one of his buildings (the Lovell House) repho- dation of Chicago. tographed-was well aware of the importance of pho- Even photographers, graphic designers, critics, cura- tographs.' Most architects of the modern period had close tors, and all of those who help to (re)produce the work in and longstanding relationships with their photographers. the media are coming into focus. It is no longer possible to As Neutra said about Shulman: "His work will survive me. ignore how much of modern architecture is produced both Film [is] stronger and good glossy prints are easier [to] ship in the media and as media, and how much of architectural than brute concrete, stainless steel, or even ideas."2 By the practice today consists in the production of images. Books end of the century, the graphic designer has assumed an like Joseph Rosa's A Constructed View: The Architectural Pho- equally important role. Bruce Mau, the designer of tography ofJulius Shulman (1994), and Shulman's own mem- S,M,L,XL, is credited equally as author with Rem Koolhaas oirs, Architecture and its Photography (1998), bring into closer and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.). focus the circumstances of the collaboration between Shul- One day historical research will have to explore this kind of man and Richard Neutra at a time when architects were not partnership. only present during the photographic shoot, but also Critics and institutions have similarly collaborated in removed the client's furniture, artworks, and draperies and the production of modern architecture (Figure 2). How to brought in their own props-directing, as it were, the mise- separate Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner, Philip COLLABORATIONS 463 This content downloaded from 204.168.144.216 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 19:05:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 'IVA, Figure 2 Ise Gropius, Sigfried Giedion, and Walter Gropius in the Gropius It house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, ir 'aAMMM around 1952, from Paul Hofer and Ulrich ,;PK no... Stucky, Hommage 6 Giedion: Profile Seiner Personlicheit (Basel and Stuttgart, 1971) N VII 41 AM- Pima oe Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchock, the Museum of tion in the last decade.