Critical Approaches to Architectural Environments: The Photography of Eric Mendelsohn and Wolfgang Tillmans Item Type text; Electronic Thesis Authors Hayt, Andrew Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 07/10/2021 13:25:41 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/624142 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO ARCHITECTURAL ENVIRONMENTS: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF ERIC MENDELSOHN AND WOLFGANG TILLMANS by Andrew C. Hayt ____________________________ Copyright © Andrew C. Hayt 2017 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the SCHOOL OF ART In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS WITH A MAJOR IN ART HISTORY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2017 Hayt 2 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR The thesis titled Critical Approaches to Architectural Environments: The Photography of Eric Mendelsohn and Wolfgang Tillmans prepared by Andrew C. Hayt has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for a master’s degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Andrew C. Hayt APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR This thesis has been approved on the date shown below: Defense date Dr. Kate Palmer Albers May 12, 2017 Associate Professor, Art History Hayt 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………4 Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………5 Chapter 2: The Photograph as a Tool for the Architect…………………………………….........11 Chapter 3: Mendelsohn: Expressionist Architecture and Modern Vision……………………….21 Chapter 4: Wolfgang Tillmans’ Book for Architects…………………………………………….34 Chapter 5: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………46 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..48 Hayt 4 ABSTRACT This thesis is concerned with the development and implications of a critical mode of inquiry into the architectural environment as it is articulated in the photographic projects of German artists Eric Mendelsohn (1887-1953) and Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). These projects are understood as being in opposition to a conventional subordination of photography to architecture. The architectural photograph has consistently been reduced to the role of a tool in the proliferation of structures of global capitalism, facilitating the rise of homogeneous and disconnected built environments. Through an examination and comparison of Mendelsohn’s 1926 book Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten with Tillmans’ 2014 video installation Book for Architects, this thesis argues that the visual strategies employed in these works reflect similar concerns regarding the state of architectural practice, providing alternative avenues of inquiry for architects, and highlighting the necessity for deeper engagement with the phenomenological qualities of the architectural environment. Hayt 5 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The advancement of globalized spatial practice has resulted in the proliferation of architectural models that appear dissociated from any cultural context and which reject vernacular traditions in favor of a totalizing and autonomous status within the built environment. It has become necessary for artists and architects to investigate the implications of practicing their trades within the framework of a system of global capital. Artists and architects in the 20th century have continually sought to develop alternative methods of seeing and interpreting the environment as a means of subverting and questioning the notion of infinite reproducibility that characterizes much of contemporary expression. Often these are strategies that rely upon the sublimation of architectural and photographic practice into a critical structure. This structure, which is characterized by the use of photography to explore often overlooked or easily dismissed elements of architecture is significant in its fracturing of traditional methodologies. The concept of utilizing a photograph to break down and present alternative approaches to architectural spaces may be understood as a means of both absorbing and rebelling against the notion of a global artistic or architectural tendency. The relationship between architecture and photography has traditionally functioned in a distinctly capitalistic mode, where the image serves the architecture. Photography in this mode may claim to facilitate an experience of both local and worldwide processes of spatial engagement and development, but it is ultimately subordinated to the processes of capital that drive architectural growth. The concept of a critical photographic mode is inherently opposed to the tendencies of established architectural photography, treating image and architecture on equal Hayt 6 terms as a means of deconstructing the space and revealing the processes that have implicitly shaped the built environment for more than a century. Working in the early 20th century, the architect Eric Mendelsohn compiled a set of images from a trip to the United States in 1925 that reflects a distinctly analytical mode of seeing and understanding the built environment. Mendelsohn’s Picture Book for Architects was ostensibly designed to display a vision of the United States for his peers in Germany, while presenting a commentary on the buildings and places that he experienced.1 Almost a century later, in 2014, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans presented a project of a similar name, Book for Architects, that utilized a set of strategies similar to Mendelsohn’s work as a means of expressing what the artist perceived as elements of architecture whose significance in the everyday life of their users was underappreciated by architects.2 These two projects form the nucleus of a critical mode of architectural photography, which is focused on the breakdown of the traditional relationship between architecture and the image. This critical method of photographing seeks to reveal the degree to which architecture that has been colonized by the tendencies of global capitalist production has resulted in the desensitization of the individual and the fragmentation of the built environment. Architectural photography as it is commonly understood in the contemporary moment is a practice that utilizes visual strategies derived from Modernism. Photographers such as Lucien Hervé, Julius Schulman, and Ezra Stoller, working in the period surrounding the second world war, contributed to the development of contemporary modes of seeing and interpreting structures through images, a methodology that is inextricably bound to the way in which the function of the 1 Michele Stavagna, “Image and the Space of the Modern City in Erich Mendelsohn's Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten,” Schriften der Bauhaus – Universität Weimar 120/48 (2008): 339. 2 Louisa Buck, “Wolfgang Tillmans: Journeys into Space,” The Art Newspaper 23 (2014): 44. Hayt 7 structures themselves was understood at the time in question.3 Architectural practice in the 20th century has been dominated by principles established by icons of Modernism, such as the Congrès Internationaux D’Architecture Moderne, the Bauhaus, and other notable groups from the period of the 1920s. The impulsive growth of capitalism has brought with it a seemingly infinite repetition of form with regard to the shaping of spaces that humans inhabit, stretching Modernist principles of functional simplicity to their logical ends in an effort to spread accessible, straightforward architectural models. The photographic medium enables artists to test the limitations of both physical and phenomenological constructions in the image as well as in the architectural space. Through the incorporation of decades of Modernist vision, including the visual strategies developed by László Moholy-Nagy and Le Corbusier, and by underscoring the significance of pre-Modern modes of visualizing the built environment, it is possible to propose an alternative mode of seeing and interacting with architecture that synthesizes these methodologies into a critical strategy for examining the built environment and its inhabitants. The relationship between photography and architecture is an intimate one, stretching back to the beginnings of the photographic medium. Evident as early as Niépce’s experiments with light-sensitive materials in the 1820s, the presence of architectural forms in photographic images has served myriad purposes, advancing both mediums in a symbiotic relationship that persists into the contemporary moment. The shift toward the notion of a genre of ‘architectural photography,’ took place in concert with the early moments of Modernism, where architects and photographers collaborated, in a loose definition of the term, to effectively market architectural 3 Julius Schulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors, (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1962), 2-4. Hayt 8 forms.4 This commodification of architecture that took place in the early 20th century, indicated by the rise of mass-produced buildings and the spread of what Corbusier called “machines for living,”