from the picturesque to the smartphone: architecture's obsession with being seen

before the building, the image

Before the Crystal Palace existed in Hyde Park, it appeared in the newspaper. Joseph Paxton sketched his proposal in June 1850 and sent a view to the Illustrated London News while the scheme was still awaiting approval. It appeared on July 6th. The Royal Commission accepted his design nine days later. Thousands of panes of glass and miles of iron structure still had to follow, but the public had already seen the building in the form of that image.

This sequence still happens now. We regularly meet architecture first as an image, often long before visiting it, and sometimes without ever visiting at all. But this second existence developed over centuries. Buildings occupy sites, and they occupy pictures. Sometimes the picture begins doing so much of the architectural work that it’s hard to separate the two.

Little Island, Heatherwick Studio, New York, 2021 | image by Michael Grimm

before the camera

At Stourhead in Wiltshire, a walk around the English estate frames ever-changing scenes. A Pantheon sits across the water between trees, and an arcaded bridge stretches beyond. Henry Hoare II began to design and build the garden in the 1740s with architect Henry Flitcroft, and drew on classical landscapes and paintings by Baroque-era artists like Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Buildings were strategically sited to emerge into view, disappear into nature, and then return beautifully from another angle.

The picturesque had already made the ‘view’ into something that was to be curated by architects and landscape designers. John Macarthur’s writing on the subject follows the way this ‘pictorial’ thinking entered landscape and architectural design, as special importance was given to the viewer in motion. Space could be walked through while certain moments within it behaved almost like finished pictures. Even while the technology of photography would arrive later, architecture already understood the joys of situating someone in exactly the right place to look.

a view of Stour Head in the County of Wiltshire, the Seat of Henry Hoare Esq. (The Temple of Flora) | image courtesy Yale Center for British Art

architecture learns to travel

Of course the picturesque estate was reserved for only a select few. London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, the world’s first international world’s fair, brought this type of experience to mass culture. Millions eventually entered Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, though illustrated newspapers had already given the building another audience.

Paxton understood the usefulness of that audience early. His newspaper image helped build excitement for a proposal still competing for approval. This way, representation became part of the project’s public understanding before it was even built.

World’s fairs were filled with these split existences. Their pavilions were temporary by design, but photographs and printed images gave them an eternal life. The Eiffel Tower remained in Paris, while many structures surrounding it at the 1889 Exposition survive only through their representations. Architecture could vanish from a site and remain alive as a still image.

Crystal Palace, illustration of the transept of the Crystal Palace, designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Hyde Park, London | image courtesy Britannica

modernism finds the page

By the early twentieth century, architecture and mass media were growing together. Le Corbusier selected photographs, edited them and arranged them across books with an understanding that the page could construct its own architectural experience. A house became a sequence in itself as the reader entered through one photograph, turned a page and found another. At this time, experiencing built space in this way was relatively novel.

Historian Beatriz Colomina highlighted this relationship as part of her reading of modernism in Privacy and Publicity. She wrote: ‘modern architecture only becomes modern with its engagement with the media.‘

Her argument places publications and other systems of representation inside architectural production itself. Le Corbusier’s buildings existed on their sites, while another version was being assembled through photographs and printed pages for a much larger public.

‘Le Corbusier: Architect of Books’, Catherine de Smet, archival interior photograph of the L’Esprit Nouveau Pavilion, 1925 | image courtesy Nostos

photography begins changing the building

Claire Zimmerman, Professor of Architecture at the University of Toronto, describes an even more consequential exchange in Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century. Architects first turned to photography because it reproduced lines and planes so effectively and helped their work circulate. That relationship soon moved in both directions.

‘Photography altered the material that it represented,‘ Zimmerman writes. Her study follows the overlap between how modern buildings looked and how photographic images made them look.

Once architects spent years seeing architecture flattened onto magazine pages, those pages inevitably entered the visual imagination of architecture itself. Glass became reflection, and white walls became fields of light and shadow. A corner could take up an entire spread. Even though buildings were still rooms and structures, they were being designed inside a culture that was beginning to understand what a camera could extract from them.

Lucia Moholy. Bauhaus Workshop Building from Below. Oblique View. September 1926 | image courtesy MoMA

the pavilion that survived as photographs

Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s Barcelona Pavilion makes this exchange especially strange. The original structure stood for only a short time before it was dismantled in 1930. For the decades that followed, architects encountered its marble planes and chrome columns through a limited body of black-and-white photographs. The building became foundational to modern architectural culture while remaining physically absent.

When the pavilion was finally rebuilt in 1986, generations had already spent more than half a century looking at it. Through photography, the project was at once preserved and reinvented. Those images determined the pavilion’s most familiar views, flattened its colors into tones, and established an object that existed outside of built space. The reconstruction eventually gave visitors a building they could walk into, but those photographs had reached them first.

‘a picture of a mood’ becomes the house

Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22 offers a more intimate version of the same phenomenon. Julius Shulman arrived to photograph the house in May 1960 while the Stahls were still waiting to move in. Construction dust remained, and was surrounded by incomplete landscaping. During the photoshoot, Shulman noticed two young women sitting in the cantilevered glass corner and rebuilt his composition around them, with Los Angeles glimmering below.

The now-iconic photograph feels effortless because the moment was authentic and temporary. Shulman later described the image as ‘a picture of a mood.’

For millions of people, Shulman’s photograph is their first encounter with Case Study House #22. The image has circulated so widely that Koenig’s architecture and Shulman’s construction of it have become almost inseparable. The house had rooms, changing daylight and years of family life. The photograph compressed all of that into one corner at one hour and somehow gained the greater cultural reach.

Julius Shulman, Case Study House #22, Pierre Koenig, Los Angeles, California | image courtesy Sotheby’s

las vegas reads at highway speed

Denise Scott Brown’s photographs of Las Vegas capture a landscape built to be read in motion. Motel signs hang against huge skies, lettering often larger than the buildings it advertises. In Learning from Las Vegas, Scott Brown, Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour described this as ‘an architecture of communication over space,’ where ‘communication dominates space as an element in the architecture and in the landscape.’ The Strip had to make itself legible before the driver passed it.

Photography was central to how Scott Brown studied that condition. She documented roads, signs and commercial strips. She said: ‘I am not a photographer. I shoot for architecture.‘ The camera became a way to isolate the visual logic of the city. With a vibrant sign floating against the sky, or a parking fronting a low box, architecture is compressed into an image quickly enough to be understood at speed.

from a handful of images to thousands

For much of the twentieth century, a major building entered architectural culture through a small set of photographs. Photographers chose the views, editors repeated them, and certain angles slowly became inseparable from the buildings themselves. Shulman’s Stahl House and the familiar photographs of Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion gained their authority partly through this scarcity.

The smartphone broke open that small circle of image makers. A visitor can photograph a building, edit the image and publish it before leaving. Theorist Lev Manovich calls Instagram ‘the perfect medium of the ‘aesthetic society,’ where image-making has become far more accessible. Architecture now enters a stream of pictures produced almost continuously by the people moving through it.

Corinne Vionnet’s Photo Opportunities combines repeated tourist photographs into a collective image

the visitor enters the frame

MVRDV’s Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen makes this shift especially obvious. Its mirrored facade absorbs Rotterdam and everybody standing around it. Before the building opened, Winy Maas was already watching passersby search for ‘the best place to stand to take a good selfie.’ The visitor becomes part of the architectural image almost automatically.

Case Study House #22 became famous through one highly controlled photograph. A contemporary museum can generate thousands of competing views in its first week. One person photographs the facade while another turns the camera toward themselves. Architecture now often circulates through a constantly feed of images rather than a single iconic frame.

architecture learns from its own image

This sense of abundance also feeds back into design. Openings frame views, mirrors multiply scenes, and circulation creates new positions between bodies and buildings. Of course these elements physically exist in space, but they also lend themselves to be easily photographed. A building can keep offering images as people move through it.

Claire Zimmerman’s line that ‘Photography altered the material that it represented’ captures the longer exchange. Architects designed buildings, saw them returned as photographs, then designed the next buildings with this image-centric culture in mind. In this way, the camera became part of how architecture understood itself.

Le Corbusier, Beistegui Apartment-external terrace on the 4th and last floor (from Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complète 1929-1934, Paris 1947) | image via Research Gate

the camera moves inside

For most of photography’s history, some distance remained between a building and the production of its public image. Shulman arrived to LA with equipment, Scott Brown photographed Las Vegas as research, publications gradually carried those pictures elsewhere, but the smartphone compresses those stages almost completely.

Buildings now see versions of themselves circulating within hours of their public openings. The smartphone — and social media — accelerated a generations-long exchange between buildings and their representation. Architecture spent the twentieth century learning what it looked like in photographs. Now, the camera walks through the door with everyone else.

Louvre Abu Dhabi, Atelier Jean Nouvel, United Arab Emirates, 2017 | image © Laurian Ghinitoiu

This article is part of designboom’s SPECTATOR AND SPECTACLE chapter, asking how wonder gets built, and how it might return some mystery to a world that has measured most of it away. Discover more stories that turn onlookers into participants, alter perception and disrupt the everyday here.