Prologue or The Myth of Vals

Myth ... can be read in the anonymous utterances of the press, advertising, mass consumer goods; it is something socially determined, a ‘reflection’. This reflection ... is inverted: myth consists in overturning culture into nature or, at least, the social, the cultural, the ideological, the historical into the ‘natural’.
Roland Barthes[1]

... mountain, stone, water, building in stone, building with stone, building into the mountain, building out of the mountain, being inside the mountain: our attempts to give this chain of words an architectural interpretation, to translate into architecture its meanings and sensuousness, guided our design for the building and step by step gave its form.
Peter Zumthor[2]

In most architectural reviews, Peter Zumthor’s thermal bath in Vals gets discussed within the phenomenological context of material and place. Or as Mark Wigley would put it, ‘an entire infrastructure of storytelling labours away to position the building in time ... and place’.[3] Reverence is primarily paid to the bath’s truthful treatment of materials and its refined contextuality. The following quotes might serve as examples for the rhetoric deployed and the bath’s setting within the architectural discourse.

Peter Zumthor – ... devoted to the truth of materials – has as usual worked in intense contact with the project and its site. ...Through the rigour of his craft, [he] has realised an extraordinary building full of sensory richness.[4]

All in all, the rising Swiss German ‘school’ seems subtly divided today between those architects who follow in the Neues Bauen tradition and thus keep alive Max Bill’s differentiation between Konkrete Architektur and Konkrete Kunst – I have in mind figures such as [Roger Diener and Peter Zumthor] and the partnership Guyer and Gigon, and those architects, like Herzog and de Meuron and the partnership of Sumi and Burckhalter who appear to be seduced by all the hallucinatory effects of the media world.[5]

Whereas Kenneth Frampton in the last quote characterises the former group of architects by their ‘moralist’, truthful treatment of materials and their preoccupation with the ‘corporal experience, in which the tactile or sensual attributes’[6] are of major importance, he condemns the latter group for their ‘dandified’ manipulation of materials and their striving for purely visual effects.[7] Frampton thus deliberately creates a dichotomy between essence and effect. Zumthor’s work is the paradigm of the first group – essence, substance and truthfulness seem to be the main objectives in his design. Zumthor’s own project descriptions deploy a similar terminology:

The establishing of a special relationship with the mountain landscape, its natural power, geological substance and impressive topography ... seemed to us [to play] a more important role: ... In keeping with this idea, it pleased us to think that the new building should communicate the feeling of being older than its existing neighbour, of always having been in this landscape ... [The thermal bath] relies ... on the silent, primary experiences of bathing, cleansing oneself, relaxing in the water; on the body’s contact with water at different temperatures and in different kinds of spaces; on touching stone.[8]

The prevailing visual account of the thermal bath consists in black-and-white photographs which form part of this ‘infrastructure of storytelling’. In Peter Zumthor’s own publications, the photographs of the building are set within a sequence of photographs which visualises the ‘chain of words’ cited above.

A ‘feeling of impatience’[9] at the sight of the naturalness with which the rhetoric cited above mystifies the perception and the reality of the thermal bath initiated the following investigation.



Introduction

With this thesis I want to challenge the widespread habit of praising Peter Zumthor’s bath for its refined contextuality and its material truthfulness; I propose instead:

• Could it be that instead of the bath’s careful placing and its tactile sensation, it is the bath’s place effect and tactility effect – conditioned by black-and-white photographs – which is paid reverence to?

• Thus, could it be that instead of the bath’s actuality, it is the bath’s photographic effect, its photogenic quality, which is paid reverence to?

• Could it be that instead of positioning the bath in the discursive context of Zumthor’s work, setting it alongside works which arouse similar reverence and which seem to be similarly photogenic – for example works of classical Greek architecture and Mies van der Rohe’s architecture – would open up a totally different trajectory?

• Could it be that Peter Zumthor built for the photograph?

By analysing the prevailing rhetoric with regard to Zumthor’s bath, the objective is to decipher those operations which have given rise to this rhetoric, rather than to prove it wrong or to suggest a different rhetoric. The thermal bath serves as a case study for the unveiling of those operations of myth-building, which are common within architectural discourses. The analysis of photography’s impact on architecture and photography’s role within the context of myth-building will be focused on in the following.

In order to investigate the interrelation of architecture and photography I want to set up a discursive context within which to analyse how specific architectures like the thermal bath affect the sight and the camera eye and thus the perception of them. In allusion to the aforementioned observation that some architectures like the thermal bath, the Parthenon and the Barcelona Pavilion seem to be more photogenic than other architectures, I would like to give a short definition of photogenia. This definition will serve as a starting point for addressing the interrelation of architecture and photography, and outline the scope and structure of my argument.

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When approaching the issue of photogenia from the perspective of portrait photography, a definition of photogenic could read as follows: someone photogenic looks beautiful in a photograph, without necessarily looking beautiful in reality; and, not everyone looks beautiful in photographs. Moreover, the image of someone photogenic seems to capture the aura of the person, image and self seem to coincide.

This definition, however vague, already implies three distinct issues which one should distinguish when talking about someone or something as being photogenic:

1. someone or something being photogenic shows in the medium of the photograph,
2. it seems to be somehow rooted in the object while it can only be seen in the photograph,
3. and it has got something to do with the distinct operation of translating an object into a photograph, which one could describe as making object and representation coincide.[10]

Based on these observations, I want to address the different issues arising with regard to the location and operation of photogenia and other effects of photographic representation within the context of architecture along three major themes:

In the first chapter I will be looking at the medium of photography. What are the intrinsic characteristics of photographs and what are their visual effects? How does photography as a mode of representation distinguish itself from other modes like painting or drawing?

In the second chapter I will be looking at the distinct operation which occurs when architecture is translated into photographs. What are the intrinsic characteristics of this operation? How does this operation influence the status of both, the original and the translation? Has photogenia something to do with architecture’s translatability?

In the last chapter I will be looking at architecture itself in order to reveal its visual effects, its photogenia. Does an alignment exist between certain architectures and photography? What kinds of seeing do certain architectures call for? What kinds of representations do certain architectures call for?

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In the following I want to delineate the setting of my argument and the focus I chose to approach this investigation.

Many theorists and critics have already argued that photography as a technology of representation has a major impact on the perception and also on the conception of works of art: Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction notes that

around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes,[11]

Siegfried Kracauer in Photography claims that

...precisely by exploding perceptual traditions, modern photography ... assumed another function – that of influencing art, ... [and that] ... of all media, realistic photography ... thus ... contributed to the rise of abstract art,[12]

and Susan Sontag in On Photography argues that

as most works of art (including photography) are now known from photographic copies, photography ... has decisively transformed the traditional fine arts and the traditional norms of taste, including the very idea of the work of art. ...photographs have become so much the leading visual experience that [there are] now works of art which are produced in order to be photographed.[13]

Benjamin, Kracauer and Sontag thus observe the indirect influences of photography on the perception and conception of arts like painting or conceptual arts.

With this thesis I want to expand the discussion on photography’s impact into the context of architectural production and focus on photography’s direct impact on the design of architecture by asking the question: What is it to design architecture that is liked by the photographic camera? This thesis argues that photography as a technology of representation has a major impact not only on the perception of architecture but also on its conception. Beatriz Colomina observes that through the invention of photography, the site of architectural production has been transformed, that it is

no longer exclusively located on the construction site, but more and more displaced into the rather immaterial sites of architectural publication, exhibitions, journals.[14]

I want to push this idea further by arguing that it is not just the site which has been transformed but that the process and objective of architectural design itself has been altered: the anticipation of photographs, the anticipation of architecture’s image effects, are productive in the design of architecture.

While my thesis will be based on the analysis of both photographs and the settings of the actual building, my argument is not set within any moralistic discussion about the distinction between the real and the image, between the original and the copy, between the ‘truthful’ and the ‘lie’, between essence and effect,[15] or a discussion of how an ‘image world’ is replacing the ‘real world.’[16] The objective of this thesis is to unveil the effects of certain photographic representations of the bath and to formulate photography’s impact on architecture in general. Thus, my argument is based on an understanding of architecture as ‘a series of overlapping systems of representations’:

To think about modern architecture must be to pass back and forth between the question of space and the question of representation. Indeed, it will be necessary to think of architecture as a system of representation, or rather a series of overlapping systems of representation. This does not mean abandoning the traditional architectural object, the building. In the end, it means looking at it much more closely than before, but also in a different way. The building should be understood in the same terms as drawings, photographs, writing, films and advertisements; not because these are the media in which more often we encounter it, but because the building is a mechanism of representation in its own right. The building is, after all, a “construction”, in all senses of the word.[17]

In the course of this thesis, I will argue that certain assumedly natural categories of the thermal bath, like place and materiality, might be interpreted as effects of photographic representation. Thus, my thesis addresses the twin aspects of mythology and photography: in particular, I want to unveil certain visual effects of the bath which seem to give reason to the aforementioned rhetoric. On a more general level, this investigation will demystify the nature and naturalness of photography and argue that photography is the main means – as distinct from any other mode of representation – of creating this kind of myth – understood here in Barthes’ terms as ‘overturning ... the social, the cultural, the ideological, the historical into the natural’.[18] In the course of my argument I want to outline the differences between photography and other modes of representation – like drawing or painting – to disclose photography’s distinct and unique impact on the perception and conception of architecture through its formal and structural characteristics.

Further research might position this argument of photography’s impact on architecture in a wider analytical study of how technologies of representation have influenced the design of architecture at different times; another question thus could be: what is it to design architecture that is liked by the drawing?[19]

Digression

In the following, I want to give a short account of other effects of portrait photography apart from the effect of photogenia. This list of photographic characteristics and effects – a short anthology of quotes, narratives and photographs – has to be understood as a prelude to the diverse effects I will investigate in the course of this thesis. They will be woven together in my argument on architecture’s photogenia.

I

We rarely view a life-size portrait photograph, nor do we usually view a figure in its entirety. Invariably we see a part of the body (head, head and shoulders, half-length, and so on). Just as the photograph flattens physical bulk, so it also frames and crops – ... suggesting presence through absence.
Graham Clarke[20]


II

Photography tends to suggest endlessness. This follows from its emphasis on fortuitous complexes which represent fragments rather than wholes.
Siegfried Kracauer[21]

A photograph, whilst recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen. ... What it shows invokes what is not shown. ... The degree to which ... this is worth looking at can be judged by all that [is not shown] because it is contained within it.
John Berger[22]

Yet the cinema has a power which at first glance the Photograph does not have: the screen is not a frame but a hideout; the man or woman who emerges from it continues living: a ‘blind field’ constantly doubles our partial vision. ... The presence (the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph. Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (fetish). ... The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame.
Roland Barthes[23]


III

Many photographers continue to prefer black-and-white images, which are felt to be more tactful, more decorous than colour – are less voyeuristic and less sentimental or crudely lifelike.
Susan Sontag[24]


IV

Edward Weston’s portraits work best in those cases where he had some intense sympathetic or erotic relation with his subjects. ... Weston’s biographer ..suggests that what is revealed in these very great photographic portraits is not the personality of the sitter; and not the personality of the photographer, either. Instead, it is an invisible, indefinable interaction of the two.
Eric Homberger[25]


V

The portrait photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself...
Roland Barthes[26]


VI

Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing’, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.
Roland Barthes[27]

Consider a press photograph of President Kennedy widely distributed at the time of the 1960s election: a half-length profile shot, eyes looking upwards, hands joined together. Here it is the very pose of the subject which prepares the reading of the signifieds of connotation: youthfulness, spirituality, purity.... pose is not a specifically photographic procedure but it is difficult not to mention it insofar as it derives its effect from the analogical principle at the basis of the photograph. The message in the present instance is not ‘the pose’ but ‘Kennedy praying’: the reader receives as a simple denotation what is in actual fact a double structure – denoted-connoted.
Roland Barthes[28]


VII

Special importance must be accorded to what could be called the posing of objects, where the meaning comes from the objects photographed. The interest lies in the fact that the objects are accepted inducers of associations of ideas.
Roland Barthes[29]


VIII

Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait chronicle of itself.
Susan Sontag[30]


IX

Garbo offered to one’s gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, ..., an archetype of the human face. ... The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.
Roland Barthes[31]


X

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
Garry Winogrand [32]


 

Chapter 1: Photography and Reproduction

Garbo offered to one’s gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, ..., an archetype of the human face. ...The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.
Roland Barthes[33]

Photography tends to suggest endlessness. This follows from its emphasis on fortuitous complexes which represent fragments rather than wholes.
Siegfried Kracauer[34]

Many photographers continue to prefer black-and-white images, which are felt to be more tactful, more decorous than colour, or less voyeuristic and less sentimental or crudely lifelike.
Susan Sontag[35]

This chapter will address the intrinsic characteristics of photographs and their visual effects. Since photography and its relation to architecture has been written on extensively, I will concentrate on some key texts by Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin,[36] and develop my argument along the following two issues: the issue of the photographic message and the issue of photography’s reproducibility.

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I

In order to investigate the different messages a photographic image produces, I want to approach the issue using the example of the advertising image – ‘[since] in advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional’[37] – and ask: Why are certain architectures like the thermal bath, the Barcelona Pavilion, the Villa Tugendhat, and the Parthenon favoured settings for fashion shootings and advertisements? Does this underline the fact that these buildings already function as images? What is it that gets advertised? What role does architecture occupy in this configuration of the following advertisements?

Roland Barthes in The Rhetoric of the Image[38] distinguishes between three messages an advertising image yields:
1. the linguistic message,
2. the analogical or denotational message and
3. the cultural or connotational message, which will be of major interest in the context of my argument.[39]
Barthes argues that an advertising image provides a series of discontinuous connotational signs, which require a general cultural knowledge of the beholder. I will come back to this notion of cultural context as a precondition for operations like signification and effect later on.[40]

Italianicity is not Italy, it is the condensed essence of everything that could be Italian, from spaghetti to painting.[42]

The term refers to an abstract idea of Italy rather than to Italy itself.[43]

The transposition of that idea onto the bath’s different photographic framings – both the black-and-white photographs and the fashion photographs – could help to analyse the place effects these photographs yield: they signify a condensed essence of place, they signify – as I will call it – a certain place-y-ness. By place-y-ness, I mean the following: place-y-ness is not place. place-y-ness is an effect which shows in the photograph, or rather, which is produced by the operation of the photograph. place-y-ness both originates in and plays on culturally shared connotative systems.

Of course, someone might raise the objection that this place-y-ness has to be found in the place, in the referent of the photograph itself. I would answer to this objection in two steps: first of all I would argue that place-y-ness is not found in the place itself – as Italianicity is not found in Italy – but that it is constructed by the photograph and our cultural knowledge.[44] Photography’s objectivity is a myth, photographs are not neutral or transparent or a mirror of reality, but the photographic frame, which is just one part of the photograph’s composition and just one of many connotation procedures as they were pointed out by Barthes, transforms the referent;[45] this is linked to the second part of my argument: in a second step I would argue that place-y-ness is found in the place; but it is just the effect of place-y-ness which like a code engraves itself on the object reciprocally and thus as an ‘after effect’ influences the perception of the place. Photography’s denotational nature veils this connotation by naturalising the effect.

With regard to Barthes’ identification of Italianicity in the assemblage of different signs, – the tomato, the pepper and the tricoloured hues, in the case of the bath’s effect of place-y-ness, one has to turn the deciphering process the other way round and ask: what are the signs in the photographs that signify that place-y-ness? Whereas Barthes gives a positive definition, that means he defines something by the presence of something else, at this stage of the argument I want to claim that the distinct effect of place-y-ness cannot be defined by the presence but rather by the absence of something. The photographs of the thermal bath signify place-y-ness because they refrain from locating the bath in a specific place and a specific time, they deliberately exclude all elements which would place the bath: for example people are almost never shown but just traces of them, and if they appear in a photograph they form part in a highly aesthetisized photographic composition. Moreover, the decision to use black-and-white photographs suppresses the major effect colours might have in placing the bath in the strikingly luscious green mountains. Thus the signs might be called: absence of people, absence of action, absence of colour, absence of weather.

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In the following, I want to elaborate in more detail on the different aforementioned absences which add up to the photographic effect of place-y-ness, and explore their individual effects. They might be assembled into two groups: absence of place and absence of time.


absence of place – placelessness

...mountain, stone, water, building in stone, building with stone, building into the mountain, building out of the mountain, being inside the mountain: our attempts to give this chain of words an architectural interpretation, to translate into architecture its meanings and sensuousness, guided our design for the building and step by step gave its form.[46]

For some, [the Barcelona Pavilion] is one of the most contextual and site-specific of Mies’ European buildings. Others have argued with equal persuasiveness that it was a placeless and autonomous object and that its reconstruction could be sited anywhere in that the original was unfettered by distinctions of place.[47]

The reconstruction of the Barcelona Pavilion serves as a striking example of the contentious discussion about what makes a building either independent from place or contextual. Whereas in the case of the Barcelona Pavilion the building’s autonomous objecthood is referred to as a proof of its placelessness,[48] in the case of the thermal bath, the focal point is slightly shifted: I want to argue that the thermal bath’s placelessness is not based on its autonomous objecthood – the bath is not independently ‘sliding through space’ – but that it is rather based on its endless interior. This interiority detaches the bath from its particular surrounding place.[49]

This effect of endlessness is not just grounded in the architectural disposition of the bath – the meandering, labyrinthine bathing space – but moreover is a result of the photographic frame’s power to suggest endlessness and consistency beyond the frame.

Photography tends to suggest endlessness. This follows from its emphasis on fortuitous complexes which represent fragments rather than wholes.[50]

A photograph, whilst recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen. ... What it shows invokes what is not shown. ... The degree to which ... this is worth looking at can be judged by all that [is not shown] because it is contained within it.[51]

the similarity between the three-dimensional vegetation and the two-dimensional veining of the Alpine marble wall is largely a function of the homogenising effect of black-and-white photographic image: reproductions ... demonstrate that the larger and grainier the enlargement, the closer in tonal value the wall and vegetation appear. ... Tegethoff [one of the advocates of the pavilion’s contextuality] projects his own desire to see a connection between the pavilion and its physical context, attributing the visual characteristics of black-and-white photography and photographic enlargement onto the physical character of the building.[55]

In similarly ironic way, in the thermal bath, photographs are employed to create this supposed connection between building and place; not just single photographs but the persuasive sequence of photographs in Zumthor’s own publications and his unmistakable chain of words quoted above establish a story that links the valley, the village, the raw stones and the finished stonewall of the bath. This sequence of photographs veils the bath’s potential placelessness as discussed earlier. Roland Barthes defines this effect of sequence as another kind of signification, which he calls syntax or concatenation.[56]

This connotation procedure implies that another sequence of photographs could establish a different contextuality for the thermal bath. Could one not imagine the bath’s trans-location by a similarly persuasive sequence of images? For example a trans-location to the Atlantic coast?

By expanding on this observation I want to disclose the double aspect of context or place and – to my mind – the prevailing misunderstanding of how a building is placed: First of all one might define a building’s contextuality by the building’s placement in one particular place, which is what everyone is supposedly talking about when referring to a building’s context. Zumthor’s writings might serve as an example of this understanding:

...when we, as architects, are concerned with space, we are concerned with but a tiny part of the infinity that surrounds the earth, and yet each and every building marks a unique place in this infinity.[57]

To my mind, this understanding has to be supplemented by another observation: the building’s contextuality is also defined by the building’s deliberate placement – through distinct choices and modes of representation – within a certain discursive context. As I have alluded to in the introduction, the site of architectural production has been shifted from the construction site to the rather immaterial sites of architectural publication, exhibitions and journals.[58] Thus, the thermal bath is not just placed in a particular place in a Swiss valley, but it is also placed in manifold architectural journals, which constitute a different contextuality.

With regard to photography, one might also describe this operation of placing a building within a certain discursive context by the term framing. Just as the photographic frame deliberately includes and excludes, and thus connotes the depicted object, the inclusion and exclusion of certain building details, photographs, anecdotes etc. frames the thermal bath in each article, publication, or exhibition anew.

Garbo offered to one’s gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, ..., an archetype of the human face. ... The face of Garbo is an Idea.[64]

Furthermore, there are no signs of weather or clothes which could have an impact on placing the bath in a particular time or age.[65]

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The fashion photographs of the thermal bath refer to the black-and-white photographs’ site-less and time-less idea of place rather than to the distinct place of the bath. Thus, one might argue that specific architectures like the thermal bath or the Barcelona Pavilion are settings for advertisements since they already signify a culturally shared, abstract idea of place. This idea of place acts like a sleek continuous background for the object advertised, whereas every other place which had not that quality of place-y-ness would obstruct the frank and emphatic message of the advertisement.

Another explanation of the bath’s place effect and its use for fashion shoots could be drawn from Brett Steele’s interpretation of minimalism and the use of minimalist spaces as ‘neutral backdrops’ for advertisements. Steele argues that

new minimalism isn’t just an architecture that looks good in glossy magazines [but that] the style is a glossy magazine.[66]

The neutral quality of minimalist interiors does not distract the viewer from the fashions exhibited, but reinforces the act of looking as the privileged activity; moreover, these interiors become fashionable images themselves. While refraining from any discussion of whether the bath is minimalist in style or not, this digression nevertheless gives an insight into the bath’s operation as a background for advertisements and its image effect.[67]

Comparing the fashion advertisements shot in the thermal bath with the Absolut Vodka advertisement on Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building, one notices a crucial difference: Absolut’s promotion of the future – in the correlation of Mies, modern architecture and hard liquor – might be read not just as a certain kind of place-y-ness but moreover as a certain kind of modernicity, or better as a certain kind of mies-y-ness. The question of where Mies’ architecture stops and Absolut’s advertisement begins is far more complex in this example. The advertisement paradoxically draws from both the abstract idea of place and the specific Miesian place. Whereas one is familiar with Mies’ architectures operating as brand spaces, one might interpret the thermal bath as another brand space, signifying zumthor-y-ness with the aforementioned natural values like place or material truthfulness.[68]

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.[72]

...that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work or art.[73]

When applying these two categories of authenticity and aura to the interrelation of architecture and its photographic reproduction, one might contend Benjamin’s claim: do not distinct images – for example reproductions of the Parthenon in Athens – capture an aura of the building which seems to be lost when one actually visits it? Is it just the frame of the photograph which is missing when moving through the space, the frame, which kept all distractions out of sight, which in a way purified the object from its distinct place. Might one distinguish between two different kinds of auras, the one of the building which is characterised by its presence to all senses, by inclusion and complex stratification – the one Benjamin is talking about – and the one of the photograph which works purely visual, by exclusion and purification? Thus could one define place-y-ness as the aura of the photographs as opposed to the aura of the place itself? This interpretation recalls the argument of the first part, namely that the effect of place-y-ness is an effect of the photographic message, affected by the different absences – absence of place and absence of time.

I now want to take a slightly different approach in analysing the photographs impact: by stepping back from the composition and connotation of the photograph to its technical quality, I want to show that photography’s reproducibility is of interest at this stage of my argument. Benjamin proclaims a certain shift in the production of works of art due to this quality: not only that reproduction enables the work to ‘meet the beholder half-way’:

...technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway. ...and in permitting the reproduction [to do this], it reactivates the object reproduced.[74]

Moreover, with works of art being designed for reproducibility, the notion of authenticity ceases to be of importance, since by definition there can be no authentic print.[75] As a result of this change, ‘the total function of art is reversed’; this brings me to the next characteristic of photography which will be crucial in the course of my argument:

In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line.[76]

Benjamin observes that works of art are received and valued on two different planes: on one plane, the emphasis is on the cult value of a work of art, on the other, the emphasis is on the exhibition value. While for the former, the existence of the work of art itself matters, for the latter just being on view is the objective. The striving for exhibition value induces a qualitative transformation of the nature of the work of art.

By transposing Benjamin’s conceptions to the thermal bath, one could reach the following conclusion: since the thermal bath – like most architecture nowadays – is mainly perceived through photographs,[77] why should the issue of designing for photographic reproducibility not have had a major impact on the design of the bath in the first place?[78] Referring to the idea of exhibition value vs. cult value, one could argue that the bath’s exhibition value, its image effect which I have described up to now as its place-y-ness, might have had a major impact on the design, perhaps as much as the creation of the place itself, the place’s cult value as a bath.[79]

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The analysis of the bath’s photographs with regard to Barthes’ theory of the photographic message elucidated photography’s power and influence on the perception of the depicted object, and unveiled the myth of the bath’s contextuality in parts as an effect of photography. Benjamin’s analysis of the intrinsic characteristics of photography has opened up several questions with regard to the interrelation of architecture and photography, one of which is: what is it to design architecture which is appreciated for its exhibition value, which is reproducible in images? Since not every place produces the effect of place-y-ness in a photograph, in the following I will first analyse the distinct operation of translating architecture into photographs, and then search for the source of that effect in architecture itself.

Chapter 2: Original and Translation

Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing’, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.
Roland Barthes[80]

Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait chronicle of itself.
Susan Sontag[81]

Mies is the most important modern architect to a new generation because he’s the easiest to copy – well.
Philip Johnson[82]

In the second chapter, I want to look at the characteristics of translation, focusing on the act of translating rather than the final product, the translation itself. How does this distinct operation influence the status of both the original and the translation? In the first part of this chapter, I will convey my take on Walter Benjamin’s definition of translatability within linguistics and transpose some of his ideas onto architecture and photography.[83] Moreover, I will look at Robin Evans’ notions on translations.[84] My argument will be developed with regards to the process of translation, and the issue of the translation’s impact on the perception and conception of the original. In the last part of this chapter, I will give a short account of Mies van der Rohe’s and Peter Zumthor’s design processes with regard to the discussed issues.

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I

This chapter’s focus manifests itself in Benjamin’s definition of translation as a ‘mode’: the focus is not on the translation’s objecthood, but on the operation of translation and its impact on both the translation and the original.[85] Walter Benjamin in his text The Task of the Translator[86] defines translation as follows:

To comprehend [translation] as mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability.[87]

When approaching the translatability of a work of art, Benjamin distinguishes between two questions: the first one asks whether an adequate translator could ever be found among the totality of its readers, whereas the second asks – to his mind the crucial question – whether the original’s nature lends itself to translation or rather, ‘in view of the significance of the mode, calls for it’.[88] Could this quality of translatability be compared to the quality of photogenia? Do faces or buildings call to be translated into a photograph? I will come back to this issue later on but first I want to concentrate on the process of translation, as it is defined by Benjamin with regard to linguistics.

Benjamin describes the process of translation as a temporally linear process which operates from the original towards the translation. Translations are closely connected with the original through the original’s translatability, but without being ‘of importance to the original’. In the course of the argument, Benjamin searches for concise definitions of the interrelation of original and translation.

Illustration 9: Diagram 1, sketch by Christine Neuhoff


Benjamin specifies that the translation issues not so much from the original’s life but from its afterlife. He points out that translations come later than the original since

important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin.[89]

Benjamin defines the eternal afterlife of the original as fame. According to his definition, only when the original achieves fame, is the translation enabled.

Illustration 10: Diagram 2, sketch by Christine Neuhoff


In the next part of the argument, a profound modification takes place: Benjamin claims that

in its afterlife, which could not be called that, if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living, the original undergoes a change.[90]

Hence, Benjamin questions the static quality of the original when he refers to historical processes as having an impact on the original.

llustration 11: Diagram 3, sketch by Christine Neuhoff


Benjamin then pushes this idea further in saying that every translation originates in a specific stage of linguistic history. The translation transplants the original into a definitive linguistic realm at that point in history and thus implicitly influences the perception of it. Benjamin points out that this setting is not a finally definitive one but that the original might be positioned anew in a different context by yet another translation.

Transposing Benjamin’s interpretation of the process of translation onto the translation of architecture into photography, – by first defining architecture as the original and photography as the translation[91] – one might develop an argument with regard to the following issues:

The first issue concerns the process’ one-way linearity or temporal sequence – in particular the linearity of the enablement of the translation and the recognition of the original. Is this one-way linearity and temporal sequentiality due to the translation’s operation within one single mode of representation? Or is it bound to the particular mode of language? One might challenge these two hypotheses with the following examples: The narrative on Las Meninas illustrates, how within the single mode of painting the transcriptions or trans-paintings of Pablo Picasso in 1957 – which moreover are originals in their own right – had a major impact on the perception and evaluation of Diego Velasquez’s original of 1656 afterwards. An example from within the single mode of language might be the translation of Sigmund Freud’s theory on psychoanalysis into English: the translation systematised Freud’s theory by translating the human drives called the Es, the Ich and the Über-ich in German into id,  ego and superego, instead of It, I and Over-I. The systematised translation had a major impact on the reception of the original. These examples supplement Benjamin’s linear concept of recognition with the notion of reciprocity.

Within the context of architecture and photography, the process of translation gets even more complex: photographs not only have an impact on the perception of the original as discussed in the first chapter, but photographs are taken even before the building is finished. These photographic translations get covered up and folded into the original and its perception. Hence, in this case, the translation precedes the original.

llustration 12: Diagram 4, sketch by Christine Neuhoff

The task of the translator consists in finding [the] intended effect (Intention) upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.[94]

When transposing this idea onto architecture and its photographic translation, one would conventionally argue that the photographer has to search for the intended effect and translate this intention, so that the photograph produces an echo of the original. Referring back to Benjamin’s notion of translatability one could ask in how far the translatability of the original has an influence on the translator’s work. One might question whether some architectures, in anticipation of the photographic translation, present the intended effect more frankly to the camera eye than others, whether some architectures lend themselves to the production of the original’s echo in the photographic translation.[95]

This idea might be further pursued in applying the following description of Benjamin:

The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own he must go back to the primal elements of [the] language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. ... The extent to which a translation manages to be in keeping with the nature of this mode is determined objectively by the translatability of the original.[96]

Within the context of architecture and photography, this operation of influence described in the first part of the quote is the conventional one: a photographer is congratulated when her photographs produce an echo of the original which she supposedly achieves when being influenced by the specific language of the building.[97] The last part of the quote already implies that the photograph’s successful translation is bound to the architecture’s translatability.

I want to push these two points further by arguing that within the context of architecture and photography, the direction of influence, the ‘expansion and deepening of language’, might also be turned the other way round: I want to imagine the architect who is ‘powerfully affected’ by the ‘primal elements’ of photography – which I have elaborated on earlier –, who anticipates the photographic translation when designing. Not the photographer but the architect takes on the task of the translator: he translates future photographs into architecture. The extent to which the architect manages to do that determines architecture’s translatability into photography, its photogenia.

The anticipation of photographic translations relates to the complex play of posing in front of the camera eye.

Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing’, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.[98]

...what founds the nature of Photography is the pose. The physical duration of the pose is of little consequence; even in the interval of a millionth of a second (Edgerton’s drop of milk) there has still been a pose, for the pose is not, here, the attitude of the target or even a technique of the Operator, but the term of an “intention” of reading.[99]

Hence, an object photographed intends a certain reading with a certain pose. This act of posing is another characteristic which distinguishes photography as a means of representation from other representational modes like drawing or painting. While one might pose for a painting as well as for a photograph, the analogical nature of the photograph distinguishes the effect of posing: it naturalises the act of posing into an actual fact.[100] Roland Barthes observes the complexity of this act of posing in portrait photography:

The portrait photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself...[101]

Within the practice of architecture, this act of posing becomes even more complex: with the architect, another party joins in. The architect decides about how his building poses in front of the photographic camera. Moreover, he himself poses through the building and thus intends a specific reading of the building, of himself and his values. Although one might think that the building cannot adopt more than a single pose – due to its characteristic of being static – in this single pose, the architect has – potentially – taken into account the different parameters which influence the building’s act of posing: light and weather conditions and the different perspectives of the moving eye and moving camera eye. Thus, with regard to a building’s pose, the parameters of mobility and stasis are somewhat reversed: it is not the object photographed which moves into a pose, or changes from one pose into another, but it is the camera eye that captures different poses of a building by moving through it.[102]


II

The reading of Robin Evans’ Translations from Drawing to Building and Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries [103] adds another layer of interpretation with regard to the operation of translation, and serves as yet another example of my argument’s focus. Evans observes that drawings become independent from their referent and become themselves the ‘repositories of effects and the focus of attention’.[104] But like Evans, I am not so much interested in the photograph’s independence and own objecthood, but rather in the transmutation that occurs between building and representation.

According to Evans, the translation from drawing to building is characterised by its anticipatory notion, in that drawings produce a reality rather than reflect it.

Drawing in architecture is not done after nature, but prior to construction; it is not so much produced by reflection on the reality outside the drawing, as productive of a reality that will end up outside the drawing. The logic of classical realism is stood on its head, and it is through this inversion that architectural drawing has obtained an enormous and largely unacknowledged generative power: by stealth.[105]

Evans’ notion of the drawing’s productiveness still acknowledges the temporal sequentiality of drawing and building. In contrast, I want to argue that – by transposing this idea on architecture and photography – photographs are not so much the reflection of a reality, but similarly productive of a reality like drawings, even when being in the temporal chain later than the original. This idea refers back to the interpretation of the architect’s task as that of translating photographs into architecture. What might seem like a paradox just calls for the imaginative mind and the knowledge of the formal connection between the original and its photographic translation, which will be the focus of the next chapter.

Robin Evans explores that formal connection between drawing and building further when remarking on an alignment between certain drawings and buildings, and their illusions:

In Palladio’s sketch of the S. Petronio facade the close alignment (but not quite identity) between drawing and building is at once obvious. This is the kind of architecture that so much fascinated Alberti: a massive, monumental architecture engendered from the etiolated, reduced, bodiless elements of ‘lines and angles which comprise and form the face of the building’; an architecture made through drawing and made of the same species of illusion as is to be found in drawing.[106]

One might argue that a comparable alignment also exists between certain architectures and photography, and that this alignment defines architecture’s photogenia.

To illustrate the significance of translation, as a last reference to Robin Evans I want to discuss his observation, that some architectural realities – be it the projective relations of dome and floor in de l’Orme’s Royal Chapel at Anet,[107] or the horizontal symmetry of Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion[108] – are better apprehended in photographs than in reality.[109] Evans argues that

Perusing the slides I had taken of the reconstructed pavilion, I found it difficult to decide which way up they went – an artefact of photography, no doubt. Then I changed my mind. It was not an artefact of photography, but a property of the pavilion itself, a property of which I had not been conscious while there. The photographs had made it easier to discern.[110]

Evans claims that ‘the horizontal symmetry of the Barcelona Pavilion is very powerful’[111] although he had not been conscious of it while being there.[112] In an ironic way, he looked at photographs of the pavilion to observe the horizontal symmetry as a reality of the pavilion.

I have since looked at as many photographs as I could find of both the original and the reconstructed pavilion. ... They show that ... in Mies’s pavilion the plane of symmetry is almost impossible to escape.[113]

Rather than interpreting this horizontal symmetry as a property of the pavilion, I would approach this observation by distinguishing between property and effect. I will argue that the effect of horizontal symmetry just exists in the photographs and is specifically intended for the pavilion’s apprehension through the photographs; it has got nothing to do with the unmediated perception of the pavilion’s reality.[114] Instead of the effect, it is the source of this effect – the architectural disposition – which has to be a property of the pavilion itself.


III

In the following, Mies van der Rohe’s and Peter Zumthor’s design processes might serve as examples of the translation’s impact on the conception of the original. In his article Absolut Mies, Absolute Modern, Brett Steele claims that

Mies’ working methods ... effectively merged a project’s guiding concepts with highly visual forms of their own promotion.[115]

By referring to the Seagram building, Steele points out that the company’s advertising and publicity interests were not only central to but moreover lead to Mies’ commission. Mies’ obsession with simulating the effects of his spaces might be seen in his numerous photographic collages, which anticipate the visual effects of the space on a two-dimensional plane and which envision future photographs.

Steele argues that this concern with photographic representation and reproduction might be one of the reasons why Mies remains very much alive today, or to put in Philip Johnson’s words

Mies is the most important modern architect to a new generation because he’s the easiest to copy – well.[116]

Whereas Mies’s bravura within this context is widely recognised, the anticipatory impact of photographs on the design process also applies to Zumthor, when he himself says:

All too often in the design process you reach a point when the initial warm feeling for the object or the space begins to suffocate under the intellectual and theoretical justification for designing a specific element in a specific way. ... When this happens, my method is to say to people: ‘Step back from what your have lying there on the table. Imagine for a moment that the thing on the drawing has been built and that you’re seeing it in a movie. You’re not responsible for anything. You can cut your ties, regain some sort of innocence, and just let this ‘thing’ have an impact on you.[117]

Seeing it in a movie is the crucial phrase in that statement: Zumthor does not refer to the experience of space but to the operation of framing space. He thus in the design process employs the means of the frame, or rather a sequence of many frames, to scrutinise the design in terms of its future image effects. Linked to this design technique is the method of taking endoscopic photographs of card models which render the image effect of the space.



llustration 16: Diagram 5, sketch by Christine Neuhoff


Going back to Mies’ Seagram building and the merging of advertising, publishing and design interests right at the beginning of his commission, it is also interesting that the visual accounts for different purposes correspond: whether in advertisements for the facade, architectural journals of that time, modern architectural history texts or monographs on Mies, all these publications re-use the same photographs. This observation refers back to the issue of mies-y-ness or place-y-ness; the repetition of images reinforces their iconic status and their reference to an abstract idea of Mies and place.

The correspondence of images also applies to the thermal bath: the biographical publications of Peter Zumthor, articles in architecture magazines and the commercial brochures of the thermal bath all use the same visual account: the aforementioned black-and-white photographs which promote the bath’s place-y-ness.

***************

Having started off from Benjamin’s notion of translatability, I have analysed the interrelations of original and translation and their possible reciprocal impact. I have argued that within the context of architecture and photography the process of translation might not only follow a one-way linear pattern, but that future translations – future photographs – might have a major impact not just on the perception but also on the conception of the original. This observation redefines the task of the architect as the task of a translator: he translates future photographs into architecture.

Benjamin claims that some works of art call for their translation, without defining those works in more detail and without considering the impact of that notion on the conception of the original. In the following chapter I want to ask: what is it to write something or to design something which calls for its translation? Which architectures call for their translation into photographs? How does architecture ‘pose’ for being photographed? or to put it in Robin Evan’s words, does an alignment exist between certain architectures and photographs and their respective effects? Does Evans’ alignment or Benjamin’s translatability define architecture’s photogenia? The next chapter will elucidate these issues and their impact on the design of architecture in more detail.


 

Chapter 3: Vision and Form

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
Susan Sontag[118]

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
Garry Winogrand[119]

Every epoch perceives with its own eyes. The historian must ask in each case how a thing demands to be seen in itself.
Heinrich Wölfflin[120]

This chapter addresses the object itself in search of the source of its visual effects in photographs, its photogenia. Since not every place produces the effect of place-y-ness in a photograph, I want to ask: what is it in architecture that defines Benjamin’s translatability or Evans’ alignment with photography? This part will be mainly based on Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History.[121] Whereas in the first half the correlation of vision and form will be discussed, in the second half, the focus will be the effect of the picturesque within architecture.

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I

In his Principles of Art History, Heinrich Wölfflin developed a theory of vision, which articulates the interrelation of the history of vision and the history of representational forms. Whereas Wölfflin refrains from elaborating on the causal quality of that relation – he never asks whether vision might have an impact on representational forms – his theory might nevertheless serve as a basis for my argument that specific visual possibilities and optical technologies correlate with the creation of art or architecture. The reading of Wölfflin’s theory will help to identify the visual effects of the thermal bath in the building itself and clarify how these interrelate with the medium of photography.

In his Principles of Art History, Heinrich Wölfflin assembles different works of art in two opposing groups of representational forms, the classic and the baroque – the main formal opposition he explores is that between the linear and the painterly – and he analyses how these forms call for distinct ways of seeing.[122] As I will show in the following, the aforementioned architectures of classic Greece, of Mies van der Rohe and of Peter Zumthor might be assembled in the first group of representational forms, the classic, or to allude to the first category, the linear.[123]

The following quote forms the basis of Wölfflin’s theory of vision. I will draw on this to build up my argument.

Every artist finds certain visual possibilities before him, to which he is bound. Not everything is possible at all times. Vision itself has its history, and the revelation of these visual strata must be regarded as the primary task of art history.[124]

Hence, there is a history of vision which has an impact on the creation of art. The analysis of architectural forms and their appreciation by the human eye and the camera eye respectively will be the focus of this chapter, rather than a comparative evaluation of the aesthetic quality of the different representational forms.[125]

Whereas Wölfflin claims that

every epoch perceives with its own eyes, [and that] the historian must ask in each case how a thing demands to be seen in itself,[126]

I want to ask, how does architecture, which will be mainly perceived through photographs, demand to be seen and therefore demand to be designed?[127]

Wölfflin claims that opposing forms of apprehension and representation are based on different interests in the world: whereas the classical supposedly values the truthful, the nature of things as they really are, the Baroque values the appearance of the things. These different interests in the world manifest themselves in the production of two totally different architectural effects: whereas the Baroque seeks beauty in the architectural form ‘as something over which, for all its stability, there plays an apparent, constant movement [and] change,’[128] all classic architecture seeks beauty in the solid figure, the enduring and pure form, the measurable, the finite, and the thing itself.[129]

The latter reads like a priority list of Peter Zumthor himself and his affinity to these classic values is perhaps best expressed in his statement that

to me, buildings can have a beautiful silence that I associate with attributes such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence and integrity, and with warmth and sensuousness ...; a building that is being itself, being a building, not representing anything, just being.[130]

the sense and beauty of things is first sought in the outline, ..., [and] that the eye is led along the boundaries and induced to feel along the edges.[132]

He claims that classic forms work throughout with clear-cut, tangible boundaries; every surface has a definite edge, every solid has a perfectly perceptible form. Thus, linear vision sharply distinguishes form from form, as the crisp lines separate the different forms and volumes from each other. Linked to that notion of tangible boundaries is the observation that in linear vision and architecture, light and shadow serve the form and emphasise the impression of plasticity.[133] As a result of the combination of the aforementioned notions of form, light and shadow, Wölfflin proclaims that the linear style produces a tactile picture:

The evenly firm and clear boundaries of solid objects give the spectator a feeling ... as if he could move along them with his fingers, and all the modelling shadows follow the form so completely that the sense of touch is actually challenged. Representation and thing are, so to speak, identical.[134]

Wölfflin argues that the operation which the eye performs resembles the operation of the hand which feels along the body.

This observation could be the crux in the analysis of the praised tactility of the thermal bath. Rather than producing just a material effect which affects the sense of touch, the bath has also a distinct visual effect, and provokes a touching with the eye. The significance of this observation lies in the fact that architecture might evoke a tactile sensation just by looking at it. According to Wölfflin’s argument, Zumthor’s favoured main characteristics of the thermal bath – the pure forms, the refined material organisation and the tactile sensation – are not just promoted within the phenomenological context of the building’s presence and by the sense of touch, but also by the medium of photography in the form of visual effects.

This interpretation has to be understood as an extension of the aforementioned photographic effect of place-y-ness. Whereas in the first part of my argument I concentrated on the connotational message a photograph yields, defining place-y-ness as an assemblage of absences – absence of people, absence of colour etc. – with regard to Wölfflin’s theory of correlating vision and form, the photograph’s denotational message is the focus.

In the next pair, Wölfflin opposes the notions of plane and recession in architecture. He states that classic architecture

possesses a perfectly well-developed feeling for volume, but it forms volume in a different spirit from the baroque. It seeks stratification in planes, and all depth is here a consequence of such plane sequences, while the baroque from the outset avoids the impression of the planimetric and seeks the real essence of the effect, ... , in the intensity of the perspectives in depth.[135]

Linked to that notion of stratification, Wölfflin argues that classic architecture does not demand the oblique view but that ‘the pure frontal aspect will always make itself felt as the one lying in the nature of the thing’.[136] Whereas his claim seems to be valid in the interior of the thermal bath or the Barcelona Pavilion – the volume is felt as a stratification of different volumes, planes and spaces rather than as being perspectival – it seems not to hold for the views from the outside. To my mind, Wölfflin in his endeavour to set up absolute categories, underestimates the great effect an oblique view might have even in classical architecture; one just has to think of the magnificent photographs taken of the Parthenon from the propylaeum or the Barcelona Pavilion taken from an oblique point of view; do not the perfect rhythm of the columns of the Parthenon and the autonomous objecthood of both the Parthenon and the Barcelona Pavilion have even greater effect when seen from an oblique point of view? Perhaps Wölfflin should have distinguished between views from the outside and views in the inside.[137]

Wölfflin’s discussion on possible points of view and the characteristics of different modes of representation might elucidate in more detail the relation between ‘classic’ architecture and photographic vision. Wölfflin argues that in the classic style, the permanent form is emphasised and that therefore the variation of the appearance has no independent value. Thus classic architecture acknowledges

either no standpoint of the spectator – certain distortions of the form always being present – or all. ...[Whether seen] foreshortened or not, with or without intersection of the forms, ..., yet from all standpoints, the tectonic basic form will penetrate as the decisive element.[138]

...the multiplicity of views is the question opened by the picturesque.[141]

Hence, the bath’s image effect, the bath’s photogenic quality might also be based on its picturesque quality – defined here by the possibility of multiple viewpoints and the disposition of space as a sequence of picturesque stills. In the thermal bath, the sequential clicking of the eye, the clicking of the camera shutter, seems to best capture the bath’s spatial and visual quality. Thus, not the continuous movement is the vehicle of apprehension and evaluation – that for example Richard Serra’s sculptures would call for – but sequential standstills.

Wölfflin argues that linear architecture is only picturesque, insofar as its spatial disposition becomes a picture for the perceiving eye.[142] Thus, the effect of the picturesque does not reside in the object itself. Given the photograph’s denotational quality, one could extend the argument in saying that this effect does not just exist for the perceiving eye but also for the camera eye.[143]

...even in a purely linear presentment – and this is the decisive point – a certain decorative picturesque effect ... remain[s].[144]

Auguste Choisy’s analysis of the Acropolis in Athens might be read with regard to Wölfflin’s discussion of the picturesque.[145] In his chapter The picturesque in Greek Architecture, Choisy interprets the architecture of the Acropolis as a sequence of tableaux which offer themselves to the visitor’s gaze in the 5th century BC.[146]

The employment of both terms – picturesque and tableau – underlines Choisy’s focus on the pictorial and compositional values and effects architecture or architectural ensembles might provoke.[147] It is interesting to note that this chapter on the picturesque is set between different chapters on Greek building types and typological elements. Choisy’s equal treatment of the building type of the temple and the visual effect of the picturesque underlines the latter’s position as it is assigned by Choisy within the practice of architecture: the effect is described as yet another building element, thus acquiring a similar status in the creation of architecture, becoming somehow a comparable material fact. The importance of visual effects in the design of architecture is further explored by Choisy in the section on the compensation of visual errors in Greek architecture.

Choisy’s and Wölfflin’s notions of the picturesque thus exemplify once again the existence and evaluation of certain visual or rather pictorial effects within architecture, which might have an impact not just on its photographic representation but also – in the anticipatory calculation of the effect – on the conception of architecture.

Choisy’s interpretation of the Acropolis as a sequence of picturesques not only had an impact on the filmmaker S.M. Eisenstein and his theory of montage,[148] but also profoundly influenced architects like Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier reproduced an illustration of the Acropolis of Athens from Auguste Choisy’s Histoire de l’architecture in Towards a New Architecture, to develop his theory on the ‘plan as the generator’.[149] Moreover, Auguste Choisy’s theory on the sequence of picturesques which are apprehended from within movement might be interpreted as the basis for Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale. In his Œuvre complet[150] the photographs of Villa Savoye give a synthetic view of different aspects of the building and thus gain meaning in their sequential reading, while moreover each photograph in itself might be interpreted as deliberately designed and captured tableaux: each photograph is a carefully composed, mounted still, thus comparable to Eisenstein’s theory of the ‘montage within one shot’.

The concept of montage composition is inseparable from shot composition: one cannot exist without the other. ... montage is a stage derived from the shot; in other words, the conflict of compositional elements within the frame is ... a cell, a nucleus of montage which obeys the law of fission as the tension of that conflict rises. Montage is the leap made by internal shot composition into a new quality. ... Montage exists not only in time but in space, and not only in the object but, crucially, in the perception of it.[151]

This digression into different theories on sequential readings of picturesques and on montage within film shows once again that some effects even if provoked by a certain architectural setting, crucially exist in only the perception of it. The allusion to S.M. Eisenstein perhaps best exemplifies the anticipatory calculation of pictorial effects when transposing a 3-dimensional space or reality onto a 2-dimensional plane, the movie screen.

***************

Heinrich Wölfflin’s comparative analysis of classic and baroque vision and form has been very influential and effective within architectural history and theory, but one should not underestimate the impact of the two screens and the use of this clear cut dichotomy on the persuasiveness of his theory. Wölfflin was the first one to introduce two lanterns and two screens in the lecture halls in order to sharpen the eye to the stylistic differences between two comparable works of art. By the means of photography and this comparative two slide projection, the attention is focussed on certain aspects of the buildings, and the photographs in comparison depict what might have been overlooked otherwise. Thus again, the naturalness of the photographs veils intention and possible manipulation: connotation procedures like choice, frame, exposure, angle, etc. are deliberately employed in order to achieve the intended effect. As Gombrich points out, Wölfflin made the polarities of the baroque and classical look like strong polarities through his choice of examples and his powers of description. This method of basing an argument on two polarities became fashionable in the 18th century, another example of which is Burke’s Sublime and Beautiful.[152] Gombrich criticises these polarising conceptual systems for always making exclusive claims and making previous classification obsolete.[153]

To my mind, Wölfflin does not fully develop the potential of his theory and its impact on the production of art and architecture. While he says

it is certainly right that art has always been able to do what it wanted and that it dreaded no theme because ‘it could not do it’, but that only that was omitted which was not felt to be pictorially interesting.[154]

he never turns the argument around and claims, that one might do something just because it is first of all pictorially interesting, that one might do something just because of the image it produces.

Wölfflin’s theory of correlating vision and form nevertheless explicates how specific architectural forms call for a certain way of seeing and for certain means of representation. According to his theory, one might argue that there are architectures which call for being photographed rather than painted or drawn. The impact of this knowledge on the production of architecture is obvious.



Conclusion

With this thesis I have shown that the positioning of Peter Zumthor’s thermal bath within the discursive context of Mies van der Rohe, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Robin Evans and Heinrich Wölfflin reveals the bath’s intrinsic relationship with photography and its operations on a visual level. This change of context shows that one has to be aware of the multiple layers of stories, mythologies, translations and framings,[155] which position the thermal bath in a distinct context. The objective of this thesis was the demystification of those operations – in particular the mythology of photography – which work upon the perception of the thermal bath and other architectures. The thermal bath provided an exemplary case study with which to identify the effects of photography, notably the effect of photogenia in architecture.

A first definition of photogenia served to delineate the scope of my investigation and to structure my argument along three major issues; in the course of my argument, the medium of photography, the operation of translation and the architectural object became the respective focal points.

***************

In the first part of this thesis, I focussed on the medium of photography by pursuing two strands of thought: the unveiling of photographic messages, in particular the signification of place-y-ness, and the analysis of photography’s characteristic of reproducibility.

By dissecting the connotational messages the bath’s photographs yield, I argued that the widely discussed natural category of place might be interpreted as an effect of the bath’s photographs, in particular the black-and-white photographs. Thus, I have analysed the twin aspects of mythology and photography, by unveiling the effect of place-y-ness which in its naturalised form gives reason to the aforementioned rhetoric,[156] and by demystifying the unique nature and naturalness of photography. I demonstrated that the effect of place-y-ness is produced in the prevailing black-and-white photographs of the bath and by the signification of certain absences, in particular by the absences of colour, of place, of people, and of weather. In that context of place-y-ness and placelessness, I elaborated on the double aspect of a building’s contextuality – understood as both the context of the real building site and the context of the immaterial sites of architectural journals or exhibitions. Linked to that, I discussed the frame’s power to merge the building with its context while simultaneously detaching it from that context. Moreover, the allusion to Adolphe Appia’s stage sets and Brett Steele’s interpretation of minimalism shed a different light on the bath’s place-y-ness and its employment as an advertising setting: I interpreted the bath as an unconditioned stage, an idea of place, which becomes a specific place – a bathing place or a fashion place – through action.

My reading of Walter Benjamin’s texts on photography raised several questions about the photographic reproducibility of architecture and architecture’s exhibition value. I argued that photography has an unequalled impact on the image effects of certain architectures in distinction to other modes of representation. A wider study could focus on different representational modes and analyse their distinct impact on design and evaluation processes at different times in history.

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In the second part, I focussed on the intrinsic characteristics of the operation of translation within the context of architecture and photography was, while I refrained from discussing the dichotomy of original and translation, and from embarking on any moralistic discussion about the difference between the real and the image or between the ‘truthful’ and the ‘lie’.

Using the analogy of Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation within linguistics, I analysed the complexity of translating architecture into photography and developed a theory about reciprocal influences. I formulated several implications for the design of architecture by transposing the complex play of posing from portrait photography onto architectural photography, and by interpreting the architect’s task as the task of a translator: I turned the translating process around in suggesting that architects like Mies van der Rohe and Peter Zumthor might have been powerfully affected by the language of photography when designing, and that they might have translated future photographs into architecture. Thus, I argued that photographs are productive of a reality rather than just its reflection. Moreover, the notion of translation opened up questions about the complex objecthood of architecture, namely: what is the original in architecture? the material form, the construction plan, the sketch? What translations have buildings already undergone before they are translated into photographs? A further study could investigate these different translations and their reciprocal impact on each other. The definition of architecture as the result of manifold translations is crucial for the understanding of architecture’s objecthood.[157]

To illustrate the significance of the translation’s mode, I referred to Robin Evans’ observations in Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion. I argued that there might be visual effects – for example the visual effect of horizontal symmetry – which just exist within the photographs, or rather for the apprehension of the pavilion through photographs.

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In the last part, I looked at architecture itself in order to trace its photogenia, its translatability, and to find an explanation for the observed alignment between certain architectures and photography.

Heinrich Wölfflin’s theory on correlating vision and form provided the crucial link between the photographic effect and the architectural form. I formulated the argument that one might design architecture in order to achieve a certain image effect in photographs. A prerequisite for this argument was the knowledge of photography’s denotational nature. I revealed the bath’s tactility as a visual effect which is promoted by the photographs. Wölfflin’s claim that in classical architecture, ‘Representation and thing are, so to speak, identical’,[158] corresponds to my definition of photogenic as something where image and self seem to coincide. The photographs of the thermal bath, of the Parthenon and of Mies’ architecture seem to prove that what is liked by the classic eye – that is solid lines, pure and tangible forms, light and shadow in the service of form – is also what is liked by the camera, what is felt as being photogenic. As there are no ‘wrong’ views of the architecture itself, one could argue – when considering photography’s denotational nature – that one cannot take ‘wrong’ photographs of the bath, of the Parthenon or the Barcelona Pavilion. Based on this observation I have thus also claimed that one could define the effect of photogenia within architecture by the fact that it is somehow impossible to misinterpret the architecture’s effect in photographs.

The discourse on the picturesque within architecture and film exemplified the existence of a visual effect solely in the perception of architecture whilst being affected by the architectural object itself.

***************

By linking the notions of signification and effect with Wölfflin’s theory on the correlation of vision and form, one could establish a new definition of photogenia and photography’s impact on the conception of architecture. With reference to my short definitions of photogenia and place-y-ness, one could argue: while photogenia is not found in the face itself, it is noteworthy that it is produced just by some faces! while place-y-ness is not found in the place itself, it is noteworthy that it is produced just by some places!

Thus, the design of architecture is not just about the place itself, the building itself, the space itself; it is also about the recognition of the exclusive existence and operation of certain effects within the medium of the photograph, and the knowledge of how these photographic effects correlate with the architectural form and how they inscribe themselves on the perception of the architecture itself.

By taking the thermal bath as an exemplary case study, I have disentangled photography’s complex structure and power. I have argued that the effects of place-y-ness and tactilicity do not just influence the perception of the bath’s reality, but they moreover inscribe themselves back onto the building’s reality, hence, that they form part of its essence. The supposedly clear dichotomy between essence and effect does therefore not hold with respect to the thermal bath. By extending this argument, I want to conclude with the thought that the bath’s essence is its effect and that effect is its essence.


 

Illustration credits:

Figure 1:               Panzani advertisement, digital image, source unknown.
Figure 2:               photograph by Volker Schlechtriemen.
Figures 3-6:           photographs by Christine Neuhoff, collages of inside views of the thermal bath by Christine Neuhoff.
Figures 7-8:           photographs by Christine Neuhoff.
Figures 9-12:         sketches by Christine Neuhoff.
Figures 13-15:       photographs by Christine Neuhoff and unknown.
Figures 16:           sketch by Christine Neuhoff.
Figures 17-25:       photographs by Christine Neuhoff.

 

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Notes: