Modernism, media, abstraction: Mies van der Rohe's photographic architecture in Barcelona and Brno (1927--1931).
Item
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Title
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Modernism, media, abstraction: Mies van der Rohe's photographic architecture in Barcelona and Brno (1927--1931).
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Identifier
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AAI3239309
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identifier
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3239309
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Creator
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Zimmerman, Claire.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rosemarie Bletter
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Architecture | Art History
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines mechanical reproduction, photography, and architecture in the Weimar Republic, through the work of German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). Modernism, Media, Abstraction begins with two Weimar buildings for which photography played a particularly important role, surveying the professional photographs of the Barcelona Pavilion (1928-29) and the Tugendhat House (Brno, 1928-30), the historiographical uses of these images over the last seventy-five years, and their relationship to the buildings they depict. The dissertation next considers the impact of photography and film, as new media of the Weimar avant-garde, on Mies's design process. These two buildings were publicized through photography, but photography and film also provided conceptual devices that can be analyzed with particular clarity in the two projects under discussion.;The importance of photographs in the reception of architecture occupies a subsequent chapter on propaganda and ideology, suggesting that photography played a critical role in transforming architecture in ways that resonated well with contemporary political needs. Photographs created a flexible space in which architecture could be preemptively directed towards certain ideological goals, through the partiality and camouflage enabled by photographic technique. The last chapters turn to a close discussion of the images themselves, concluding that architectural photography, borrowing from contemporary developments in other fields, helped create a newly conceptualized (and paradoxically non-physical) mode of architectural abstraction. The photographs of Mies's buildings absorb conventions of architectural photography in the successful creation of new spatial constructs---called here a 'photographic architecture.' In doing so, they offer a counter-model to the experiential or synaesthetic fullness of constructed modern architecture. Architectural photographs offered a more portable form of abstraction, one taking its cues from the physical formats of painting, photography, and film much more directly than architecture itself ever could. The dissertation ends by comparing Mies's buildings, reflecting the importance of new media transformed through their spatialization, and the architecture described by their highly influential photographs---noting their significantly different attributes, as well as the prominence of the latter in historical accounts.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
