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Mies van der Rohe's Photographic Architecture

Architectural photography and its widespread dissemination in the Weimar period (and after) can be profitably investigated through the German work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. A discussion of the photographic architecture of modern mass media, and Mies’s place within it, subtends numerous issues connected to the intersection of two practices. For example, the persistently paradoxical demands for authenticity placed on architectural photographs have helped camouflage the precise characteristics of the alternative architecture projected on their surface-a virtual architecture related to, but not identical with, constructed reality. By contrast, avant-garde preoccupations with the apparent spatial depth of photographic and filmic surfaces (as exploited by particular printing processes), created an environment within which photographers of all sorts explored new visual possibilities. In the pictures of the Tugendhat House, the architect and photographer together created an alternative construct whose characteristics differ in specific ways from the building on site in Brno, and whose circulation was exponentially wider. The precise characteristics of this alternative ‘building’ remain to be elaborated and examined. A contradictory combination of perspectival space and avant-garde composition, these images (themselves produced for strictly commercial purposes) reflect photography’s various roles in modernism- as advertisement, as art image, as utopian projection.