Seeing Architecture: On Photographers, Architects, and the Ambition of Space

Photography and architecture have long shared a complex intimacy—each dependent on the other for its visibility, its audience, and its myth. Both practices begin with acts of framing: of deciding what belongs within a boundary and what must be left out. Yet, while architects build spaces for inhabitation, photographers construct images for contemplation. Between them lies an uneasy and fertile exchange, a shifting negotiation between the physical and the representational, between ambition and afterimage.

From the very onset of architecture as a discipline, looking and depicting have been fundamental to its self-definition. From Sebastiano Serlio’s perspectival drawings to Brunelleschi’s experiments with vanishing points, from abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier’s primitive hut to Robin Evans’s writing on the political charge of axonometric projections, architecture has been a project of visual argument as much as of spatial construction. Its social nature—how it stages life and orchestrates experience—has always been tested through acts of looking. In this, the camera became both a witness and a collaborator, inheriting architecture’s obsession with light, proportion, and the drama of perception.

I. Recording Architecture: From Proof to Projection

Photography’s initial role in architectural history was utilitarian. Before it became a language of expression, it was a tool of record—an empirical apparatus promising objectivity.

The introduction of photography in 1839 immediately presented architecture as an ideal subject. Because early photographic processes required long exposure times, static subjects like buildings and landscapes were naturally favored. This suited the growing bourgeois interest in travel and the romanticized revival of medieval architecture prevalent at the time. The two competing initial methods defined the medium's early applications: the Daguerreotype offered pristine detail but yielded a single, unreproducible positive image, while William Henry Fox Talbot’s Calotype (based on a paper negative) allowed for the inexpensive production of multiple copies, which was essential for widespread access and architectural education.

Early architectural photographs were valued for their accuracy, their ability to describe a façade or a column without the embellishment of a draftsman’s hand. The camera’s eye, it was believed, did not lie. Yet even in these first images, the supposedly neutral gaze betrayed aesthetic choices. Exposure times softened shadows; compositions emphasized symmetry or grandeur. Notably, pioneers like Édouard Baldus often deliberately adopted the perspectival conventions of academic drawing—such as placing the vanishing point centrally—to ensure the resulting photographs were legible, reliable, and acceptable to architectural historians and institutions.

By the mid-19th century, the reproducible photograph had become indispensable to documentation, preservation, and education. Institutions such as the École des Beaux-Arts began to rely on photographic archives as extensions of the drawing collection. American architects, like H.H. Richardson, built extensive personal archives of thousands of photographic prints ordered from Europe, using them as both reference and inspiration to shape new American styles—demonstrating how the photograph acted as a tastemaker, traveling easily across the Atlantic to influence design decisions. The image, as always, was not merely a record but a construction of cultural desire.

With the turn of the twentieth century, architectural photography evolved from documentation to mediation. It became not only a record of architecture but the primary way most people experienced it. In the modern era, when buildings appeared in magazines long before most would visit—or even be completed—photographs came to define architecture’s identity in the public imagination. A photograph could immortalize a building, and sometimes even invent it.

II. The Architect and the Image

Few architects understood this more astutely than Le Corbusier. His relationship with photographers like René Burri and Lucien Hervé reveals how modern architecture came to be shaped by its image.

In 1949, Lucien Hervé—a self-taught photographer—traveled from Paris to Marseille to see Unité d’habitation, Le Corbusier’s recently completed housing complex. Overwhelmed by its formal rigor, he shot 650 photographs in a single day and sent them to the architect. Le Corbusier’s response was immediate and telling: “You have the soul of an architect.” He hired Hervé as his official photographer, declaring later that he had finally found someone who could “express architecture.”

For sixteen years, Hervé would become Le Corbusier’s visual counterpart, transforming raw concrete into chiaroscuro, reducing structures to near-abstraction. Their collaboration redefined the architectural photograph—not as static documentation, but as a kind of visual philosophy. Le Corbusier saw in Hervé’s framing a means of architectural discovery: light and shadow as design principles, the fragment as an emblem of totality. Through Hervé’s lens, buildings acquired faces—anthropomorphic presences that blurred the line between architecture and portraiture.

The same can be said, in another register, of Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman. Their images of modern American architecture—Stoller’s austere precision, Shulman’s cinematic vitality—transformed architectural modernism into cultural iconography. Shulman’s famous photograph of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22 (1960), with two women suspended in the glowing glass box above Los Angeles, is less an image of a house than an advertisement for a lifestyle: leisure, transparency, control. Through such images, the modern home became a stage for modernity itself.

But here lies the critical tension: architecture, in these photographs, often appears emptied of its contingencies—unscuffed, uninhabited, composed. The photograph became less a mirror than a mask. Its subject was not the building as lived but the building as idea, as manifesto. For architects, this was both liberation and loss. The image freed architecture from geography, allowing it to circulate as concept—but it also tethered architecture to the seductions of surface.

III. Two Lineages: Commissioned Vision vs. Independent Gaze

The photographers who defined modern architecture—Stoller, Shulman, Hervé—were often commissioned directly by architects. Their task was not simply to document, but to communicate the architect’s vision to a public unlikely to experience the space firsthand. Their access was privileged, their timing deliberate—often before the arrival of occupants, when architecture could still perform its ideal self. These images were acts of persuasion as much as of observation.

By contrast, a second lineage of photographers approaches architecture not as client or collaborator but as interlocutor—sometimes adversary. For these artists, buildings are not endpoints but instruments in larger narratives about culture, politics, and perception. Their work situates architecture within broader conditions—urban, social, economic, environmental—where the architect’s intent becomes only one of many forces shaping the image.

The chief difference, then, lies in the departure point of each. The commissioned photographer begins from the architect’s world: space, form, and program serve the building’s self-expression. The art photographer, on the other hand, begins from a conceptual or cultural inquiry, using architecture as material. There is no ranking between the two—only a difference in ambition.

Figures like Iwan Baan and Julius Shulman complicate this division. Their images, though often commissioned, transcend mere documentation. Baan’s aerial shots of informal settlements or disaster-stricken cities—juxtaposed with sleek architectural works—expose the social conditions architecture inhabits. Shulman’s staged glamour contrasts with Baan’s anthropological curiosity, yet both define the cultural life of their subjects. Their photographs do not merely show buildings; they shape how architecture is remembered.

Artists such as Thomas Demand, Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Struth—many emerging from the Düsseldorf school founded by Bernd and Hilla Becher—engage architecture as part of a broader visual argument. Demand’s meticulous paper reconstructions of interiors—photographed as if real—turn architecture into evidence of absence. Höfer’s empty museum halls and libraries transform public institutions into quiet studies of order and emptiness. Struth’s monumental images of city streets and museum visitors reveal the choreography of seeing itself. In each case, architecture is present but not paramount. The image’s ambition lies elsewhere—in the cultural reception of space, the politics of looking.

IV. The Bechers and the Birth of the Cool

The Bechers’ influence on this second lineage cannot be overstated. Their typologies of industrial structures—water towers, blast furnaces, grain silos—first appeared as methodical studies but evolved into meditations on anonymity and repetition. When their students—Gursky, Höfer, Ruff, Struth, Esser—expanded this language, photography became an arena for critical reflection on the built environment itself.

The exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975) at the George Eastman House marked a turning point. Including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, Stephen Shore, and the Bechers themselves, the show presented a sober, disenchanted view of the contemporary landscape—tract housing, industrial parks, suburban sprawl. The images were cool, detached, and resolutely anti-romantic. They replaced the sublime landscapes of Ansel Adams with the banal terrains of late capitalism.

Robert Smithson, who collaborated with the Bechers on related projects, described this condition in his essay A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. Driving through the post-industrial outskirts of the city, Smithson found himself in a landscape that “seemed to beg to be photographed—or, perhaps more accurately, appeared already to be photographically and cinematically staged.” For Smithson, the world had become image-like, self-consciously mediated. Architecture was no longer the subject of representation but its symptom.

The New Topographics photographers turned this realization into method. Their images were less about critique than exposure—revealing how architecture participates in systems of production, neglect, and entropy. The photograph became a form of archaeology: not uncovering ruins, but documenting the present as if it were already past.

V. From Glass Slides to Screens: Seeing as Projection

If photography gave architecture new ways of being seen, architects also began to adopt photographic thinking. In 1911, Walter Gropius delivered his lecture Monumentale Kunst und Industriebau (“Monumental Art and Industrial Architecture”) using 69 glass lantern slides. The slides—grain silos, factories, bridges—embodied his argument for a “new monumental style” based on corporeality: the expression of mass, structure, and volume. The projection itself became part of the architecture of persuasion. The images, illuminated by light and voice, performed the solidity they depicted.

Gropius’s glass slides prefigured the way architecture would come to exist through its reproductions. A few decades later, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion would achieve near-mythic status through a handful of photographs. When Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici, and Fernando Ramos reconstructed the pavilion in the 1980s, they relied on those original black-and-white photos—ambiguous, suggestive, incomplete. Even the depth of the reflecting pool had to be guessed, as the water appeared black in the images. In a sense, the reconstruction was an act of reverse photography: reanimating an architecture that had survived only as image.

VI. Fantasies and Fabrications

Photography’s role in architectural imagination extends beyond documentation or even mediation—it becomes generative. Le Corbusier and Hervé had already used photography to project “architectures not yet there.” Mies’s 1957 collage for the unbuilt Bacardi Headquarters in Cuba exemplifies this logic: abstract cutouts of marble and glass evoke a building that exists more vividly in representation than in reality. The view it constructs is defined as much by absence as by presence. When the project was never realized, the image itself became its most enduring form—an architecture that lives in imagination

Gianni Pettena’s Ice House II (1972) similarly turns photography into architectural speculation. By digitally inserting a monolithic block of ice into a suburban Minneapolis street, Pettena exposes architecture’s indifference to environmental context, anticipating contemporary debates on climate and entropy. Carsten Güth’s Private Bunker series (2013) extends this logic, removing windows and doors from photographs of ordinary houses, transforming them into sealed, anxious forms. In each case, manipulation is not deceit but critique—an interrogation of architecture’s relationship to truth.

This interplay between truth and fabrication is as old as photography itself. In 1840, Hippolyte Bayard staged his Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, protesting the French government’s decision to credit Daguerre with the invention of photography. Bayard’s morbid tableau—a photographic suicide note—was effectively the first instance of “fake news” in visual form. His image revealed what photography’s advocates had denied: that the camera, far from objective, could lie persuasively.

“The corpse of the gentleman you see here . . . is that of Monsieur Bayard, inventor of the process that you have just seen. . . . As far as I know this ingenious and indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with perfecting his discovery. . . . The Government, who gave much to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life! . . .”

Bayard’s later career, documenting French monuments for the Société héliographique, underscores the paradox: photography’s authority as truth was born from an act of fiction.

VII. From the Chemical to the Digital: Post-Photography and Architectural Desire

With the advent of digital photography in the 1990s, the faith in photographic truth faced a final reckoning. Theorists like William J. Mitchell declared a new “post-photographic” condition—a shift from static, authored documents to participatory, infinitely reproducible images. Mitchell himself noted that popular terms like “electronic photography” obscure the importance and far-reaching consequences of this new information format for visual culture.

In academic discourse, the term post-photography has been critiqued as an inclusive term that acts as a "reprise of photography" rather than a true move beyond it, retaining the old medium's language. This is evident in arguments that claim the essence of the digital image is discoverable in the birth of photography, or that analogue photography should be revisited as proto-digital to argue for continuity. This position, which stretches the concept of digital code to claim that photography was "always already digital", has been described as an "ontological short-circuit" designed to "breathe new life into the living corpse of photography".

In architecture, this transformation paralleled the rise of computer rendering. Buildings began to exist first as digital images, long before construction. The rendering, like the photograph before it, became an instrument of seduction, often more vivid than the built work it promised. This shift from analogue to digital marks a historic paradigm shift from projection to processing, moving from the instrumentalization of the gaze to the algorithmization of operations. The screen is stressed as the current form of the image. In the age of social media, architecture circulates as spectacle. The “Instagram moment” has replaced the promenade architecturale. Buildings are designed for the lens, optimized for visual shareability. The act of photographing has supplanted that of inhabiting. Yet, paradoxically, these fleeting images also democratize architectural experience. They reveal how people occupy, misuse, and reinterpret space—how architecture performs socially beyond the architect’s control.

The image-in-the-moment—ephemeral, performative, ubiquitous—no longer reflects architecture but constitutes its life within culture. Architecture today lives not only in concrete and glass but in pixels and feeds. Its meaning is constantly rewritten through acts of seeing.

VIII. AI and the Architecture of Imagination

Artificial intelligence marks the latest chapter in this evolving relationship. This development has invited a fundamental re-evaluation of the image's technical basis in architectural practice. Theorist John May considers the status of computational images in architectural thought, arguing that the computational image has nothing in common with the photographic or orthographic, concluding that the very idea of a "digital photograph is an oxymoron". This perspective fundamentally questions the consequences of computational imaging for the architectural imagination.

Platforms like Midjourney and DALL·E have flooded digital space with hyper-stylized visions of impossible architectures—coral cathedrals, gravity-defying cities, dreamlike landscapes. This deluge has provoked both awe and anxiety: What becomes of authorship, originality, or intent in a world where anyone can conjure architecture with a prompt?

But this anxiety, too, has precedents. Every new imaging technology—from the daguerreotype to Photoshop—has unsettled the boundaries between the real and the represented. What distinguishes meaningful work from noise is not the tool but the intent. Craft, narrative, and critical inquiry remain the artist’s domain. The photograph—whether analogue or algorithmic—retains its agency only when guided by thought.

In this light, the AI-generated image might be understood as a speculative instrument, akin to Mies’s collage or Le Corbusier’s photomontage: an architecture not yet built, perhaps not buildable, but imaginable. Intent is what transforms these images from fantasy to proposition. As Andrés Reisinger’s Take Over series (2023) demonstrates, digital surrealism can articulate longing, melancholy, and critique as powerfully as any physical structure.

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey offers a prescient metaphor. HAL, the film’s disembodied AI, inhabits the architecture of the spacecraft itself—an intelligence made spatial. The glowing red eye embedded in sterile white corridors is both camera and consciousness, observer and environment. In Kubrick’s vision, architecture and image merge completely: the building is the machine, the photograph is the gaze. This inversion mirrors our own condition, where the tools of vision—smartphones, sensors, surveillance—are inseparable from the spaces they inhabit.

IX. The Image as Continuum

Seen within a larger practice—whether architectural or photographic—the image becomes more than documentation; it becomes thought material. A body of images reveals not only buildings but the evolution of an idea. Candida Höfer’s quiet interiors, Hélène Binet’s studies of shadow and surface, or Struth’s monumental urban views each form a sustained inquiry into the nature of space. For architects, these photographs offer more than representation—they offer reflection. The act of photographing, like drawing, becomes a way of thinking through form.

The image’s repetition within a practice—its recurrence, variation, and refinement—traces an ethic of seeing. What one chooses to photograph, and how, becomes a form of architectural authorship. A photograph is never neutral; it expresses a worldview. Over time, this visual consistency becomes evidence: of curiosity, of discipline, of ambition.

X. Image, Architecture, and the Ethics of Vision

Ultimately, the image’s power lies not in its fidelity to the real but in its capacity to question what is seen. Architectural images, whether captured, constructed, or computed, are moral instruments. They frame not only form but also values—what is celebrated, excluded, or obscured. In a world of environmental crisis and social inequity, how architecture is represented carries ethical weight. Does the photograph reveal labor, resource, context—or erase them in pursuit of perfection?

When an architectural image circulates globally, it projects more than design; it transmits ideology. To align photography with architecture’s larger ambitions—to house, to dignify, to sustain—is to reclaim representation as a site of critical authorship. Whether in the tactile grain of film or the frictionless glow of the screen, the image remains a proposition: a way of imagining the world differently.

XI. Seeing Architecture

To see architecture is to participate in its becoming. Every photograph, drawing, rendering, or post is an act of translation—from matter to light, from experience to image. These translations are never innocent; they construct the myths by which architecture lives. Yet they also sustain its vitality, allowing buildings to outlast their materials, to exist across time, geography, and medium.

In the interplay between the architect’s ambition and the photographer’s gaze lies the enduring dialogue of space and vision. One builds for the body, the other for the eye—but both imagine for the mind. The photograph does not end architecture; it extends it. Through each act of seeing, architecture renews its claim upon our attention—not merely as shelter, but as speculation, as argument, as art.

XII. Beyond the Photograph: The Computational Continuum

The concluding thought that the image "extends" architecture requires a final confrontation with the nature of the image itself. The very term 'photograph,' as discussed in Section VII, has been critiqued by theorists who argue for the necessity of a 'forget photography' mandate. This is not merely an academic exercise but a critical refusal to let the historical definitions of an analogue medium—fidelity to light, evidence, indexicality—constrain our understanding of the current visual landscape.

In this view, the architectural image is no longer a photograph, but a computational, networked artifact. Its DNA is not silver halide and light, but code and data. The "ontological short-circuit," the attempt to claim that the analogue photograph was 'always already digital,' is seen as a way to preserve the cultural and historical value of 'photography' even as its technical basis has vanished. When architects circulate renderings, immersive models, or AI-generated concept images, they are engaging in a process of algorithmization rather than projection.

The enduring dialogue between the architect's ambition and the visual artifact is now defined by the conditions of the screen. The image is a synthetic space where architectural ideas can be tested, critiqued, and mythologized, free from the constraints of material reality. By embracing the computational continuum, architecture acknowledges that its most powerful form of existence in the 21st century is as a speculative, infinitely adaptable digital proposition.