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Indepth Arts News:
"Altered States of America: Julius Shulman"
2000-08-09 until 2000-09-24
Photographer's Gallery
London, ,
UK
In a career which spans eight decades, Julius
Shulman is considered one of the world's leading
architectural photographers. Born in New York in
1910, Shulman's images captured the spirit of
post-war Californian modernist architecture. This
exhibition brings together some of Shulman's
most iconic photographs of West Coast domestic
architecture.
A self-taught photographer, Shulman's career
began when he met the architect Richard Neutra
in 1936. Neutra had been brought to Los Angeles
to assist fellow Austrian architect Rudolph
Schindler, who was overseeing the construction
of Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House. Neutra
went on to establish a reputation as one of the
leading architects working in Southern California
and was particularly noted for the intriguing
relationships he created between buildings and
landscape. Shulman documented the majority of
Neutra's buildings in photographs. He captured
their cool, clean geometries and at the same time,
humanised their radical modernism.
Neutra belonged to a group of modernist
architects drawn to work in and around Los
Angeles, who believed in the social benefit of
architecture: 'As an architect, my life has been
governed by the goal of building environmental
harmony, functional efficiency, and human
enhancement into the experience of everyday
living.'1John Entenza, editor of Arts and
Architecture magazine, shared the same vision,
and the Case Study House programme he
initiated in 1945 provided an extraordinary
opportunity for a generation of American and
emigrč architects to pursue an unprecedented
experiment in domestic architecture. Fuelled by a
rising demand for affordable single-family homes -
and the need to house a generation of GI's
returning from Europe - in its twenty year duration
some 26 progressively designed Case Study
Houses were built, each intended as a model for
future construction on a mass scale. Architects
such as Edward Killingsworth, Charles and Ray
Eames, Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig
Ellwood and Pierre Koenig proved they could
build cost-effective homes without compromising
the utopian principles of modernism. It was Julius
Shulman who gave pictorial form to the radical
architecture they created, and his perfectly
composed, light-filled images parallel the sense of
optimism and confidence which infused both the
architecture and the historical moment in which it
was created.
Craig Ellwood and Pierre Koenig used industrial
materials such as steel to create structured
armatures and combined this with broad expanses
of glass, juxtaposed with reflective planes of
water. In these geometric and modular designed
houses, the boundaries between inside and
outside were broken down with the use of
translucent materials. Perched high in the hills,
with the city of Los Angeles spread out below,
these houses transformed the way the modern
house looked. Shulman's images of Pierre
Koenig's two Case Study Houses were to become
synonymous with this project. When Norman
Foster discussed the impact of Pierre Koenig's
work, he is in fact describing Shulman's dramatic
evening shot: 'The heroic night-time view of Pierre
Koenig's Case Study House No. 22 seems so
memorably to capture the whole spirit of late
twentieth-century architecture. There, hovering
almost weightlessly above the bright lights of Los
Angeles, spread out like a carpet below, is an
elegant, light, economical and transparent
enclosure whose apparent simplicity belies the
rigorous process of investigation that made it
possible. If I had to choose one snapshot, one
architectural moment, of which I would like to have
been the author, this is surely it.'2
Camilla Jackson
Programme Organiser
1 Richard Neutra from William Marlin, ed. Nature
Near: Late Essays of Richard Neutra
2 Norman Foster, in the foreword of Pierre
Koenig, by James Steele, David Jenkins, 1998
IMAGE:
Julius Shulman
Case Study House No. 20 (Bass House), 1958
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