Review: Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century, by Claire Zimmerman

Architectural scholar Claire Zimmerman, author of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (2007) and coeditor of Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (2010), has written another important book that extends her research on German and British modernism into the burgeoning field of visual media studies.¹ An impressively researched book, Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century explores the complex reciprocal relationships between buildings and photographs before, between, and after the two world wars. Zimmerman uses the term photographic architecture to describe two types of interrelated cultural production: photographs of buildings for either commercial or avant-garde purposes, and buildings whose design and reception are informed by the logics and effects of photographs. She...