For the only perspectival view of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève he drew for publication in a professional magazine, Henri Labrouste traced a photograph commissioned for that purpose. Taken in 1852 by the Bisson Frères, the image is very likely the first commissioned photograph of a contemporary building as well as the firm’s first architectural photograph. This use of photography as a template in the architectural representation of a contemporary building predates by almost twenty years what later became common practice. Labrouste’s deployment of a mechanical interface in drawing mirrors his use of exposed iron in the building itself and carries with it many of the same implications regarding the search for a modern, realistic, and industrialized form of expression. In The Template of Photography in Nineteenth-century Architectural Representation, Neil Levine marshals histories of the book and of photography to help explain the context in which Labrouste developed this idea.

Undertaken at the turn of the eighteenth century by John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor for Charles Howard, the third earl of Carlisle, Castle Howard began life as a grand country house linked to a traditional formal garden but soon evolved into what has come to be acknowledged as one of the first, if not the first, English landscape garden. This essay focuses on the outbuildings in their landscape setting in order to show how the strange and evocative mood they create in the beholder grows out of a new subjectivity that reveals important insights into the shift from classical to early modern ideas of architectural representation. Unlike previous studies, which have explored the role of the patron, the relationship to contemporary English culture, and the social and economic forces acting upon the design, this one attempts to place the work-and define its significance-in the broader context of the development of early modern architecture.