009. Architecture — The Montana Lab

Documentation of the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion might have left an impression on us, especially Jeff Wall’s Morning Cleaning. On an assignment, we spent half a day at this magnificent venue, quietly minding our own business. Somehow, we found ourselves waiting for that warm morning light to sweep across the main hall and cast a shadow onto the onyx wall. It never arrived. Instead, reality revealed another kind of beauty through its crisp lines and almost graphic serenity on a late spring morning.

Jeff Wall, ‘Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona’ 1999.

Did the photograph shape our experience of the building? It certainly would not be the first time. As Mike Christenson recounts, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion received a lukewarm reception at the 1929 International Exposition. It was not until 1960, when Nikolaus Pevsner recognised it as “the most perfect architectural work” of the previous thirty years in An Outline of European Architecture, that its status was firmly established. Photography played a decisive role in carrying the Pavilion far beyond Barcelona, shaping how it was seen, circulated, and ultimately remembered. Jeff Wall’s Morning Cleaning later added another layer, turning the Pavilion from an architectural icon into a photographic one.

Lluís Casals. Pabellón alemán Exposición Internacional de Barcelona 1929, Barcelona, España, Mies van der Rohe, 1998.

Source: mymagicalattic

Slim Aarons’s iconic photograph of a Palm Springs house, designed by Richard Neutra, in 1970. Photo: Slim Aarons/Getty Images

Architecture may be designed by architects, but it often reaches us through photographers. The relationship between architect and photographer has long operated as a form of authorship in itself. Richard Neutra’s collaboration with Julius Shulman is one of its most recognised examples, shaping not only how his buildings were seen, but how an entire vision of modernism came to be understood.

Julius Shulman, Case Study House #22, Pierre Koenig, Los Angeles, California, 1960

“So we worked, and it got dark and the lights came on and I think somebody had brought sandwiches. We ate in the kitchen, coffee, and we had a nice pleasant time. My assistant and I were setting up lights and taking pictures all along. I was outside looking at the view. And suddenly I perceived a composition. Here are the elements. I set up the furniture and I called the girls. I said, ‘Girls. Come over sit down on those chairs, the sofa in the background there.’ And I planted them there, and I said, ‘You sit down and talk. I’m going outside and look at the view.’ And I called my assistant and I said, ‘Hey, let’s set some lights.’ Because we used flash in those days. We didn’t use floodlights. We set up lights, and I set up my camera and created this composition in which I assembled a statement. It was not an architectural quote-unquote “photograph.” It was a picture of a mood.”

Source: https://www.holdenluntz.com/

During a time when we were building rockets to go to the moon and planning on colonising Mars, the zeitgeist was caught perfectly in that picture.

- Tom Ford on Case Study House #22

Julius Shulman, arch. Richard Neutra, Singleton House, Los Angeles, California 1960

Pedro E. Guerrero, David & Gladys Wright House, Circa 1950-1955

In this photo of the David & Gladys Wright House in Phoenix, Arizona, Guerrero tackled the harsh desert light and deep shadows in the sparse landscape. The
expertly composed image, in which viewer and house are connected through the deep recess of the concrete block wall (what Wright identified as the house’s “anchor”), captures the heat’s intensity. In his biography, Guerrero recalled that Wright and his son David had an argument over bougainvillea vines that David had trained to soften the architecture. When Wright commanded they be ripped out for the photograph (published in House & Home in 1953), David kicked the architect and photographer off the property. Guerrero was tenacious and stayed behind for a photograph from the end of the driveway.

Source: https://franklloydwright.org/

Viewed from the Northwest, circa 1953. Photographed from the entrance on the ground level. As visitors approach the home from the drive, they walk under the main level, across the garden court to the base of the ramp, up the circular ramp to the entrance on the main level. The lower level of the large massive column houses the bath/changing room for the pool. The second level of the column is the master bedroom fireplace. Although the column anchors the eastern end of the home, the main level cantilevers past it and seems to float above the ground. The master bedroom is on the left, the bedroom gallery is on the right. Photographed by Pedro E. Guerrero for the June issue of House & Home. 10 x 6.75 B&W photograph. Courtesy of the David & Gladys Wright family.

Source: http://www.steinerag.com/

Pedro E. Guerrero, Sitting room with balcony, Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1952.

Hedrich Blessing, A rustic living room inside the home of Mr. and Mrs. Philip S. Rinaldo Jr's house in Downer's Grove, Illinois, USA, 1950.

Lionel Freedman, The Umbrella House by Paul Rudolph, 1953.

Manolo Laguillo, Dar a ver el tiempo, 2024.Image Courtesy of Banco de España Collection.

Lucia Moholy, Roof of the Atelier-House, Bauhaus Dessau, 1926 © 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
Image Courtesy of ArtBlart

Lynne Cohen, Spa (1999), chromogenic print. NGC

Marvin Rand, Smith House (1958, Craig Ellwood) Los Angeles
Credit: Courtesy the estate of Marvin Rand

Wayne Thom, Anaheim Convention Center Arena, 1969.

Together, they remind us that architecture is never only experienced through space. It is also experienced through photographs, each offering another way of seeing. Looking at Hélène Binet or Dayanita Singh often feels like reading Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows in photographic form. Guido Guidi slows our gaze. Takashi Homma turns Le Corbusier’s windows into quiet studies of light. Luigi Ghirri reminds us that architecture can be playful and ordinary. Wolfgang Tillmans, through his Tate photocopier works, questions whether architecture even requires a camera at all.

Frederick H. Evans, Kelmscott Manor Photographs, 1896. Image credit: https://www.metmuseum.org/

Laura Gilpin, Ranchos de Taos Church, 1930

Arthur Köster, Erich Mendelsohn, Einstein Tower, 1917-21, Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, 1924.

Jaromír Funke, Untitled from the series Reflections, 1929.
Image courtesy: MOMA

Tina Modotti, Escaleras, 1924-1926

Andre Kertesz, Puddle, Empire State Building, NY, 1967

Knud Lonberg-Holm, Equity Trust Building – Oblique View, 1923

Although the Danish-born architect Knud Lonberg-Holm is relatively unknown as a photographer, his revolutionary images of American cities in the mid-1920s were profoundly influential to the generation of avant-garde photographers active between the two World Wars. This extraordinary night view of the Thomas Cusack Company Building on New York's Madison Square was reproduced in a section of Erich Mendelsohn's landmark book Amerika entitled "World Center—Money Center." Built in 1919 by the young modernist architect Ely Jacques Kahn for a firm specializing in outdoor advertising, the six story building was designed with a façade that allowed for bands of signage beneath the windows and was surmounted by a massive signboard bearing the Cusack Company name. In Lonberg-Holm's futuristic view, floodlights transform the entire structure into a glowing billboard framed by the soft white orb of a streetlight and a diagonal stream of headlights. The effect is otherworldly, recalling the fantastical set designs for Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1929) and presenting the new American city as an ethereal utopia founded in commerce and existing entirely of light and energy.

Source: https://www.metmuseum.org

Knud Lonberg-Holm,Thomas Cusack Company Building, New York, 1923

Berenice Abbott, Penn Station, 1935–38, printed 1982, gelatin silver print.
Image credit: https://www.sothebys.com/

"Over the past twenty years, through my work and on my own initiative, I have collected artistic documents of fine 16th to 19th century architecture in all the ancient streets...in the form of photographic plates...This huge artistic and documentary collection is now completed, and I can truthfully say that I possess the whole of ''le vieux Paris.''"

- E. Atget, Paris, letter to Paul Léon, Directeur des Beaux-Arts, 12 November 1920.

Eugene Atget, L'Eglise Saint-Séverin, vue prise sur les toits, 5ème arrondissement, Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris.

It is through these different ways of seeing that we arrive at Ivory Press’s selection. Luigi Ghirri wrote that photography is “a way of thinking through images.” The books gathered here extend that idea into architecture itself. Spanning modernist icons, typological studies, and deeply personal interpretations of space, they remind us that architecture is not only built. It is also photographed, edited, sequenced, and remembered.

Before we enter a building, we often enter its photographs.

Luigi Ghirri, Fenis, From the series Paesaggio italiano, 1991

Axel Hütte, London: Photographien 1982-1984, Schirmer / Mosel, 1993.
Image Courtesy of https://www.book-komiyama.co.jp/

Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Katsura Villa, 1953–1982. Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York

Dayanita Singh, Montage XV, 2019

Dayanita Singh, Montage X, 2019

Image courtesy: frithstreetgallery

Lucien Hervé,Villa Savoye, 1961

Hélène Binet. Église Saint-Pierre, Firminy-Vert, France, Le Corbusier, 2007.

Photographing great landmarks of modernist architecture around the world, Sugimoto has deliberately taken the images out of focus and at unusual angles, isolating the recognizable forms. The blurred forms evoke the passage of time, muting the architectural details and leaving the essence of the building; suggestive of the way in which our memories preserve images.

Source: https://fraenkelgallery.com/

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2000.
Image Courtesy of Fondazione Bisazza.

Nadav Kander, Pudong I, Shanghai, 2007

Candida Höfer, Banco de España Madrid VII 2000
Image Courtesy of Banco de España Collection.

Günther Förg, Haus Lange, Krefeld 1, 1986/1998

Luisa Lambri, Untitled (Casa de Baile, #01), 2003
Image Courtesy of Thomas Dane Gallery

Appartement-atelier, Immeuble locatif à
la porte Molitor, Paris, France © Takashi Homma

Eye Camera Window: Takashi Homma on Le Corbusier presents photographic sequences and clusters that present the window as a spatial and perceptual motif in both Le Corbusier and Homma’s work while calling into question the act of seeing. A selection of Le Corbusier’s original drawings from the CCA Collection will also be exhibited, emphasizing his concepts for the treatment of windows and openings to construct views.

Source: https://madoken.jp/

Wolfgang Tillmans, Tate Modern has described the new gallery extension as ‘the most important cultural building to open in the UK for almost two decades.’

01. Study

CCCP – Fedeli alla linea, Epica Etica Etnica Pathos, Virgin, 1990. Copertina aperta: fronte e retro esterni.

Not every architectural photograph is found in a photobook or on a gallery wall. We first came across Luigi Ghirri's photograph for the CCCP – Fedeli alla Linea album Epica Etica Etnica Pathos through a post by Karolina Wiśniewska (Michael Hoppen Gallery).

We invited Karolina to tell us why. Her reflection reminds us that architecture is not only defined by what it was built for, but by the lives, sounds, and stories it continues to hold.

CCCP – Fedeli alla linea, Epica Etica Etnica Pathos, Virgin, 1990. Copertina aperta: fronte e retro interni.

The architecture therefore became an active condition [to] music making.

Words by Karolina Wiśniewska

What draws me to Luigi Ghirri’s photograph for CCCP’s Epica Etica Etnica Pathos is what it brings together: a former chapel has become a recording and mixing room where speakers stand before the altar, cables spread across the floor, and technical equipment occupies a space once organised around ritual - creating a new ritual. It is a tender image of a sacred place transformed into another holy place.

The album was recorded at Villa Pirondini, an abandoned eighteenth-century country house near Rio Saliceto, with the musicians using the building’s natural acoustics rather than the controlled environment of a conventional studio. The architecture therefore became an active condition [to] music making. Its rooms, surfaces and echoes became part of the sound. Ghirri’s photograph makes that relationship visible without illustrating it literally. To me, this is the essence of Ghirri’s photography: an extraordinary ability to give a sound and a taste to emptiness. It’s a 101 class on philosophy of architecture; understanding how space is shaped by use and histories, in this case being a reactivatation of a dead building. Remarkable considering how quiet the photograph is, a portrait of a band without any members of the band present.

The moment when a structure resists a fixed identity and becomes something else entirely is when it becomes most interesting.

CCCP – Fedeli alla linea, Epica Etica Etnica Pathos, Virgin, 1990. Buste: Epica, Etica.

CCCP – Fedeli alla linea, Epica Etica Etnica Pathos, Virgin, 1990. Buste: Etnica, Pathos.

Ghirri introduced this approach to Italian photography in the 1970s and 80s. Before him, most landscape photographers looked for dramatic, postcard perfect views. Ghirri did the opposite. He spent his career photographing totally ordinary, everyday places; suburban streets, gas stations, housing developments, etc. He focused on these marginal spaces to show how a place relates to the present day, paying specific attention to its mutability, neglect, and mystery.

Part of that mystery is something I am personally drawn to - anything that remains unfinished for some reason. Ghirri’s picture reminds me of a project I saw years ago at Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Alterazioni Video’s project Incompiuto: The Birth of a Style, which examined unfinished public buildings across Italy. I love this term “incompiuto” meaning incomplete, but in this context it describes buildings whose construction stopped before they could fulfil their intended purpose.

The moment when a structure resists a fixed identity and becomes something else entirely is when it becomes most interesting. Villa Pirondini is not an "incompiuto" in the strict sense, but Ghirri’s photograph, and its use as an album cover, gives it an open ending, or rather, a new life. It allows for mystery and anticipation, transforming old to new, giving birth to its new purpose.

02. Listen

The image has a little crack, let's say, is generous. The moment you imagine, you are creating three-dimensional things in your brain, like when you are reading a book or dreaming.

Helène Binet in conversation with Brad Feuerhelm

In this conversation (Nearest Truth), architectural photographer Hélène Binet reflects on photography as a way of reading space rather than simply recording it. Light, shadow, material, and silence become the vocabulary through which architecture gradually reveals itself.
During the conversation, Binet discusses her practice and how she came to architecture, including her work with Peter Zumthor and Zaha Hadid. Her reflections reveal a deep, meditative approach to space, shaped by light and atmosphere. The discussion also touches on her background in photography and the way she works within such environments.

Portrait on https://www.metalocus.es/

03. Read

Published by MACK in 2016.

Few photographers have written about seeing with the same clarity and generosity as Luigi Ghirri. Throughout these essays, photography becomes less a means of documenting the world than a way of paying closer attention to it. His reflections on landscape, architecture, memory, and everyday life continue to shape how we understand the medium today.

Perhaps it's in this very space, one of total fiction, that truth is concealed; it's here and only here that on seeing St. Peter's dome, we do not refer back to the stylised images we have of it, but recognise the sham, and return to a perception of our own, seen in reality.

Luigi Ghirri, In Scale 1977-1978, The Complete Essays

04. Photobooks

To conclude this issue, we invited the team at Ivorypress to curate a selection of photobooks that explore architecture through the lens of photography. Their choices bring together figures such as Giancarlo de Carlo, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Luigi Ghirri, revealing how these books do more than document buildings: they test ideas of context, typology, and perception, turning architecture into something to be read, compared, and reimagined.

Together, these books show how architecture can be reimagined through photography, publication, and the book as a space of interpretation.

Founded in Madrid in 1996, Ivorypress is an independent bookstore and publisher specialising in contemporary art, architecture, photography, and visual culture. Its carefully curated programme has made it a reference point for readers, artists, and collectors alike.

Experiments in Thickness: OFFICE (Walther Konig) 2024

Giancarlo de Carlo

This book is part of the ‘Everything without Content’ series by Kersten Geers, Jelena Pancevac and Joris Kritis, and it presents the work Giancarlo de Carlo built in Urbino in the 1960s and 70s, in the shadow of his involvement in Team 10 debates that challenged modernist doctrines on architecture and urbanism.

Giancarlo de Carlo first visited Urbino in 1951 to carry out a minor refurbishment of the offices of the rector of the University. This was the beginning of his lifetime engagement with the small town where he continued working over the next five decades. The eight buildings in this book are presented in drawings by students of the Academy of Architecture USI, Mendriso, and photographs by Stefano Graziani.

Welcome (To The Teknival) (B. Frank Books) 2017

Kasper Akhøj

Through his research-based work, the artist recorded the restoration and resurrection of this early modernist villa, one of the very few built by a female architect at the time. These photographs were taken over a period of six visits to E-1027 (in 2009, 2010, 2015 and 2017), yet each image is taken from a diverse view, allowing for the interchangeable nature of the villa to resonate through the documentation. The record of the successive occupants is confronted with each other, creating a gripping historical dialogue of conceptual storytelling.

Neues Haus Neue Welt.(Rudolf Mosse, Berlin)

Erich Mendelsohn

Photographs , situations and illustrations with comments of the author, for the new architecture and furniture design of private houses. Photographs by Arthur Köster.

Anonyme Skulpturen: A Typology of Technical Constructions (New York: Wittenborn and Co.) 1972

Bernd and Hilla Becher

The first monograph of the Bechers and often considered their magnum opus. Minimal and clean in design, the viewer is quietly immersed into the couple's distinctively stark style. "In this book we show objects predominantly instrumental in character, whose shapes are the result of calculation and whose processes of development are optically evident. They are generally buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style. Their peculiarities originate not in spite of, but because of the lack of design." Roth 101, p. 194. (https://www.burnsiderarebooks.com/)

Italia in Miniatura(MACK) 2024

Luigi Ghirri

This new book presents the entirety of Ghirri’s In Scala series, expanded with numerous previously unseen images, and places them in conversation with work by the park’s founder and designer, Ivo Rambaldi. Rambaldi’s maps, sketches, collages, and reference images, made on exhaustive research trips across Italy, offer an analogous exploration of the possibilities and paradoxes of miniaturisation. Their frank functionality resonates with Ghirri’s embrace of the perspective and tools of the ama-teur. From the dialogue between these meticulous works of representation and fabrication we discover the possibility that, in Ghirri’s words, ‘Perhaps it’s in this very space, one of total fiction, that truth is concealed’.

The Arquitect´s Album 02 (Actar) 2025

Denise Scott Brown

Here we present a selection of around 50 unpublished photographs that tell the story of her wedding journey with her first husband, Robert Scott Brown, in 1955: five weeks travelling in Illyria, a Balkan region between Albania and the former Yugoslavia, where a young architect-photographer shows us, through her camera, a country in transition, portraying aspects of rural and urban life, through places, people, animals, landscapes, streets and architecture that take us on a unique and transcendental journey, her Illyrian Honeymoon.

Carlo Scarpa's Tomba Brion (Hatje Cantz Verlag) 2011

Guido Guidi

Since 1995, Italian photographer Guido Guidi (born 1941) has trained his large-format camera on the Brion family’s memorial vault at San Vito d’Altivole. Designed by the great Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978), the burial site is explored over the years at different times of the day and in different seasons, building a remarkable portrait of place, time, creator and admirer.

Luis Barragán (Phaidon) 2000

Rene Burri

One of the key figures in modern architecture, Luis Barragan’s (1902-88) influence has travelled far beyond his Mexican homeland, culminating in his reception of architecture’s most prestigious award, the Pritzker Prize, in 1980. His architecture represents a strongly personal vision. Inspired by the vernacular style of his native country, his passion for Moorish architecture and desire for spiritual beauty and harmony with nature, he set about creating serenity and enchantment in his buildings and gardens. Photographer Rene Burri visited Barragan and photographed his work on several trips to Mexico in the 1960s and 70s. Here Burri pays tribute to his friend, reflecting the spirit of the man, capturing the essence of his architecture, and creating the sense of peace and contemplation that is at the heart of his work.

Gabriele Basilico fotografa Aldo Rossi (Humboldt) 2026

Gabriele Basilico

Gabriele Basilico followed Aldo Rossi’s work for almost twenty years, accompanying his rise to become a leading figure in international architecture (winning the Pritzker Prize in 1990). His photographs reveal their deep professional affinity: the two shared Milanese origins, degrees from the Politecnico, an interest in social issues and urban transformation, and even more importantly, the moral compass with which they explored the world around them. Growing up in a Milan of which the industrial civilisation was by then in its death throes, they grasped the opportunity to create a new language still mindful of tradition. The volume brings together Basilico’s photographs of Rossi’s architecture for the first time, and is enriched by contributions from Chiara Spangaro and Pier Paolo Tamburelli, project notes by Rossi, as well as the writings that they dedicated to each other.

05. Reflect

Some photographs wait decades before revealing their full meaning. For the Barcelona based photographer Gregori Civera, it took thirty one years to return to the same building.

We invited Gregori to reflect on architecture through two moments in his practice: his first photographs of the D.A.T. (Dispensario Antituberculoso) in Barcelona, made in 1993 at the very beginning of his career, and his return to the site in 2024. Between these two bodies of work lies not only the evolution of a building, but also of a photographer's way of seeing.

All images courtesy of Gregori Civera.

Gregori Civera, D.A.T. 1993.

All photographs were commissioned by Antonio Pizza for a book about the D.A.T.

I just had to find the 31 year old negatives, which miraculously took my assistant about only 10 minutes.

Words by Gregori Civera

D.A.T. stands for Dispensario Antituberculoso, a health facility designed by the G.A.T.P.A.C. I first photographed it on October 13, 1993, the very day before turning 22 as pointed by the notes on the negatives.

It’s a summer’s day of 2024 and I‘m having a lunch with Jorge Ribalta, with whom I just had worked on group show he had curated at MACBA Barcelona called ‘An unknown city beneath the mist. New images of Barcelona’. The show consisted of 13 new production projects around the topic of the tittle that Jorge commissioned to 13 different artists: from international luminaries like Jeff Wall or Martha Rossler, to Spanish artists like Pedro G. Romero, Bleda y Rosa, Manolo Laguillo and myself. During the lunch Jorge asks me about what’s on my desk. I mention I had photographed the Dispensario all those years ago and that my immediate plan was to photoigraph it again. Being a photographer himself, Jorge had also photographed the Dispensario and we decide to join forces and propose a two man show to Angels Barcelona Gallery. The Show will include the BW photographs I made in 1993, the ones made by Jorge between 2017 and 2020, also in BW, and the color ones I was about to produce. I just had to find the 31 year old negatives, a task that miraculously took my assistant about just 10 minutes.

Gregori Civera, D.A.T. 2024.

Valuable negatives are never lost.

Valuable negatives are never lost, and I always felt those very early photographs were somehow the foundation of my work. Looking at them 30 years later was interesting; they were straight BW photographs taken with a SWC Hasselblad camera, a standard of that period. In some frames, I even remember using a soft yellow filter to enhance the sky a llitle bit, a detail that makes me think how very serious about the work I was already. They also look tentative and naive; it was my very first encounter with important architecture and It was the moment in which I realized architecture was an interesting subject. At (almost) 22, I had just finished my photography studies and my main concern was to be professional, to deliver what the client required. My school had a technical approach rather than an artistic one, so I knew very little about photography as a language. My only reference was Renger-Patzsch an the New Objectivity that I had found in a book, German photography from the 30s whit its soft tones and distanced approach. Of course, without internet, references were much harder to find for a young photographer. The plague that are extreme wide angle lenses along with the spectacular and, quite often, banal images they produce, had not yet arrived. Neither had social media and its endless carrousel. All of those circumstances had influence in the result of the series and in the way I think about photography in general and architectural photography in particular.

Then, 31 years later, there I was again. My idea was to photograph the historic building in use before the health assistance is moved to the new facilities. This time I will be using color and an 8X10 plate camera which produces very rich photographs, full of detail, and with deep sense of space. I had no plan other than showing up whit the camera until I ran out of film.