Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation

Drawing on an incomparable collection of architectural drawings and prints, photographs, books, and periodicals, Architecture and Its Image explores the idea of serial imagery in architectural representation through works dating from the Renaissance to today.

Although drawings and photographs of architecture are often viewed as single images, they are generally produced in series. The most basic of these is the set of drawings that shows a building in plan, elevation, and section. But as Architecture and Its Image reveals, the concept can be extended to other types of architectural representations: theater sets, travel accounts, photographic surveys, pattern books, even the alternative designs submitted for competition. All relate in different ways to their subjects; viewed in series, all reveal underlying principles of organization that can convey new understanding of architectural imagery.

Under the headings Architecture in Three Dimensions, Architecture in Place and Time, and Architecture in Process, essays by six scholars use the concept of serial imagery to explore the complex relationship between various types of architectural representations and their subject matter: projective drawings (Robin Evans), 19th-century urban survey photography (Eve Blau), the travel narratives of English architectural “explorers” from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century (Edward Kaufman), festival and theater architecture (William Alexander McClung), architectural publications, competitions, and exhibitions (Helene Lipstadt), and computer graphics (Robert Bruegmann).

An accompanying catalog describes 350 examples, drawn from the CCA collections, of work by architects and architectural delineators, photographers, and cartographers. The book is illustrated by over 400 superbly reproduced duotone illustrations and 16 pages of color.

Architecture and Its Image is a publication of the Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal Distributed by The MIT Press.

MIT Press/Canadian Centre for Architecture