Louise Smith Bross Lecture Series: Alina Payne
Photospace: Renaissance Architecture and the Photographic Atlas
Abstract
The appearance of photography in the 19th century caused a sea change in the arts. Architecture felt it no less. Indeed, among technologies that affected the very conception of architecture and constituted a pivot point in its course, photography holds a significant place. However, once again a two-dimensional support inserted itself within the tools of the architect, within architectural seeing and aesthetics. Arguably the climax in the sequence of representational media laminating referent to representation, the photograph and its seriality caused a shift in the conception of the architectural monument and its presentation as object both within the museum space and the city. Focusing on the rise of the Renaissance architecture photographic atlas in the later 19th century, this talk looks at the surreptitious slippages from the photographic medium into architecture, its description, conception, representation and pedagogy.
Architecture in Two Dimensions
Architects have perennially struggled with the problem of conceiving and executing three-dimensional structures using vehicles at scales and materials vastly different from those of the finished buildings. Yet, these conceptualizing and visualizing tools, among them drawings, prints, models, books, photographs, slides, computer models, and even paintings are not transparent devices, invisibly and seamlessly connecting the mind with the finished product. Rather, I argue, they leave significant residues on the object of architecture; as tools and mediators they themselves have agency. In these three lectures then I seek to address the consequences of the most fundamental distortion that architecture suffers: the design of buildings and environments as conditioned by two-dimensional supports. Taking a longue durée perspective, my case studies focus on pivot points in the history of architectural representation—from the invention of orthogonal projection in drawings, through photography to computer modeling— that is, moments when genuine paradigm changes occurred that allowed two-dimensional biases to seep into the design of architecture and remain quietly at work within the realm of tools, beneath the surface, for a long time thereafter.
About the Lecturer
Alina Payne is Alexander P. Misheff Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and Director of Villa I Tatti (Florence). Most recently she published L’architecture parmi les arts. Matérialité, transferts et travail artistique dans l’Italie de la Renaissance (Hazan/Louvre 2016) and The Land Between Two Seas. Art on the Move in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea 1300-1700 (Brill, 2022). She is the editor of a number of volumes among which The Renaissance in the 19th Century (with Lina Bolzoni; I Tatti/Harvard, 2018); The Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Architecture (Wiley/Blackwell, 2017); and Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local (with Gulru Necipoglu; Princeton, 2016). In 2006 she received the Max Planck and Alexander von Humboldt Prize in the Humanities and is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has held visiting appointments at the GSD (Harvard University); Villa I Tatti; Kunsthistorisches/ Max Planck Institut Florence; École Pratique des Hautes Etudes; Paris, Hertziana/ Max Planck Institute, Rome; University Roma II; University of Palermo; and Max Planck Institute, Berlin.
About the Louise Smith Bross Lectures
The Bross lecture series is endowed in memory of Louise Smith Bross, presented every three years by a distinguished scholar of pre-1800 European art and resulting in a book-length publication. There are three lectures presented in this series and the invited lecturer for the 2022 series is Alina Payne.
This series is being offered in a hybrid format. To register for the virtual lecture please RSVP here.