The move away from conventional ways of publishing skyscrapers and toward new perspectives took place, firstly, through the broadening of aspects considered of interest beyond just the facts of construction. New York skyscrapers in 1907, showing the view downward from the top of the Singer Building, a photograph from the French general-interest journal L’Illustration ( ‘La ville des “gratte-ciel”’, 1907: 191). Furthermore, these articles also contained elements that identify them as international precursors of what would later be defined as the distinctly modern and spectacular perspective of architecture and the city, which makes it rather surprising that this type of source has not yet been used for the writing of the history of architecture. 5 This body of articles allows us today to comprehend the shaping of a public perspective different from the professional one. Indeed, a detailed look into the French general-interest weekly illustrated news journals from around 1900 to 1912, mainly L’Illustration, Le monde illustré, La vie illustrée, and Dimanche illustré, reveals a body of articles that offered distinctly new perspectives on skyscrapers. 2) shows that the general-interest press had already adopted a very different approach. While in the architecture journals this relation between word and image remained largely unchanged until the 1920s, the juxtaposition of a page from L’Architecture in 1906 with a page published only a year later in the news journal L’Illustration (Fig. All in all, when publishing about the skyscrapers the architectural journals followed the same procedure as they did when publishing the more conventional types of buildings, such as houses or libraries the graphic elements primarily served as mere illustrations of the written information.Īrticle on New York skyscrapers from the professional journal L’Architecture in 1906, with a view of the City Investing Building and floor plans of the Times Building ( Nelson 1906: 166). The much less selective photographs could only be used whenever an unobstructed view of the object was possible. 4 Since the sketched views often altered or idealized the context to give the reader an unimpeded view, the building itself would usually be pictured as an isolated object set in an unreal urban context. 3 Also, right from the start, one or more of the following elements accompanied the texts (sometimes placed on separate plates): plan, section, elevation, sketched perspective view, or photograph (Fig. 2 From the very beginning, these architecture journals published an explanatory text based on building facts and often also discussed the usefulness of this new type of building. 1 After a break from 1898 to 1902 without any news on the subject, all the published new skyscrapers were located in New York, which by then had become the main skyscraper city on which to report. Towards the end of the 19th century, La construction moderne and L’Architecture, two major architecture journals in France, began to publish articles on the skyscrapers emerging in the United States. This episode in publishing New York buildings represented the beginning of an important rift between the general public’s and the architectural expert’s ways of perceiving and experiencing architecture and the city. With this evolution towards architecture as sensational news in which the reader became the protagonist, the general-interest journals offered a completely different approach visually compared to the conventional way architecture journals published the same skyscrapers. These photographs, preceding those famously taken by Alvin Coburn, were a means developed by the journal editors to convey strong sensations to its readership. The spectacular double-page photographs taken with an unusual viewing axis gave the clearest expression of it. Through the diachronic analysis of word-image relations at work in these journals, this article reveals how the publishing of this new building type - within an equally new cityscape - moved within a single decade towards new forms that were the product of inverted hierarchies between the written and the graphic. In the first decade of the 20th century, French illustrated news journals - and especially L’Illustration - published articles on the skyscrapers of New York.
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