How Architecture Learned to Be Seen: From the Picturesque to the Smartphone

Key facts

• Joseph Paxton sketched the Crystal Palace in June 1850 and sent a view to the Illustrated London News, which published it on July 6th; the Royal Commission accepted the design nine days later.
• Henry Hoare II began designing Stourhead in Wiltshire in the 1740s with architect Henry Flitcroft, drawing on Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin.
• London's Great Exhibition of 1851 was the world's first international world's fair and brought picturesque viewing to mass culture.
• Beatriz Colomina wrote in Privacy and Publicity that 'modern architecture only becomes modern with its engagement with the media.'
• Claire Zimmerman, Professor of Architecture at the University of Toronto, wrote in Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century that 'photography altered the material that it represented.'
• Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich's Barcelona Pavilion was dismantled in 1930 and rebuilt in 1986 after decades known through black-and-white photographs.
• Julius Shulman photographed Pierre Koenig's Case Study House #22 in May 1960 and described the image as 'a picture of a mood.'
• Denise Scott Brown said 'I am not a photographer. I shoot for architecture' while documenting Las Vegas for Learning from Las Vegas.
• Lev Manovich calls Instagram 'the perfect medium of the aesthetic society.'
• MVRDV's Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen features a mirrored facade; Winy Maas watched passersby search for the best selfie position before it opened.