The Architect's Eye: R. M. Schindler and His Photography

Shortly after emigrating to the United States from Vienna in 1914, the modernist architect Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887-1953) purchased a portable camera and began ambitiously surveying the built landscape of the Midwest and West. Working with an intensity matched by few photographers of the period, he produced, over the course of a decade, more the twelve hundred images, now housed in the Architecture and Design Collection at the University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara. Inventive and spatially active in composition, and far-reaching in its exploration of the landscape, these images provide the basis for my dissertation-the first comprehensive investigation of Schindler's photographic oeuvre. I argue that his photographic undertaking was critically situated in the complex development and expression of his modernist aesthetic. He pioneered the use of the portable camera in the architectural field, generating a new visual mode for interpreting the metropolis while pursuing an expansion of the role that photography could play in the creative life of the architect. My study considers Schindler's photography from five general perspectives: as an exploration of the documentary and aesthetic possibilities specific to the medium of photography; as a product of cultural encounter and exchange; as an approach to the visual arts which involves an interplay with other media; as an attitude toward urbanism, technology, vernacularism, and nature; and as a campaign with a strong educative and promotional component. I consider Schindler's unique positioning-chronologically, geographically, artistically, and conceptually-within contemporary photographic movements, and more broadly within the currents of modernism as they developed. In addressing the interplay between architecture and photography, I generate a substantive new interdisciplinary framework for reexamining Schindler and his contributions to modernism.