[A]rchitecture + [P]hotography + [A]rchive: the

APA factor in the construction of historiography

Pierluigi Serraino

Architectural photography delivers the object it represents as a finished product. It

stalls human perception to the perennial rewinding of time. It extrapolates one
image of a building out of its physical context from a specific point of view in space
within a flow of countless events and sets it on an autonomous journey in the
circulation system of architectural visuals. It magnifies sight at the expense of
architecture as a complete sensorial experience, carrying upon itself its cargo of
memory of past buildings and symbolism. Metaphorically speaking, the
architectural photograph is the declared enemy of the artifacts life cycle: it denies
the edifice its vulnerability to the agency of time. This is by far the dominant type of
illustration being published in scholarly journals and overrides the buildings
Heideggerian being in the world as a material object subject to use and abuse.
Ultimately, the most iconic of these images prevail against all factual evidence about
the structures physical decay. Their suspended reality takes precedence over their
actuality in the collective unconscious. Who would not be surprised to say the least
to compare image with reality in the case of, for example, the definitive black and
white shot choreographed by photographer Norman McGrath of the renowned
design Piazze dItalia in New Orleans by American architect and educator Charles
Moore (1925-1993)? At the time of its completion it was considered a paradigmatic
example of post-modernist architecture. Yet in its current state the project is entirely
enclosed with a cheap metal fence and shockingly irrelevant in the life of the city for
which it was conceived.
The loss of innocence of photography in being a faithful equivalent of
external reality has been abundantly documented - although not fully exhausted as a
research topic- in canonical meta-disciplinary texts within humanistic discourse. A
little less than half a century ago, art and architectural historian George Kubler made
aware the specialized audience of this background assumption in the assessment of
architecture:
.. it is useful to learn - and it is a hard lesson - that no work of art
ever is really finished. The workmen leave, the painters come, the
client pays, and the building is occupied, but it is not finished,
because from the very first moment, its users and its designers are

Journal of Art Historiography Number 5 December 2011

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[A]rchitecture + [P]hotography + [A]rchive

aware of possible improvements.1

In the narrower scope of architectural photography, what remains largely
unexplored from a scholarly perspective are the side effects of universal
photographic practices codified in the genre. What of the retrievability of the
archives of the photographers who authored those pictures on the formation of the
institutional accounts of modernism and of our contemporary time? The former is
only one of the unforeseen consequences of what at the onset were believed to be
protocols of objective recording of the built environment ever since the camera
became the preferred instrument for documentation of architectural subjects in the
mid-nineteenth century. The latter has without doubt an across-the-board impact on
our shared knowledge of past and present design accomplishments in the field,
because photographs are the evidentiary units of art and architecture historical
work, and their retrievability is a prerequisite for their inclusion in the master
narratives of architecture. The heritage industry is unquestionably dependent on
photography to substantiate its own claims of universality.
When, for reasons of distance or available time, the pragmatics of site visits
prove to be impractical for scholars - a much more frequent circumstance than one
might assume - historians scrutinize pictures2 of built work to validate its existence
and to insert these examples in a network of visual references generating a
delineation of the subject being examined, although one arguably still incomplete.3
Once these historical constructs become authoritative and institutional, the past is
locked into a specific order and represented by a predictable sequence of carefully
selected pictures drawn from the same collections, remaining the same and
consistently unchallenged even by following generations of scholars.4 The
magnitude of this phenomenon, anticipating the photographic age, might be
measured and fully understood when reflecting upon the influence on eighteenth
century artistic discourse of German art historian and archeologist Johann Joachim
Winckelmann (1717-1768). Throughout his career, he argued through carefully
selected images and convinced the majority of his European audience - for the
superiority of Greek heritage over that of the Romans, despite having himself never
set foot either in mainland Greece or in the Eastern Mediterranean countries.
But what happens then when a project of potentially critical acclaim is
photographed by an architectural photographer whose archive, filled in all
likelihood with tens of thousands of negatives (or digital files since the Internet age),
George Kubler,What Can Historians do for Architects?, Perspecta, 9/10, 1965, 302.
Michael Thomason, The Magic Image Revisited: The Photography as a Historical Resource, The
Alabama Review, 31, April 1978, 83-91.
3 Martin Segger, Mirrors of the Architectural Moment: Some Comments on the Use of Historical
Photographs as Primary Sources in Architectural History, Material Culture Review, 14, Spring 1982, 4754.
4 Ian Borden, Imaging Architecture: the Uses of Photography in the Practice of Architectural History,
The Journal of Architecture, 12:1, February 2007, 57-77.
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is nowhere to be found? Or got lost in a fire or was disposed of by family members?

Or its location is known, but the collection is unprocessed? That project is lost,
together with thousands of others, and, for historical purposes, is photographically,
visually unaccountable. The existence of a work of architecture and its ultimate
addition to the permanent references and thus the historiography - within the field
is therefore inextricably linked to what I call here the APA (Architecture +
Photography + Archive) factor. Prerequisites for the prospective inclusion of a work
of architecture in the canon are that the project in question is bearer of design
innovations relevant to the time in which it was built; that an architectural
photographer captures that project in a set of images crafted according to the visual
rhetoric of the genre; and that the archive of the photographer will be retrievable
over time, fully processed as well as cross-referenced, and accessible to scholarly
scrutiny. How does the APA factor impact the reliability and validity of the
genealogies institutionalized in the defining narratives of the historians? This essay
explores this theme through the case study of prominent Italian architectural
photographer Giorgio Casali (Fig. 1), visual chronicler of magazines such as Domus
and Casabella, and the Italian rationalist architect Gian Luigi Giordani (Fig. 2),
celebrated during his time as a pioneer of industrial architecture, with numerous
other building types realized throughout his career, and virtually lost in the current
memory of the discipline. A closer look at what appears as a default condition of
historical inquiry might cast light on our knowledge gaps. While complete reversals
of historical accounts based on the discovery of new sources are improbable,
widening our awareness about the extent of the architects participation in the vast
project of modernization of the built environment can dramatically increase the
accuracy of our comprehension of the time under investigation.
In 1956 the Reynolds Metal Company of Louisville, Kentucky published a
two-volume set titled Aluminum in Modern Architecture (Fig. 3). It was a worldwide survey charting the use that signature architects of the time had made of
aluminum in a variety of buildings types of all scales. This compilation resulted
from merging suggestions from legendary architectural editors such as Douglas
Haskell, Jane Jacobs, Walter McQuade, and Peter Blake; leading architecture
magazines from lArchitecture dAujourd hui (France), Domus (Italy), The Architectural
Review (UK); and key organizations in the metal sector such the Socit Anonyme
pour LIndustrie de LAluminum (Switzerland) and the Aluminum Development
Association (UK). The list of architects featured in the book was the whos who of
post-war architecture around the globe with the adoption of aluminum as their
common denominator in the pursuit of a modernist design expression. Among the
few lesser-known architects in that parade of celebrated names, the Italian Gian
Luigi Giordani (Bologna, 1909-Rovereto, 1979) is represented with two built
accomplishments illustrated with images by Giorgio Casali (Lodi, 1913- Milano,
1995), a sought-after architectural photographer of the post-war Italian avant-garde.
One project was the Farmitalia Pharmaceutical Factory (Fig. 4) in Milan, Italy of 1953,
an ambitious manufacturing complex hailed in the aforementioned book as one of
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Europes best industrial structures; the other was the Methane Gas Exhibition
Building (Fig. 5) in Piacenza, Italy, also of 1953, praised for its technological
inventiveness, cost-effectiveness, and ease of assembly.
While as of 2011 the factory is still intact, with some modifications to its skin
and exterior circulation elements, today both the projects and the architect who
conceived are utterly vanished in the collective memory of Italian Rationalism (Fig. 6
and 7). More precisely, the entire body of work of Gian Luigi Giordani, one of the
most innovative talents of the generations of 1930s in Northern Italy, is completely
unknown to our contemporary eyes. Similarly, the archive of the architectural
photographer Giorgio Casali, donated to the Universita` IUAV of Venezia, Italy, in
1998, has been partially processed and made accessible to researchers only recently,
thirteen years after the donation of this unique cache of materials to the university.
Nonetheless, the name Giorgio Casali is de facto foreign to the contemporary
generation of scholars and architects. For both characters, this was certainly not the
case when the architect and the photographer were active and prolific producers in
their respective domains. Their omission in the architectural literature of the last
twenty years is all the more baffling especially because both figures were acclaimed
protagonists within their own field. Both of them remain remarkably absent in the
most authoritative texts of our time. To name a few, there is no mention of the work
of Giordani in The History of Italian Architecture, 1944-1985 (Fig.8) by Manfredo
Tafuri (MIT Press, 1989), nor in the Il Secondo Novecento. Storia dell'architettura italiana
by Francesco Dal Co (Electa, 1997), nor in the more recent The Architecture of Modern
Italy (Fig.9) by Terry Kirk (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). Similarly, the
instrumental role of Giorgio Casali in promoting the dissemination of the modern
idiom throughout the nation is only occasionally acknowledged. In the latest Storia
della Fotografia di Architettura (History of Architectural Photography) by Giovanni
Fanelli (Laterza, 2009), Casalis name is not even listed. Casali does appear in the log
of photographers of the Alberto Sartoris collection, now at the Vitra Museum, but
not in the catalog that accompanied its exhibit Photography, Modern Architecture and
Design (Fig.10) (EPFL Press, 2005). The standard reference in the English-speaking
world on architectural photography Architecture Transformed: A History of the
Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the Present by Cervin Robinson and Joel
Herschman (MIT Press, 1990) bypasses Casalis oeuvre in the same way. How is
such extensive forgetting possible? What processes are taking place that eventually
determine the canonization of one architect versus another? What brings generations later - a photographer to the center stage of the construction of memory,
while another languishes slowly fading in the background or is completely absent
from the historical and historiographic record? And what is at stake in failing to
acknowledge these mechanisms in the development of historical constructs?
It is worthwhile briefly reconstructing the careers of Gian Luigi Giordani and
Giorgio Casali to understand where the breakdown in memory transmission occurs
and what can be learned from this case that might be extended globally to the
discipline of architectural history. Before embarking on this biographical enterprise,
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it is equally worthwhile noting that the spelling of an architects name and the
attribution of buildings to one architect as opposed to another can alone severely
impact the statistical recurrence of that architect in the production of discourse. Gian
Luigi Giordani and Gianluigi Giordani have been used interchangeably in numerous
publications, decreasing the number of occurrences of this architects name, a
scenario that has impacted his place in the architectural record very differently than
if its spelling been unanimously resolved. As a further example, depending on
which publication is being examined, the Farmitalia Pharmaceutical Factory has been
attributed to Gian Luigi Giordani, or Gian Luigi Giordani, Ippolito Malaguzzi Valeri,
or Gian Luigi Giordani, Ippolito Malaguzzi Valeri and Ezio Sgrelli.
Short biographical sketches of the architect and the photographer are de
rigueur. Following graduation from the Reale scuola superiore di architettura of
Florence in 1931 at age 22, Gian Luigi Giordani won, with a colleague, the first prize
for the design of a fountain facing Bolognas railway station. Relocated in Rome, he
worked on a competition exhibiting command of the rationalist idiom. At age 25 he
realized two Casa del Fascio (one in Minerbio, outside Bologna, and another one in
Santarcangelo, few miles from Rimini) plus the Villa Neri in Bologna. In 1934, he
won the competition for the design of the Forlanini airport of Milano-Linate.
Completed in 1938, this project catapulted Giordani to the international stage. By
1936, his name is listed in an exhibition at the Triennale di Milano devoted to Italian
architects. Multiple competitions will ensue with numerous award-winning entries.
After World War II, he worked for a few years as the lead design architect in staff for
the Montecatini company. In 1950 he founded an office in Milan together with Ezio
Sgrelli and Ippolito Malaguzzi Valeri. Besides the Farmitalia Pharmaceutical Factory,
a few of the noted projects of this phase are the office tower of Richard Ginori in
Milan (1961-65), the Centro Zootecnico Sperimentale (Zootechnical Lab) in Serviano,
Milano (1958-64), the Thermal Baths Nuovi Redi in Montecatini Terme, a noted
resort in the province of Pistoia, the remarkable Barilla plant in Parma (completed in
1964 and demolished in 1999), and numerous villas. Little to no information is
available about his last years of life, and his archive remains equally untraceable for
scholarly research.
Giorgio Casali learned the trade as a photographer in the Rambaldi studio in
Milan. In 1938, he opened his own studio with Giovanni Muzzarelli, with whom he
worked until the break of World War II. Casalis exclusive involvement in
architectural photography took place at the end of the war, through the endorsement
of Piero Bottoni, distinguished Italian architect and intellectual. In 1951, Casali met
renowned Italian master Gio Ponti, architect of the Pirelli Skyscraper in Milan and
founder of the Italian magazine Domus, and started a thirty-year-collaboration with
him to chronicle his own work, and to create images for the magazine itself. Given
Casalis talent and Pontis symbolic backing, he became the photographer of choice
for the architecture and design Italian elite. Franco Albini, Ignazio Gardella, Vico
Magistretti, Marco Zanuso, Vittoriano Vigano, Carlo Scarpa, and Giovanni
Michelucci are just a sample of the post-war Northern Italian protagonists who
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relied on Casalis expertise and aesthetic to memorialize their projects. Furthermore,

manufacturers of contemporary furniture such as Cassina, Gavina, Knoll, and
Kartell, as well as noted Italian artists Lucio Fontana and Fausto Melotti, to name a
few key names from Casalis vast clientele, provide an understanding of the
ubiquitousness of the photographers artistry and the identification of his imagery
with the current knowledge of Italian modern architecture.
The Farmitalia project enjoyed great exposure in the media. It appeared
prominently in publications in Italy and abroad. In his Recent Italian Architecture
(Edizione il Milione, 1959), noted chronicler and critic Agnoldomenico Pica
bestowed Giordani and this project the same cultural capital as the work of the
venerable Luigi Moretti, Carlo Mollino, and Luciano Baldessarri. However, in the n.
4 issue (1959) of the Milanese magazine Zodiac, a publication at the forefront of
architectural information in the fifties and sixties and now out of print, an article on
young architects showed a wide coverage of Farmitalia, yet the project was attributed
to architect Ippolito-Malaguzzi Valeri with no mention of Giordani. Broadly
speaking Giordani was an editorial fixture in the national architectural press from
the thirties till the mid-sixties. His name appeared intermittently in the seventies up
to the early eighties, to be completely abandoned as a reference in the following
years until today. Concurrently, Giorgio Casali earned the esteem of colleagues,
architects, and editors during his lifetime. After his collaboration with Domus
waned, Casali continued doing assignments for magazines and institutions with his
son Oreste, who had joined him in the seventies. He passed away in May 1995 and
his son died few months later. The University IUAV of Venezia, Italy acquired the
archive shortly after the photographers death. While the number of negatives was
initially estimated to be around 70,000, today the archivist Rosa Maria Camozzo
states that there are around 110,000 negatives of which only 55,000 have been
processed and digitized. Half of them are still unprocessed. This means that of the
archive of a photographer whose images, in a number of cases, have been definitive
of particular buildings for the development of the architectural canon in modern
Italian architecture, over half remain an undiscovered treasure chest. There lies in
wait a rich visual commentary that could significantly shift the discourse around the
vast crowd of architects that embraced modernism as the language of the post-war
society in their built work. Yet, until that archive is fully processed, it remains a
labyrinth as impenetrable as the mythological palace of Knossos, without the
looming presence of the Minotaur. The real loss is the sad toll of forgetting
remarkable projects that would add to the extraordinary legacy of twentieth century
architecture and the vastness of the modernist enterprise.
The intermittent spotlighting of the Farmitalia project is by no means a rare
episode. Casali was one among several dozen architectural photographers in postwar Italy. The archive of architectural photographer Oscar Savio who surveyed the
Roman scene in those same years, for example, is still in process, with imminent
exhibits scheduled to be organized in the near future by the University of Rome La
Sapienza. Yet to this day, Savios archive is again unreachable. Foto Vasari, also
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known as Studio Vasari, whose body of images is tied to the architecture of engineer
Pier Luigi Nervi, is also unaccounted. Other names lost in the black hole of oblivion
are Foto Fortunati, Foto Breda, Ivor De Wolf, Paolo Monti, Fotogramma, Foto
Farabola, Istituti Luce, Foto Ancillotti, Stabilimento Fotografico Mazzoletti, Gino
Barsotti, and many more. Therefore, of the current histories of modern architecture,
whether focused on Italian territory or whether Italy is framed in the larger context
of modernism, the astonishing lacunae that these institutional accounts carry become
patently evident.
The rise of the Modern Movement in architecture runs parallel with the
emergence of architectural photography as a genre with its own visual rhetoric. It is
in the black and white images of likeminded photographers that the formal
abstractions of the avant-garde found optical amplification. Then, like now, at
project completion, architects sought photographic documentation of their work to
retain a permanent record for varied uses, and for submission to publications and
periodicals among others. Yet only a selected few of those images made the editorial
cut, leaving under the radar countless noteworthy propositions together with their
authors. If for every canonical building of the avant-garde there is an equally
canonical photograph of that project, the availability to scholarly scrutiny of the
larger archival source from where that image came remains central to the writing of
modern history. Furthermore, buildings are vulnerable to the development process.
The circumstances that brought them into existence over time often become obsolete,
thus determining their later destruction to make room for new construction. Their
photographic documentation thus becomes their enduring memorialization.
Given what was learned through the Farmitalia case, it is important to to
bring this new understanding into the territory of the United States. While the
archives of American architectural photographers such as Ezra Stoller, Julius
Shulman, and the Hedrich Blessing brothers, to name the most notable, are within
academic reach, those photographers of equal renown - at least during their time such as Lionel Freedman, Robert Damora, and Ben Schnall are nowhere to be found,
their content lost permanently. Architecture is dependent on photography to survive
the passage of time. In turn, the latter relies on the retrievability of the photographic
archive for the recovery of its material and its insertion into architectural discourses.
Each urban region in the United States had an architectural photographer. By
tapping the archives of the architectural photographers of each region a far more
comprehensive picture of the dissemination of modern architecture in the United
States would emerge. Photographic documentation and archival retrieval are
therefore two indispensable ingredients to augment the accuracy index, so to speak,
of any historiography of modern architecture. It goes without saying that the APA
factor operates globally, in all regions of the world where industrialization is
sovereign, because the architecture realized in those territories is subjected to the
same hyper-compression of the building lifecycle. The latest victim in the United
States is the Information and Computer Science/Engineering Research Facility
(ICS/ERF) at the University of California Irvine by Frank Gehry, built in 1986 and
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demolished in 2007. Nations traditionally absent in the modernist discourse,

Marocco, South Africa, Colombia, Chile, Greece, Australia, for example, would then
be included in the inquiry of the contemporary scholar to retrace the maps of
movements, exchanges, and reciprocal influences of the spread of modernism in the
culture of buildings worldwide.
Pierluigi Serraino is an architect and author. He holds professional and research
degrees in architecture from Italy and the United States. He has published lectured
widely on the subject of Mid-century modern, Architectural Photography, and
Digital Design. Current research interests are the work of California architect
Donald Olsen (forthcoming, 2012), the 1958 ground-breaking creativity study on 40
architects very recently resurfaced, and changes in professional practice models in
the digital age.
Pierluigi Serraino
UC Berkeley
pierluigi@pierluigiserraino.com

Pierluigi Serraino

[A]rchitecture + [P]hotography + [A]rchive

Illustrations

Figure 1 Portrait of Giorgio Casali. Credit: Universit Iuav di Venezia - Archivio Progetti, Fondo Giorgio Casali.
Author: unknown, unpublished.

Figure 2 Portrait of Gian Luigi Giordani. Author: unknown. Published in Catalogo Bolaffi dellArchitettura Italiana. 196366. By P. C. Santini, G. L. Marini, Giuseppe Luigi Marini. Torino, Italy, Giulio Bolaffi Editore, 1966.

Pierluigi Serraino

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Figure 3 Aluminum in Modern Architecture. Vol. 1. By John Peter, Louisville, Ky.: Reynolds Metals Co., 1958-1960.
Book Cover

Figure 4 Coverage of Farmitalia Pharmaceutical Factory in Aluminum in Modern Architecture. Vol. 1. By John
Peter, Louisville, Ky.: Reynolds Metals Co., 1958-1960. Page 100-101.

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Figure 5 Coverage of Methane Gas Exhibition Building in Aluminum in Modern Architecture. By John Peter, Louisville,
Ky.: Reynolds Metals Co., 1958-1960. Page 163.

Figure 6 Farmitalia Pharmaceutical Factory. Credit: Universit Iuav di Venezia - Archivio Progetti, Fondo Giorgio
Casali.

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Figure 7 Farmitalia Pharmaceutical Factory. Credit: Universit Iuav di Venezia - Archivio Progetti, Fondo Giorgio
Casali.

Figure 8 History of Italian Architecture. 1944-1985. By Manfredo Tafuri, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1989.
Book Cover

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Figure 9 The Architecture of Modern Italy. Vol 2. By Terry Kirk, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.
Book Cover

Figure 10 Photography, modern architecture, and design: the Alberto Sartoris Collection : objects from the Vitra Design
Museum. By Antoine Baudin, Lausanne, France, Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2005.
Book Cover

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Figure 11 Recent Italian Architecture. By Agnoldomenico Pica, Milan, Edizioni del Milione, 1959.
Book Cover

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