architects like venturi scott brown turned to photographers like steven shore to capture the reality of everyday lives they commissioned him to tour the united states as part of their show signs of life which i talked about in the episode of curb appeal linked up up here somewhere sure helped the architects to pay attention to the average moments of life and not just the dramatic ones he photographed main streets but also car parks road signs gas stations and shop fronts as well as the furniture in his rented motel rooms and the food he had for breakfast he used all sorts of cameras and hardly ever staged anything or even used a flash this is almost the complete opposite of shulman and stoller sure would famously only take one shot of his subject though and he would do very little editing of the image afterwards shore's approach to photography is both deadpan straightforward and unglamorous you would say what i was trying to do was take pictures that looked like they weren't composed i wanted to get away from the visual conventions of photography the weight of tradition that informed how you're supposed to structure a photograph basically i wanted to take screwy pictures but intentionally screwy pictures venturi scott brown the architects who commissioned shore they were pretty screwy too and they designed architecture that tried to learn from the way that he was appreciating the world they wanted to create buildings that revel in the unplanned and the everyday and even to create buildings that would work like a picture for instance they're designed for the nfl hall of fame is called a building board because the main inhabitable hall hides behind a giant flat image that's meant to be seen from the nearby highway while very few photographers still take photos with actual film and images have never been more easily shareable architecture is consumed at an alarming rate in lesser hands this knowledge that a building might mostly be constructed for an image it can lead to some cynical interpretations where architects only designed to produce the most instagrammable image while neglecting all the other parts of the building that are important while this is certainly rampant firms like johnston mark lee have turned it into an art form their design process for the project called the hill house actually begins with the famous julius shulman photograph that we talked about before the one for the case study house rather than trying to make the building to produce a great image they start with the photograph and produce the building from it they take shulman's image and through collage create new architectural possibilities they erase parts of it or at least color them in white to imply a form for a building around the windows that strays from the familiar plans of the original it reframes the interior condition without alluding to things like what materials the eventual building might be made from the house itself then maintains the abstraction of the collage with a smooth white faceted form it engages the hill like a gem popping out and it actually completely fills out the buildable area of the site which is controlled by various zoning regulations and those actually give it the final form a sculpture that is completely dependent on its context the whiteness of the building then is both on the interior and the exterior and it creates a complete visual contrast with the color and texture of the surroundings and from the inside this makes the window look even more like a picture hanging on the wall in the end the building isn't very similar to the one that's in shulman's original photograph but it will always have
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