Julius Shulman Modernism Rediscovered

American photographer Julius Shulman’s images of Californian architecture have burned themselves into the retina of the 20th century. A book on modern architecture without Shulman is inconceivable. Some of his architectural photographs, like the iconic shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s or Pierre Koenig’s remarkable structures, have been published countless times. The brilliance of buildings like those by Charles Eames, as well as those of his close friend, Richard Neutra, was first brought to light by Shulman’s photography. The clarity of his work demanded that architectural photography had to be considered as an independent art form. Each Shulman image unites perception and understanding for the buildings and their place in the landscape. The precise compositions reveal not just the architectural ideas behind a building’s surface, but also the visions and hopes of an entire age. A sense of humanity is always present in his work, even when the human figure is absent from the actual photographs. Today, a great many of the buildings documented by Shulman have disappeared or been crudely converted, but the thirst for his pioneering images is stronger than ever before.

Pierluigi Serraino is a practicing architect and design agitator in the San Francisco Bay Area. His projects and writings have been published in journals such as Architectural Record, A+U (Japan), and The Architectural Review (UK). Among his books are Modernism Rediscovered (2000), Eero Saarinen (2005), The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Personality Study (2016) and Ezra Stoller: A Photographic History of Modern American Architecture (2019).