Framing life. Shulman, Baer and construction of the postwar domestic space

Abstract

The winds of change that brings the end of the Second World War and the increasing depletion of the puristic precepts of the Modern Movement projected to the forefront of the architectural outlook new ways of understanding the design process, which in the two decades after the end of conflict occupy a space located halfway between the masters’ heroic architecture and postmodernist trends. Close to the orthodoxy in one hand and ahead of phenomenological issues in the other, new trends share the concern about the definition of lifestyles that give meaning to a new domesticity inspired by spreading illustrated press targeting the growing middle class. The gradual evidence of the power exercised by the image is shaping up as one of the causes that stimulates reflection on everyday activity strengthening ties between architect and photographer, which favor the development of interdisciplinary collaborations. The study of the production that two of these professional duos (Richard Neutra-Julius Shulman and Charles Moore-Morley Baer) are capable of generating starting from a common concern and strategy and the analysis of some results capable of defining two ends of American architectural thought since 1945 allow us to understand architectural photography as a discipline with its own identity that transcends the boundaries of art to become a tool for the definition (of definitions) of contemporary everydayness.