Architects

Visual Acoustics is an exceptional film about the architectural photographer Julius Schulman and California modernism. It is a reminder of the extent to which photography was important in spreading the idea of modernism, especially since many of the early modernist buildings in Los Angeles and Palm Springs were houses that were not accessible to most people. The film also shows the influence that Schulman’s photography had in portraying modernism not as an abstract ideal but as a backdrop for a certain kind of everyday life—simpler, uncluttered, closer to nature. An interesting comparison of Schulman’s work with that of the other great architectural photographer of the period,

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The big architectural news of the last decade is not the notoriety of starchitects or the Bilbao Effect, it is the growing predominance of the megafirms, multi-city and multi-national practices whose employees number in the thousands, and whose revenues are measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. Large firms date back to McKim, Mead & White in the early twentieth century, and later Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But in 1920, the widely respected McKim, Mead & White Monograph could be found in drafting rooms across the nation, and SOM, at least in its early days, produced some modern classics such as Lever House,

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