R. M. Schindler and the Photography of the American Scene, 1914–1918

Shortly after immigrating to the United States from Vienna in 1914, the architect R. M. Schindler (1887–1953) purchased a portable camera and began ambitiously surveying the built landscape of the Midwest and Southwest. He focused on the urban fabric of Chicago and the residences of Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as on expressions of rural vernacular architecture. The camera became an active tool in Schindler's dialogue with his new surroundings and in the articulation of his emerging modernist aesthetic. His large body of pictorial work has, until now, largely eluded historical attention and scholarly assessment, yet yields important new insight into the interaction between photography and architecture during the early stages of modernism in the United States. Schindler pioneered a contextual and spatially active mode for interpreting the built environment while pursuing an expansion of the role that photography could play in the creative life of the architect.