Architectural photography is a genre unto its own. Characterized by symmetry, the straight lines of formal perspective control, and specialized lenses, the aim is to tell a comprehensive story about buildings or built environments. Often, the images are taken when the object is in its most pristine form, directed towards modes of documentation that walk a tightrope between fine art and the commercial interests of clients, builders, or architects. These images play a central role in the mythmaking of the built environment, prominent architects, and the cultural objects that constitute their legacy.

Modernism is often seen with a kind of functionalism. As a philosophical paradigm, modernism vehemently opposes ornament, adhering to the principle that form should follow function. It venerates minimalism and dares to push the boundaries of technology into the realm of aesthetics. A deeply historical stance in itself, modernism envisions an alternative way of life, one that stands in stark contrast to the ideologies of ethno-nationalism and fascism, it resolutely rejects the overly simplistic and idealized narratives that fanned the flames of social divisions culminating in the devastating conflicts of World War II during modernism’s own era. In the places of everyday living, worship, learning, justice, and reflection pictured in this book, I found poignantly different ways of seeing architecture and modernism. Individually and in their totality, the story of these buildings could not be told in standard architectural images. Nor do the buildings pictured here resonate with accounts of modernism that characterize the movement as oppositional to nature in its technological drive,non-personal in its emphases of function over form, and de-contextualized by a universalism that supersedes the particularity of ornament.