portraits of European urbanism encouraged architects to
think on a grand and ultimately damaging scale. What
photographic artists revealed through their work became
an inspiration to a generation of modernist architects.
Creating a record of the site for later investigation is
common practice, whether by sketchbook or camera. The
idea of photo-documentation led to the practice of
repetition and the exploration of various architectural
typologies. As early as 1947 Lazio-Moholy Nagy was
presenting exhibitions of photographs based on industrial
and architectural sequences that exposed the language of
abstraction related to the built environment. Replication
and prefabrication, which featured largely in architectural
practice in the 1950s and 1960s, owed something to
these photographic sequences. The lens had frozen a
moment in time, allowing serial fragmentation of
movement and subtle changes in cities to be expressed
with inherent design potential. As artists moved
increasingly from the body to the urban scene for
inspiration they exposed the limitations of the thinking
methods used by architects. In time the fractals and
abstractions of the photo-documentary artists, coupled
with ideas from land-art and map-making, led to the
opening up of fresh design possibilities. With new forms
of digitised representation (including video) the limitations
of the straight line and right angle were exposed. Just as
the discovery of perspective had liberated architecture in
the late fifteenth century, so too documentary
photography and video opened up new lines of design
potential late in the twentieth century.Drawing and photography 83