Reshaping Robert Adam's Landscape
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_zarch/zarch.201429343Keywords:
Disurbanization, landscape transformation, landscape rediscovery, non-spaces' reshaping, order behind chaosAbstract
The purpose of this research is to explore the search for a preservation of Robert Adams’ transforming landscapes of the American West of the 1960s, through the relationship between his photography and the pessimistic discourse originated in the metropolises’ disurbanization following the cold war and the nuclear menace. Adams chose not to photograph the natural beauty of Colorado but to document, without irony, the transformation of that landscape by human activity. We will explore Adams’ idea of order behind the chaos and how the author understands how these apparent non-spaces are transformed into a new architecture by means of man´s intervention, unveiling the potential of the connections between the original landscape and the intruder. The work by Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Ed Ruscha, Robert Venturi and Edward Dimendberg will help understand Adams’ position in the artistic discourse of the 60s.
Downloads
References
ADAMS, Robert. Aspects of American Photography, University of Saint Louis Missouri, 1976
ADAMS, Robert. Denver, A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area, Colorado Associated University Press, 1977
ADAMS, Robert. Prairie, Denver Art Museum, 1978
ADAMS, Robert. From the Missouri West, Aperture, Millerton, NY, 1980
ADAMS, Robert. Beauty in Photography. Essays in Defense of Traditional Values, Aperture, 1981
ADAMS, Robert. The New West. Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range, Colorado Associated University Press, 1984
ADAMS, Robert. “The Achievement of Edward Weston: The Biography I’d Like to Read”, in EW 100: Centennial Essays in Honor of Edward Weston, (edited by Peter C. Bunnell and David Feathersome), The Friends of Photography, 1986
ADAMS, Robert. Perfect Times, Perfect Places, Aperture, New York, 1988
ADAMS, Robert. To Make it Home: Photographs of the American West, 1965-1986, Aperture, in association with The Philadelphia Museum of Art, New York, 1989
ADAMS, Robert. “Two Landscapes”, (talk given at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989), in The Ohio review, 1992
ADAMS, Robert. Why People Photograph. Selected Essays and Reviews, Aperture, New York, 1994
ADAMS, Robert. West from the Columbia: Views at the River Mouth, Aperture, New York, 1995
ADAMS, Robert. What We Bought: The New World, Spectrum, 1995
ADAMS, Robert. West from the Columbia: Views at the River Mouth, Aperture, New York, 1995
ADAMS, Robert. Our Lives, Our Children: Photographs Taken Near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, Aperture, New York, 1984
BLAU, Eve. “Patterns of Fact: Photography and the Transformation of the Early Industrial City”, in Architecture and its Image, CCA/MIT, Montreal, 1989
CASTELLI, Leo; MILLER, Robert. Ed Ruscha, 1987
DIMENDBERG, Edward. “The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways, and Modernity”, October 73, Summer 1995
DIMENDBERG, Edward: “From Berlin to Bunker Hill: Urban Space, Late Modernism, and Film Noir”, in Wide Angle, Vol. 19, no. 4, 1997
DIMENDBERG, Edward. “City of Fear: Defensive Dispersal and the End of Film Noir” in ANY 18, 1997, pp. 15-17
DIMENDBERG, Edward. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Harvard University Press, 2001
LANGE, Dorothea. Photographs of a Lifetime, Aperture, New York, 1982
McLUHAN, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964
MOOS, Stanislaus von. Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown, Buildings and Projects, Rizzoli, New York, 1987
SCHOTT, John. The Works of Edward Ruscha, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982
STILGOE, John. Reinventing the West. Photographs of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams, Addison Gallery of American Art, Philips Academy, 2002
SZARKOWSKI, John. Looking at photographs: 100 pictures from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, New York, 1973
VENTURI, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, MoMA, New York, 1966
VIRILIO, Paul. A Landscape of Events, MIT Press, 1996