Earlier this month, graduate students in Peter Sealy’s course, ARC 3309 “The Photographic Mediation of Architecture,” travelled to Montréal to view photographs from the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s collection. The students were asked to research a photograph from the collection in advance of the trip. While there, they gave a presentation to the class in the presence of the actual researched piece. Louise Désy, curator of photographs at the CCA, took the students on a tour of the Centre’s underground photography vault. The class also visited Phyllis Lambert’s Greystone exhibition of photographs, taken with Richard Pare in the early 1970s.

While in Montreal, the class also visited  a number of buildings with local architects as guides, including: U, by Atelier Big City with architect Howard Davies; the Stade de Soccer de Montréal by Saucier + Perrotte, with Lia Ruccolo and Olivier Blouin; and The Schulich School of Music by Saucier + Perrotte, with Vedanta Balbahadur.

An elective course at the Daniels Faculty, “The Photographic Mediation of Architecture” provides a broad survey of architecture’s contemporary and historical relationship with photography.

From the course description:

From  Julius  Shulman’s  idealizations  of  California  modernism  up  to  Helène  Binet’s present-day interpretations of Zaha Hadid’s and Peter Zumthor’s buildings, architectural photographs tell us much about architecture in its cultural and intellectual  contexts. Sometimes  images  correspond to the intentions of architects, their clients and the imagined publics for whom buildings have been designed; in  other  cases, photographs reveal previously hidden  aspects of built space and invite new interpretations. While the relationship between buildings  and their representations is necessarily complex, themes including space, subjectivity, materiality, ornament, mimesis, interiority and otherness all find their expression in architectural photographs.

Peter Sealy is an architectural historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through indexical media such as photography. He holds architecture degrees from the McGill University School of Architecture and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is currently completing his PhD at Harvard on the emergence of a photographic visual regime in nineteenth-century architectural representation.