One of the more interesting things about photographing new architecture is watching the interval between arrival and understanding.
A building may have taken seven or ten or twenty years to emerge from competition, drawing, planning, engineering and construction, yet its public reputation can begin to form within hours of the hoardings coming down. The first photograph circulates, the building is compared with what people already know, and a judgement begins to settle around it long before occupation, weather, use and familiarity have had much opportunity to contribute.
This is to be expected. Architecture enters a world that already exists, often quite forcefully, and the public is entitled to respond. Nor should architectural novelty be confused with architectural quality; some buildings are initially disliked and remain, with good reason, difficult to admire. But the history of serious architecture suggests that first aesthetic recognition and lasting architectural value do not always arrive together.
Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art provides an unusually good example. When its first phase opened on 20 December 1899, coverage in the architectural press was minimal. Building Industries reported that some passers-by apparently wondered whether the unfamiliar building was a prison or poor house.
Lewis F. Day subsequently recognised something more profound in Mackintosh’s combination of severe utility and artistic individuality. Contemporary reaction, in other words, was not simply philistine hostility. It was a culture trying to find words for something it had not quite encountered before.
Public unease can itself be perceptive: people often recognise that a building is departing from convention before the culture has developed an adequate language for explaining what that departure means. Critics, photographers, historians, architects and, most importantly, occupants then begin the slower process of testing the proposition.
Buildings deserve to be seen in use, revisited in different light, allowed to weather, discussed by people who admire them and people who do not, and understood within the circumstances that produced them.
Perhaps this is one of architecture’s more civilising qualities. The good building does not necessarily ask us to like something strange; it may ask us to extend the range of things we are capable of seeing. Over years, the unfamiliar acquires context, the context acquires narrative, and occasionally a building once regarded as an interruption becomes part of the mental furniture of a city.
The history of architecture might therefore encourage neither automatic enthusiasm for the new nor instinctive suspicion of it, but something more useful: close looking, informed argument, a little intellectual hospitality, and sufficient time for a building of real substance to make its case.
Glasgow School of Art photographed by James Craig Annan 1910
