Hoarding Knowledge: FR Yerbury and Howard Robertson’s Records of the Modern Movement

Photography in Germany during the late 1920’s and early 1930’s often cited for its technicaland formal innovation as well as its self-promotion through numerous exhibitions, illustratedmagazines and polemical writings dominated the European modernist discourse of the time.The Neue Sachlichkeit, which was purportedly a movement dedicated to the re-infusion ofessential ordering principles, heralded what was seen as the highlighting of a “new age”through monumental images of production, machinery and the objects produced by thesenew effects of industrialization. It also instigated highly polemical investigations into the relationshipbetween nature, style, and artistic practices. The photography of architecture wassensitized by these developments, and debates ensued between those artists and architectswho staked claims on the productive effects of the medium, and others who were accusedof a tautological reproduction of objects for object’s sake. These struggles between oftenseemingly opposed modernist strains within and outside avant-garde practice were largelyexcluded in British architectural photography, which maintained an affinity for traditionalbuilding types largely in the service of publications such as The Studio and Country Life.2 Itis in this context that the F.R. Yerbury and Howard Roberston’s illustrated writings on themodern movement are introduced. While their oeuvre is not contemporary, I propose thattheir forays into media and journalism – and the perils therein – serve as precursors to currentanxieties about architectural knowledge in relation to agency and national identity. Whilenew technologies of reproducability and dissemination promise to subvert borders, architectsand their historians persist in claiming discreet territories of authorship.

Volume Editors
Robert Corser & Sharon Haar

ISBN
978-1-944214-03-6