Exhausted Narratives

The index card with a detail photograph of the Bauhaus Building by Gotthardt Itting from the Bauhaus Archive contains a reference to László Moholy-Nagy’s book From Material to Architecture. From here, this photograph found its way into numerous publications on architectural modernism. Photographs were the source for the development of narratives in the historiography of modern architecture in the early 20th century. Key texts such as Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement and Siegfried Giedeon’s Space Time Architecture followed the tradition of art history with their focus on objects and their authors. They follow a “narrative impulse,” with beginnings and ends connected by a telos, a unifying version of events in the sorting of the material.