IN PURSUIT OF A LOST ARCHITECTURAL ARTEFACT: TRACING PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIOS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Date

2023-9-28

Author

Coşkun, Esatcan

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The glass daylight studios - referred with the moniker “glass house” at nineteenth century - began to appear on the rooftops of historic city setting, and quickly evolved to be a well-defined spatial element in photographic discourse. There are many diagrams, plans and perspectives with proper dimensions and brief explanations in the early written manuals on portrait photography. However, for architectural discourse, the daylight studios mostly remain as a footnote under the nineteenth century glass obsession. The glass daylight studios are also an underrated field of study as they are generally recognized as part of a transitional and experimental period through the transparency of modern architecture. Guided by simple technical and scientific principles, the photographic “glasshouses” emerged as a manifestation of architectural space based purely on function and constructed by modern building materials of steel and plate glass. At the same time, their rapid and autonomous occurrence on the roof scape of the city as well as their growing popularity among the public underlines them as significant architectural and cultural elements of urban life. It is possible to assess that these “glass houses” as long lost urban artefacts that once had a substantial role in the collective memory of the city, which also contributed to the concept of remembrance by the photographic archives they produced from within. This study argues that the crude glass constructions and alterations on rooftops quickly transformed into a hybrid architectural typology, beginning with the well-proportioned small glass extensions embedded in the rooftops of existing buildings to an entirely new design element for architects of nineteenth century. By focusing on the period between 1851 and 1910, when portrait photography was a cultural phenomenon, this study develops a research methodology to trace and map the long-lost photography studios of nineteenth century and to reveal the architecture of “glass house” studio as a neglected typology in architectural discourse.

Subject Keywords

photography atelier, studio, glass house, typology, nineteenth century architecture, photograph

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/105963

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis