Re-interpreting Kidder Smith’s Italy Builds:
crossovers between photography and architecture.

Written by Angelo Maggi

George Everard Kidder Smith (1913-1997) was an American architect and photographer. Photo historian Robert Elwall (1953-2012) considered him as an “architectural photographer on the run” because he travelled widely and “seldom taking more than fifteen minutes over a shot, never using lights and relying on local labs to process his films, yet still producing consistently impressive, richly textured prints”[1]. Trained also as an architectural writer and, like many of his generation, using the camera as a tool of analysis and memory, Kidder Smith knew a certain amount of history but by no means considered himself an historian. His book Italy Builds: Its modern architecture and native inheritance (1955) is a collection of astonishing architectural photographs, data and critical comment upon the traditional and modern architecture. The many forms of visual narratives adopted by the author became a valuable index to the kind of building the young mid-twentieth-century architect was prepared to see when he travelled Italy. He thus simply records what has interested him in the architecture of the past and present, and the photographs and explanatory text directly reveal how he has seen it. His eyes goes first toward the primitive: the solid, earth-heavy shapes of masonry, the panels of brickwork, the skeletons of wood, the directly functional types, the solemn personi cation of human qualities in the landscape. When Kidder Smith turns to contemporary Italian architecture he consequently develops new standards of judgments. He encapsulates in his photographs the great range of Italy’s modernist experience, always elegant, and usually with an intelligent touch.

It was the President’s Fellowship from Brown University, which enabled Kidder Smith to move with his wife and their two sons to Rome and travel around Italy from 1950 to 1951. Italy Builds was the fruit of that time in Italy. Before the book was printed, on 28th April 1952, a crowded audience attended at the RIBA in London a lecture by Kidder Smith on “Contemporary Italian Architecture and the Italian Heritage”. The addressees were rewarded by a racy and informative talk and some 50 superb coloured pictures. An anonymous writer has left a very illuminating description of the event:

“(…)is was one of those lectures which ll editors with despair because no printed report can convey to a reader its impact on the eye and mind of a member of the audience. Mr Kidder Smith’s succinct and acute comments on each slide – sometimes no more than a word or two as an aside – provided vivid mental pictures which are impossible to reproduce in print. But more especially the coloured slides showing buildings which depend very much for their architectural e ect on subtle shades in renderings and concrete nishes are quite beyond the resources of anything but the most expensive production”[2].

Many of the themes discussed will appear later in the book. Kidder Smith explained how Italy is rumpled by hills and scattered by mountains. He also focused on climatic factors that characterize each
region and influence different types of vernacular Italian architecture. He showed first slides of the older architecture and scenic background of Italian building, and then of some modern buildings.

Kidder Smith thought that Italy Builds was his best book. It was described as a triumph because of the balance between photographs of older buildings and new buildings. Almost the first half of the book is devoted to seven different categories as examples: high mountain architecture; northern foot hill architecture; Dolomite types; plain lower Po valley architecture; central Appennini hills architecture; Naples bay coastal architecture; the trulli of Puglia. The second half of the book is an alternative vision of post-war reconstruction, creating the modern Italian townscape.

Architectural historian Joseph Rykwert (b.1926) criticises Kidder Smith’s approach to photographing architecture for his over-dramatization of buildings. While he says that “Mr. Smith is technically absolutely superb”, he takes issue with the photographer’s glamorization of architecture and thinks that Italy Builds optimistically misread the Italian situation. The designer Massimo Vignelli (1931-2014) was studying architecture in Italy in the 1950’s and thought then of Italy builds as Rykwert does. But looking at Italy Builds forty years after the publication he changed his mind.
He says that Kidder Smith “had the kind of detachments to see much better”. It is the architectural historian Vincent Scully (b.1920) who gives a very detailed review of the book in his article
titled “Architecture and ancestor worship”. He observes:

“In Italy his eyes goes first to peasant architecture, to barns, farmhouses and massed villages in their landscape. Some beautiful photographs interpret these with the intense emotion of an age which feels itself out of touch with the basic nature of things. The eye is toward the primitive: the solid, earth-heavy shapes of masonry, the panels of brick- work, the skeletons of wood, the directly functional types, the solemn personi cations of human qualities in the landscape. There develops a feeling for essential, not romantic, meaning. After this Kidder Smith with the best naiveté, rediscovers the beauty of the city streets and squares. Here he uses some plans from Sitte and others, but the photographs reveal his own sensitive and astonished eye. They constitute a valuable set of visual material for a study of how the twentieth century regards Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque squares. It shows an age which has been told in one way or another that the city was finished and which now, irrationally and rather magnificently, refuses to accept the fact. In these ways, and following its own needs, the present generation attempts to reconstitute the past for itself and for the future. When Kidder Smith turns to contemporary Italian architecture he has consequently developed standards of judgement. He finds it wanting in many respects but full of intense vitality in others. In his criticisms he occasionally matters, half apologetically, shibboleths derived from the fathers, but this is rare. For the most part the judgments are his own and are constructively sympathetic. He beautifully documents the work of the great engineer, Pier Luigi Nervi”[3].

In Italy he found the ancient architecture fabulous. In his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan he papered and entire living-room wall with a gigantic photographic print of the ruin of the Upper Forum in Rome. “There is no country in the world – as Kidder Smith proclaims in the preface of the book – where such a study of the old can be more profitably undertaken than Italy”[4].

The introductory essay of the book, written by the architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969), is one of the most significant chapters and represents the key to the choice of works and their interpretation. Rogers, who at that time was professor at the Politecnico di Milano and director of the architectural magazine Casabella, fundamentally guided Kidder Smith during his photo journey. According to Kidder Smith the main object of admiration in Italy is the urban scene. He considers it “an aesthetic experience”. He leads the reader into the well sculptured spaces by a series of special sequence photographs that interpret in two dimensions the three dimensions of the spaces. Each photograph bears a number and each page spread has a plan showing by numbered arrows the viewpoint and direction of the photographs. As stated by Scully, the model for Kidder Smith’s book was Camillo Sitte’s (1843-1903) Der Städtebau, the German ideologue and historian’s work provided insights into how to enrich text with eloquent comparisons between urban plans and photographs[5]. The purpose of the images was to add evidence and detail content developed by the text and drawings. Kidder Smith considered Sitte’s volume “electric” and “enormously valuable in spite of automobiles, airplanes and atom bombs”[6].

There are many key figures from the architectural world acknowledged by Kidder Smith right at the beginning of the book. Obviously all the Italian architects and engineers who presented the author with plans and images of their works are fully recognized. Two of them are quite important and they need to be revealed. The first one is Giuliana Baracco (d.2003), Giancarlo De Carlo’s wife, who translated the entire text into Italian. I like to imagine one of the most penetrating and prophetic architectural thinkers of our time, such as De Carlo, while discussing with his wife about the importance of this seminal book for the architectural evolution of a new countrywide identity[7]. The second one is Gordon Cullen (1914-1994) who wrote the endpaper and designed four sketches for the volume: the elevation of a farmhouse at Sala Alta; a perspective view of the Italian village of Manarola; the areal view of Piazza Umberto I in Capri; the changes of urban levels at Cornello. Cullen probably encapsulated the concept of visual coherence and organisation of urban environment, under the theme of ‘townscape’ in the pages of Kidder Smith’s book. Italy builds awakened interest in visual perception and consequent ‘improving’ that can be accomplished in an objective manner through an understanding of the emotional effects created by the juxtaposition of physical elements of the environment. As English architect and urban designer Cullen believed that the changes of level, texture and vista of Italy’s historic piazze, so meticulously presented by Kidder Smith, could be proffered as prototypes for contemporary practitioners charged with the redevelopment of city centres. Significantly he wrote:

“Mr. Kidder Smith approaches the spatial genius of the past with the resolution to make it live for the present and the future. His beautiful photographs and analyses of ancient squares and cities point the way to tomorrow’s finer shopping centers, housing developments, and civic cores”[8].

To better convey movement through the urban scene Kidder Smith used a series of changing perspective photographs to describe what one might see and experience as one walks through a sequence of serial visions. He coined the phrase “architectural notes” when taking pictures with his inconspicuous Rolleiflex in crowded squares and streets. Yet, every image remains a static view—a moment in time—as seen from a single point in space. Kidder Smith used visual strategy to construct his argument on Italian sites, cities concentrating on the urban setting in its vertical accent and in its change of levels. He wrote that “Although many successful streets are products of an unplanned spontaneity still the basic feeling of Italians for creative ‘rightness’ is eternally manifest in their appearance”[9]. One of the most memorable photography chronicles is a double-page spread devoted to the levels at Piazza di Spagna in Rome. He approaches the pulsating elegant space of Santa Trinità dei Monti from above giving readers the ability to fully experience “an urban stair that not only takes one up and down, as any stair must do, but makes the trip a visual and emotional pleasure, as few stairs do”[10].

Curiously on another page of the volume, Marius Gravot’s 1931 renowned photograph of the architectural promenade at Ville Savoye is compared to the handling of the various levels of approach to the Basilica of San Francesco at Assisi. According to Kidder Smith: “Le Corbusier obtained for our own time, and with a more modest dimension, much of this space-motion delight with his masterful ramps”[11]. We know that the French architect didn’t fully invent the idea. It is interesting to notice that Kidder Smith, who was evidently a great fan of Le Corbusier’s work, matches the sequence of spaces and direction of movement in Assisi with a twentieth century building based on the specific construction of a promenade with “constructed” views, vistas and experiences.

Giving substance to the issue of the modern architecture of Italy, Kidder Smith establishes the background of the new architecture in a succession of eight double-page spread with photography strips placed in top margins. Here is quite evident the unstated objective of the book which is not only its lack of emphasis on specific buildings but also in how the sequence of interdependent montages makes the meaning of each individual image flexible: the images play a part in the larger argument rather than acting as fixed icons. This gives the book a singular point of view and a considerable photographic punch. Captioning is minimal. The listing of architects and designers appears under the black-and-white thumbnail illustrations while project name and item descriptions are all contained in an index at the end of the book.

After these montages, Kidder Smith carries out an extensive photographic report on weekend villas, artist’s studios, low cost and workers housing, apartments, health colonies, war memorials, museum installations and temporary exhibition pavilions, fashionable designed shops, fish markets, factories and warehouses. Surprisingly contemporary church architecture seems to be omitted, but it is the same author who apologizes for the forced reduction in the size of the volume from 320 pages to 265 actual ones. “This made it necessary to eliminate much technical matter and many excellent buildings, and to cramp the remainder on to too few pages”[12]. He will later develop the most stimulating ecclesiastic workshop of that time in his book The Churches of Europe (1964) where seven Italian modern religious buildings are shown.

In this part of Italy Builds his photographs, sober and direct images that emphasize the geometry of buildings, show the basic outlines of new Italian architecture. The composition is based on the vertical lines of the walls and the diagonal lines of the roofs, which infuses the pictures with dynamism and rhythm. In this section a couple of Kidder Smith’s photographs feature clipping images and drawings from previously printed material. Cleverly pasting onto the same page the front elevation of an apartment house in Taranto and a full-page picture capturing the vantage point overlooking from the balcony framed by the brise-soleil, is one of the book’s visual greatest achievement. It provides evidence in support of his ideas. The same visual strategy can be seen in the pages devoted to Figini and Pollini’s apartments in Milan, via Broletto. Here different images of a lively façade and the panels of “vibrated concrete grille set in the exposed structural frames”[13] exercise an emotional effect on the viewer.

The poet Paul Valery (1871-1945) thought that photography freed the writer from describing. In this specific case the pictures taken by Kidder Smith for Italy Builds do not describe in the same way as writing. Photography confirms the precedence of visual over textual reasoning in his strategy. The page sequences are dynamic. The book’s visual strategy evokes a modern grand tour – in which the readers eyes and feet are guided through a feverish rebuilt country - resulting in a vibrant perception of space and stimulating an emotional reaction to the built environment. Italy Builds, on the wake of the success between architectural photography and personal architecture criticism, embodies a new creative processes which brought to light new ways of understanding both fields.

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[1] Robert Elwall, Building with light: the international history of architectural photography, Merrell, London and NewYork, 2004, p. 158.

[2] Anonymous reporter, “Mr. Kidder Smith’s Lecture”, RIBA Journal, 7 (1952), p. 234.

[3] Vincent Scully,“ Architecture and ancestor worship”, ArtNews, 10 (1956), p. 57.

[4] George Everard Kidder Smith, Italy Builds: Its modern architecture and native inheritance /Italia Costruisce: Sua architettura moderna e sua eredità indigena. (New York: Reinhold 1955 and Milano: Edizioni di Comunità, 1955) p.15.

[5] The seminal book by Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künslerischen Grundsätzen vermehrtum Grosstadtgrün was published in Vienna in 1889. The first English translation did not
appear until 1945, in the United States. Prior to that, Sitte was known in the English-speaking world only through two commentaries that had appeared in important books on urban design,
Raymond Unwin’s Town Planning in Practice (1909) and Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets’s American Vitruvius (1926).

[6] Italy Builds, op.cit., p. 263.

[7] During the making of Italy Builds De Carlo was part of the editorial staff of Casabella Continuity directed by Rogers. He resigned to disagreements on the line of the magazine in 1956.

[8] Gordon Cullen’s words from the endpaper of the English Reinhold edition of Italy Builds (1955). He wrote a seminal book with the title Townscape published in 1961.

[9] Italy Builds, op.cit., p.104.

[10] Ibid.,p.100.

[11] Ibid.,p.98.

[12] Ibid.,p.133.

[13] Ibid.,p.157.