Image: Julius Shulman (American, 1935–2009). Malin Residence (Chemosphere), 1961. Gelatin silver print. Getty Research Institute, 2004.R.10.
The Library maintains extensive collections of papers relating to architecture and design, some of them containing many hundreds of photographs and negatives. Strengths include architecture in Europe and in Los Angeles, the papers of major architects and architectural practices, and the papers of scholars of architectural history.
Items from Europe are centered around extensive Bauhaus-related holdings, comprising photographs of Bauhaus students, teachers, and exhibitions, a collection of Bauhaus student work, a collection of Bauhaus postcards, and photographs relating to the careers of the Bauhaus director, Hannes Meyer, and the influential Russian designer, El Lissitzky. Le Corbusier’s practice is also a major focus, with the collection of Lucien Hervé, the architect’s official photographer, containing over 18,000 negatives of his work, as well as slides and transparencies. By contrast, the making of fascist architecture is recorded in photographs belonging to the Nazi architect Hermann Giesler, and the three photographic albums documenting the 1939 expansion of Carinhall, the country estate of Reischmarschall Hermann Göring.
Collections also document the extensive architectural exchange between Europe and North America over the course of the twentieth century, recording in photographs the activities of architects exiled to North America, or American architects building photographic archives as they toured Europe. Examples of archives with extensive photographic documentation include the papers of the Romanian architect, Haralamb H. Georgescu, and the albums of photographs of English country houses and Italian villas compiled by the early twentieth-century Boston architect, Lester S. Couch.
Los Angeles is well represented, with extensive photographic holdings amongst the papers of the architects Welton Becket, Charles Eames, Franklin D. Israel, Pierre Koenig, William Krisel, Frederic P. Lyman, and Ray Kappe. The GRI also holds an important collection of photographs, amounting to over 260,000 items, by the architectural photographer Julius Shulman, covering the modernist movement in architecture in Southern California from the 1930s through the 1990s. Other significant collections with extensive photography include the Philip Johnson papers, including fifteen family albums, the papers of Daniel Libeskind, and extensive photographic materials documenting the design and construction of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The travel slides of the Southern California architect, John Lautner, were taken during his extensive world travels.
Alongside the Bauhaus collections, the GRI holds photographic documentation relating to VKhUTEMAS, an early Soviet school of design. Other significant design collections include nine albums belonging to the costume and set designer, Harold Grieve; the Vlastislav Hofman papers and drawings relating to his avant-garde theater designs in Prague; and a collection of photographs of purses designed by Boris Lacroix for the fashion house of Madeleine Vionnet in Paris.