Publications

[16/10/2024]
Architectural Aerial Photography
Lisa Henicz

[05/08/2024]
Earthscape
Tommaso Morawski

[21/05/2022]
Raumrevolution. On the first planetary spatial revolution
Marco Solinas

[21/05/2022]
Around the New Vision
Mark Dorrian

[21/05/2022]
The aerial thought of the large city
Natalie Roseau

[21/05/2022]
The influence of the photographic birds-eye view on German urbanism
Marco Rasch

[21/05/2022]
Seen from Above, Seen from Below: Towards an Iconography of Aerial Destruction
Christoph Frank

[21/05/2022]
From spaceship Earth to infrastructures of survival: a historical genealogy of a new scopic regime
Sebastian Grevsmühl

[21/05/2022]
The reverse gaze of satellite exploration - the reconstituted face of the earth
Dario Negueruela Del Castillo

[21/05/2022]
Air as Infrastructure. On Amazon Urbanism
Niccolò Cuppini

[21/05/2022]
An Astronaut-Eye View of Changing Urban Development
Jennifer K. Levasseur

[21/05/2022]
Vertical Mediation and the Current War in Yemen
Lisa Parks

[21/05/2022]
Out of the Blue: No-Fly Zones and Atmospheric Politics
Caren Kaplan

Marco Rasch

Saxonia-Freiberg-Stiftung

[21/05/2022]

Drawing of the planned buildings on Munich’s Kohleninsel (today’s Museum Island), probably after an aerial photograph, Deutsche Bauzeitung 34, vol. 30, 1900, p. 185

The influence of the photographic birds-eye view on German urbanism

It was not until years after their establishment in Germany that architects also began to take an interest in aerial photography. Under the influence of the technical development in aviation and several exhibitions as e.g. the “Internationale Luftschiffahrt-Ausstellung” (International Airship Exhibition) in Frankfurt am Main in 1909 they moved into the focus of the young urban planning.

Aerial photographs were the appropriate tool to literally visualise the expansion from regionally narrowly defined house construction to aesthetic urban construction that had been propagated since Camillo Sitte. The photographs showed the spatial relations of the buildings, infrastructure and nature and thus initiated a general change that affected both the use of space and its understanding.

How this development took place in urbanism in Germany and what part the aerial photographs played will be the subject of my lecture. I will show the continuous path from the rediscovery of perspective in architectural journals in the late 19th century, the use of bird’s-eye views for the visualisation of architectural ensembles to aerial photographs as an object of study in German urbanism.

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