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Interest in stereography spawned a worldwide industry of photographers and publishers of stereo views that produced over five million titles before its demise in the 1930s, supplanted as entertainment by radio and motion pictures and as documentary by mechanical photographic reproduction in magazines and newspapers.

As film technology advanced, stereo imagery reemerged in various forms: first as Tru-Vue films strips and then, with the invention of Kodachrome color transparency film in the late 1930s, as View-Master, an ingenious and inexpensive 3D viewing system that stored seven stereo image pairs on a 3.5-inch (90-millimeter) diameter reel.

Used first by the military for the identification of enemy aircraft, View-Master achieved wide commercial success with an inventory of thousands of realistic views of cities and buildings that played to the public's renewed interest in affordable world travel.

Color in Stereo

In 1945, amateur color photography in 3D became practical with the introduction of the Stereo Realist camera. Using 35-millimeter film, the camera produced high quality pairs of images that could be viewed in hand-held illuminated stereoscopes or projected using polarizing filters.

In its mid-century incarnation, stereo photography developed within consumer trends promoting modern style, casual living, and technological innovation. Stereo was the photographic industry's attempt at a technological advance that would redefine the medium and create a demand for a range of new products. The depth craze of the 1950s was stimulated by the enormous popularity of 3D movies, promoted by a film industry intent on recapturing an audience it was losing to television.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York provided Frank Lloyd Wright with the first opportunity to display his work stereoscopically in 1952, when Arthur Drexler curated an exhibit featuring stunning Kodachromes of the Johnson Wax Building (1939-1950) in Racine, Wisconsin.

The images were mounted in individual Stereo Realist viewers installed around the gallery, and perfectly captured what Drexler described as the essence of Wright's work: "the emotional experience of space, light, and materials." Drexler planned several other exhibits at MoMA using the technique, though only one or two were actually executed.

By 1960, the medium was virtually dead and has remained so, neglected by a generation of architectural historians and theorists whose critical gaze has been shaped by rules of perspective and composition established in the Renaissance, rules still used to represent a late-20th-century architecture that, geometrically, shares much in common with its 15th-century ancestors.

Technology Revives Interest

Then, in the mid-1980s, a group of architects emerged whose work boldly departed from rectilinearity, creating a style variously labeled as expressionist, neomodernist, organic, or deconstructivist. Buildings by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Daniel Libeskind, and others shared nonorthogonal geometry, spatial complexity, perspectival manipulation, and innovative use of structure and materials — characteristics difficult to represent using conventional photographic techniques.

New techniques (360-degree spherical imaging, computer animation in the form of fly-bys and walkthroughs) accompanied old techniques (panorama, photomontage, and stereo) in challenging the flat "renaissance canvas" as the long-accepted standard of architectural photography.

Given its unique attributes, why has the stereoscopic medium cyclically enjoyed great popularity, then lapsed into extended periods of oblivion? One explanation is that, while a supportive publishing industry for the mass distribution of 3D transparencies existed in the 19th and early-20th centuries, that condition no longer exists in the current print-based industry.

Dedicated to cosmetically perfect, four-color, perspective-corrected images that obviously sell architecture books, contemporary publishing is inherently resistant to the use of optical devices for viewing stereo images. And while technically feasible, full-color computer-based stereo viewing — requiring specialized hardware and software — remains outside mainstream usage.

An interesting explanation for the retreat to formulaic representation is offered by John Pile in a 1954 essay entitled "The Black Box."

"Modern men are trained to a system of realistic representation which requires that the world be shown from a fixed viewpoint at a given instant. This is obviously not the only or even the best way to look at the world, and the rules of perspective are so highly conventional that we have to learn how to understand perspective drawing."

Pile continues: "Nevertheless, the effect is so overwhelmingly 'realistic' that since the 15th century it has been a principal element of the artist's technique, imposing boundaries that Western art is only now escaping."

To be precise, "Western art" has been grappling with these boundaries since their imposition and/or acceptance some five centuries ago. As architecture evolves, so will the technology to represent it. Gehry's architecture offers the photographer an opportunity to reinvent the gaze, enter the space, and touch the surfaces. Like the new buildings, the new pictures attempt to reveal our time and aspirations in an honest, appropriate, and compelling way.

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Michael Kaplan is professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he taught architectural design and theory. He co-founded View*Productions in 1997 to document and publish great works of architecture using stereoscopic photography.

This article first appeared in "The Art Book," June, 2001.

The Flatiron Building in an early stereo photograph. Image: Keystone View Company The National Building Museum, formerly the Pension Building, was the subject of an early stereo photograph. Image: Keystone View Company The View-Master device was once a military tool, then a toy, now a medium for appreciating modern architecture. Photo: View*Productions A dual image of a detail in the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind. Image: View*Productions The work of Frank Gehry is the subject of 3D reels from View*Productions. Image: View*Productions A Frank Gehry-autographed circular reel for the View-Master stereoscope. Image: View*Productions The Johnson Wax Building by Frank Lloyd Wright is available for the View-Master stereoscope. Image: View*Productions   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.