ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at flagship housing projects in Marseille, London, Hamburg and Berlin from the early years that period before urban housing came to be dominated by the construction of larger housing blocks with increased population densities and reduced amenities. Arguably, the dominant element in this discourse of architectural modernism was photography, although it was not the only visual material propelling modernist architecture into this privileged position. The photographic and intellectual legacies of both the war and half a century's propagandising for modernist architecture is distilled in the appropriation of an aerial photograph to illustrate Thomas Sharp's Oxford Replanned. The capacity of photography to isolate or extract striking forms from a three-dimensional scene on the one hand, and the rectilinear and unembellished form of modernist architecture on the other, fed off each other. The markedly international character of the West German public debate about reconstruction is illustrated by a cover of Deutschland im Wiederaufbau.
