November 10, 2008

In this, the last interview Robert Damora gave before his death in March, 2009, I explore his work as an architectural photographer and learn more about his commitment to his craft.  Honed by training at Yale and his unfailing attention to the minutest detail, Damora was once described by architect, Walter Gropius as, “the best photographer of architecture in this country.”  Here then, is his very personal story, told by Damora himself and by those who cherished him and his remarkable work.

During the course of our conversation, I learned that Damora, born in 1912, was inspired by stories by his father (himself an architect) and had, in his own lifetime, known and worked with all the great figures of mid-century architecture and design. Since graduating from Yale School of Architecture in 1953, he practiced his craft during a period when visionary architects and designers were actively shaping the look of America’s landscape, as cities and suburbs burgeoned in the years following World War II. What Damora found in his new profession was the opportunity to meld a long-standing interest in photography with his emerging passion for architecture.

Damora came of age in an era when science and industry were defining Western culture. His father, who died when Robert was two, was an architect, musician and inventor. “Maybe it runs in the family”, he said. Ever the photographer himself, he served in the Navy during the war with the Bureau of Research and Invention. While there, he worked with fellow enlistee, Edward Steichen, already recognized as a renowned photographer. Together, they mounted a show at the Smithsonian Museum of Science and Industry after the war, exhibiting technological advances that were the result of military research. Given this technological background, Damora received his bachelor’s degree in architecture with a new appreciation for how the mechanical and structural heart of a building can combine with the aesthetics of the design process to create an object of beauty.

He devoted the rest of his life to capturing that blend of heart and soul on film.

 Architecturally, modernism was in full flower in the early ‘50s. The major schools of architecture were being heavily influenced by a well-known group of architects and designers who had emigrated from Germany prior to the war. Among them was Walter Gropius, then the director of Harvard’s architecture department. At Yale, Damora studied under another giant in the field, George Howe who was chair of the department at the time. After graduating, Damora went to work for U.S. Steel on an exploratory design project. But, in addition to working for many years as an architect on this and other projects, his love of photography and his desire to document structures being completed by himself and his colleagues, meant that his catalogue of carefully-planned images would continue to grow.

Damora reflected back on that period: “Gropius often said that the conditions that existed for the faculty at the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany in the 20s and 30s, allowing for free-ranging and creative thought in design, were a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”, he said, “In spite of the fact that many critics said he was out to recreate the purity of the European modern design style in the U.S, he knew it would never happen again or happen here. Gropius, who had an intuitive understanding of architectural space, turned his attention to what the next generation needed and trained his students to be forward-thinking, while continuing to analyze history.”

“This influence produced architects in the late 40s like Philip Johnson and Landes Gores, two of the group that became known as the ‘Harvard Five’. Gores was trained as a ‘modern’, but had a sincere love of history—and it showed in his designs. Johnson came out of Harvard a modernist, too; but eventually adopted the historical influences in his work.” He felt that “Johnson’s best contribution to modern architecture was in the area of promoting and popularizing architecture as a whole, first at the Museum of Modern Art and then, in his continuing ability to expand interest in architecture through teaching, the media, support of the work of other architects and his colorful personality,” Damora explained.  “Johnson’s work was influenced by his great love for and understanding of art.  He had impeccable taste and was an expert on scale and placement; but from a design perspective, he seemed to be influenced by the current tastes of the times”

As Damora continued to talk about the architectural work of others, I got the clear impression of his love for line and form and his inherent understanding of the skills needed to achieve them. “As an architect, I can look at a building and understand the intent of the designer. A good building is like a person who impresses the hell out of you. How they express themselves on the outside helps you to understand what they’re made up of on the inside. Good architecture stretches the essential elements of the human spirit to the highest point.”

Damora would spend hours or even days in the presence of his subjects, waiting for the moment when the light, sky and surroundings would show off the designer’s intent to maximum effect. The result would be an image that captured the essence of the building, with all its character and personality, as though it were a human subject sitting in front of the camera lens.

Damora also saw the construction of many buildings of his own design. He embraced the concept of “Total Architecture”, meaning design that goes beyond form alone to include function, strength and beauty. “I believe that beautiful design should not just be the province of the elite—architecture needs to be democratic—that is, it belongs to everyone; to the general population. He made good on this commitment in his design work with U.S. Steel and its subsidiary, Universal Atlas Cement Company, whose, ‘Seeds of Architecture’ project raised the aesthetic of high-grade cement and steel-reinforced concrete to an art form. Projects commissioned by Paolo Soleri, I.M. Pei and Paul Rudolph are considered iconic examples of modern design using these products and garnered Damora national recognition for his work.

His project, ‘Better Homes at Lower Cost’, in the early ‘60s, also brought Damora’s vision for simplified construction techniques, using fewer components and factory, pre-assembled elements to the job site, into the public arena. This forward-looking approach to design met his goals of making homes both affordable and visually attractive. Examples of projects completed during this period are extant today and remain striking in their use of line and form to create a dramatic architectural statement at reasonable cost.

In parting, he said, “I am always thinking about new ways to do things…I don’t put on my shoes in the morning without thinking about new ways to solve old problems. The search for innovation is not easy, but I have learned how to do it through years of trial and error. Good architecture is as much structural components as it is art—and art is not logical—it comes out of the heart and soul.”

* * * *

June 10, 2009

Passion, precision, stubbornness, an eye for detail, patience, a reverence for beauty…these are all terms used to describe the late Robert Damora as I sat with his wife and children, Jesa and Matt, in the living room of their home, recalling the man whose life’s work we all so admire. With humor, fondness and just a touch of frustration, they fondly recount the times when each stood in as photographer’s assistant, model or Sherpa on various photo shoots around the country.

Bob Damora was a perfectionist, waiting endless hours for the clouds to frame a shot correctly, manipulating his multi-plane camera to eliminate distortion and depth-of-field issues and focusing each shot with the help of his family and assistants. The irony of Damora’s work was that, as a photographer, his sight had been failing for years. The family explained that, without their assistance, he was unable to determine the final focus on a shot. But prior to that last adjustment, he would work endlessly underneath the black drape that shielded the ground glass plane of the camera’s-eye view from daylight. With a napkin over her head, Jesa offered a loving imitation of her father’s head and shoulders weaving and dodging erratically beneath the camera’s cloth, all the while flailing his hands to make adjustments on the device itself. Given that the image, from his perspective, was upside down and the detail was muted by the glass plate, he nevertheless succeeded in capturing the subject with a perfect balance of light, form and drama. She went on to tell me that if the elements did not align themselves that day, he would stake the tripod’s spot on the ground, make a note of his settings and return the next day to do it all over again!

Sirkka recalled that her husband loved to teach and to challenge his students. “He wanted to communicate his ideas with his students, she explains, “It was part of his belief in the democracy of architecture…that they should know how good design works and to be able to bring it out into the world for others.” Ingeniously, he took a lesson learned from Edward Steichen many years before and would mask the center of an image with a piece of cardboard. “In design”, she relayed to me how he would say, “take care of the middle and the edges will take care of themselves.” He believed that this lesson would apply equally to design, as well as the photographic image.

In his career, the family told me, he had interacted in the company of all the greats: discussing with Mies van der Rohe his theory on structural resolution; Philip Johnson and his views on the placement of a building in the landscape (Johnson- “A tree in the wrong place is just a weed that needs to be pulled.”, Damora had told me); Gropius and his intuitive understanding of architectural space; Louis Kahn and his theoretical lectures that students had trouble grasping; Frank Lloyd Wright, whose lectures might last all day; Ballentine beers in the front yard with ‘Bucky’ Fuller as they regaled one another with architectural tales of the fanciful and the futuristic.

But, in the end, Damora will be remembered for his graphic images of the work of all these men and more: Paul Rudolf; John Johansen; Eero Saarinen; Victor Gruen; Edward Durrell Stone; Marcel Breuer; furniture designer, Florence Knoll and many more. His reward for time spent on a project was to discover the spirit and energy of a building through the eye of his camera. “The more he sat with a building”, Matt Damora told me, “the more it opened up to him, allowing him to see things that others didn’t. My father had the ability to study a space and then train the camera lens to that precise spot in the room where he wanted the viewer to be standing. The ability—to create a third dimension and to figure out where you, the viewer, would be— was his gift as a photographer.”

“He knew his equipment and its capabilities, even though some of it was cumbersome and labor intensive”, Jesa told me. “His camera was an extension of his intuitive understanding of architecture. He had an instinctive understanding of what to do, but planned painstakingly, nevertheless”, she explained. “There was a clean quietness in his photographs, many of which have long been considered iconic.” A careful and intimate review of two dozen or more of his most important works, there in the Damora living room, certainly proved the point beyond a doubt.

And the iconic images of Robert Damora will endure like the buildings he portrayed, because as Gropius writes, “He has an intuitive understanding of architectural space…, a most acute vision, and… knows how to bring out the best…” of the world of architecture

by Richard Friswell, Editor-in-Chief