Postcards and the Making of Architectural History: The Case of the Alvin Boyarsky and Rem Koolhaas

This paper examines the appropriation of popular picture postcards in architectural culture. Deriving from theories of collecting and popular representations of cities, the paper recognizes postcard collection as a form of writing architectural history. Reflective of the city’s economic and social context, when postcards are displaced from the context of consumer tourism and placed into architectural discourse through their revalorization, interpretation and juxtaposition with other types of urban imagery, they generate meaning through the new discourse around them and offer many possibilities for criticism and appropriation. Examined in this essay are differences and similarities of postcard appropriation in the work of Alvin Boyarsky and Rem Koolhaas. Postcards are then discussed in relationship to contemporary web sites, e-cards, and urban sights that they and these other sites offer. Such images are representative not only of the sights they depict, but they also speak through what they leave out. This anonymous yet carefully assembled history is revealed through juxtaposition of postcards with other popular images, such as newspaper clips and photographs. Through their silent arguments, these montage strategies tell a history of social conflicts that moves beyond the traditional vision of modernity based on economic, social and technological progress.

Volume Editors
Marilys R. Nepomechie & Robert Gonzalez

ISBN
0-935502-54-8