In the early 2000s, a new generation of painters began exploring the built environment not just as subjects to depict, but as powerful symbols to decode contemporary culture. Artists like Julie Langsam, Brian Alfred, Eberhard Havekost, and Sarah Morris discovered that depicting architecture could serve as a compelling means of rendering the increasingly complex and ambiguous nature of modern society.
Julie Langsam never intended to practice architecture, admitting that even small sculptures confound her spatial understanding. "I don't have a good idea of three-dimensional space," she explains. "I think only illusionistically." This limitation may actually explain why her paintings of residential landmarks by modernist masters like Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, and Peter Eisenman look nothing like conventional architectural elevations. For the 43-year-old Langsam and her contemporaries, depicting architecture transcends mere documentation of bricks and mortar—it becomes a vehicle for exploring the disconnection between idealized modernist visions and contemporary reality.
The tradition of architectural representation in art stretches back centuries. Ancient scrolls and wall drawings provided glimpses of historic dwellings, while gilded medieval church panels celebrated divine glory through Gothic cathedral imagery. Modernist painters from Charles Sheeler to Edward Hopper used architectural spaces to capture the essence of their era. In the 1980s and 1990s, Los Angeles painter John Register pushed this tradition further, expressing complex emotions—primarily alienation—through images of empty motels, apartments, and diners. Register pursued what he called "a refinement of the commonplace," using photographic references to distill essential elements that conveyed specific moods.
Langsam's artistic journey began with an interest in female sexuality, leading her to search 1950s magazines for images of women. "They were all running around in high heels and nice clothing, building families in these machines for living," she recalls. "I started to wonder what these idealized pictures meant, if there was anything worth resurrecting, whether we'd really come so far." She found herself nostalgic for a past she knew was constructed and illusory. However, simply painting these women failed to adequately express the cultural schism she recognized in her generation's relationship with modernist ideals.
"By the time I came of age as a painter," Langsam explains, "all of us knew that, as artists or architects, we were supposed to fulfill the ideal of modernism, to find the perfect form, but also we were already aware that there isn't an ideal to be achieved." This realization was crystallized by her experience as a guest in a classic Neutra house, where the stunning austerity contrasted sharply with the comfortable anonymity of her Cleveland clapboard home. She describes modernism as "a rigorous aesthetic" that is "undeniably appealing yet also forbidding."
Langsam's solution was to transplant these "temples of modernism" into imaginary landscapes where they naturally belonged in her vision—specifically, the flat expanses of the American prairie first romanticized by 19th-century Hudson River School painters. While these backgrounds are products of her imagination, artfully landscaped and illuminated, the buildings themselves are rendered in painstaking detail. Working from color photographs found in architectural textbooks, she projects suitable views as transparencies onto wooden panels, creates line drawings, and adds oil colors layer by layer. "The homes are almost pasted into the landscape," she explains. Unoccupied and lacking road access, these structures embody her fundamental ambivalence: "I want them to be accurately depicted, but displaced"—literally representing ideals that can be desired but never reached.
Brian Alfred approaches modernist architecture from a different perspective, creating large-scale canvases that sometimes feature dramatic destruction. One painting depicts the original Bauhaus building receiving a direct blow from a wrecking ball. "With the Bauhaus, there was a very strict ideology," Alfred notes. "Now it's exploded and anything can be a viable idea." His interest in architecture stems from its capacity to express a broad range of concepts, evolving from his earlier work with fractals and mathematical modeling of nature.
"Eventually I abandoned the whole formula aspect because all the work was looking very similar," Alfred explains. "I was more interested in the broader things in the world." His attention turned to mass media's use of architectural imagery to illustrate news stories. "I became interested in how buildings are a substitute for things not readily visible to the media," he recalls. "It's hard to get footage of what the FBI is doing behind the scenes, for example, so the FBI building becomes a metaphor for how you get kept in the dark. Or, for a while, the glass Enron building became a stand-in for corruption." Recognizing architecture's symbolic broadcast power, Alfred saw it as providing a visual language more culturally relevant and aesthetically open-ended than mathematical formulas.
Alfred's process involves browsing the internet for hours daily, finding raw news photographs to render in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. He reduces buildings to basic shapes and manipulates them—adding elements like wrecking balls—to impose his own commentary on standard iconography. Using X-Acto knives to cut stencils, he builds paintings in flat, abutting layers. Throughout this process, a muted CNN broadcast flickers in his Brooklyn studio, serving as a 21st-century muse providing constant imagery.
German artist Eberhard Havekost, working from Dresden, also uses mass media to observe the world, but he's drawn to images for their anonymity rather than their iconic status. His suburban-focused work has drawn comparisons to fiction by John Cheever and A.M. Homes. Scanning found images of houses, trailers, skyscrapers, and office interiors into his computer, he crops away context and accentuates visual distortions—what he calls formal "flaws." His smallest canvases even approach illegibility, with buildings that refuse explanation through their impenetrability and interchangeability.
Havekost's approach reinforces the symbolic resonance of his contemporaries' more explicit sources by demonstrating how disconnected iconic buildings can become from actual architecture. Through his counter-example of buildings stripped of meaning, he highlights the conceptual weight that architectural imagery can carry when removed from its original context.
Sarah Morris offers yet another perspective, denying that architecture serves as her primary subject matter and describing it instead as a communication tool. "I use architecture to create situations in space," she explains. "I'm working with the strategies building designers use to distract people, or to make them concentrate." Her paintings, inspired by Las Vegas hotels, Miami swimming pools, Washington monuments, and New York skyscrapers, are more abstract than her peers' work. She compulsively takes photographs for reference but doesn't work directly from them, instead focusing on colors, scale, and emotional qualities rather than technical details.
Morris's spare paintings aren't "accurate" in conventional terms, yet viewers often believe otherwise. People frequently tell her that her painting "Midtown-Revlon Corporation" perfectly depicts architect Der Scutt's landmark building. "Because of the perspective and the way the painting dominates you with color and scale," she says, "people perhaps have the same feeling as they do when they're around that structure." This emotional authenticity over literal accuracy demonstrates her success in capturing architecture's psychological impact.
Drawing parallels between architecture and cinema, Morris even creates films in and around the cityscapes that inspire her paintings. "Like good cinema, successful buildings place you in a fantasy," she observes, citing how malls compel shopping and casinos inspire gambling. While Morris's minimalist geometric canvases may appear aesthetically opposite to John Register's nearly photorealistic renditions, their work shares important qualities that stretch back to Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler. Both exploit architecture's expressive potential, manipulating space on flat planes to evoke multidimensional emotions. In essence, both artists function as architects of illusion, using the built environment to construct new realities that reflect contemporary culture's complexities and contradictions.
