A photography enquiry on the natural order of architecture : Edward Allen's picture of trulli building technique

Southern Italy has always been a place of imaginary discovery for foreign architects and architectural historians with a strong passion for photography. The ‘Beehive’ homes in Italy’s Heel were an extraordinary subject for architectural magazines and books. It is in Edward Allen's book Stone Shelters (1969), on the unique conical-roofed trulli of the Apulia region, that we can find an in-depth study on photography and vernacular Mediterranean architecture. The iconographic apparatus of the book, photographed and drawn by the young architect, reveals the beauty of trulli building technique. Allen was astonished by the surprising mastery shown by the local masons, who used only stone and mortar to build up their vaults and arches. Probably Giuseppe Pagano’s brief and combative article ‘Documenting Rural Architecture’, appeared in Casabella in November 1935, inspired Allen to visit Apulia, as it had happened earlier to Enrico Peressutti, Emil Otto Hoppé, Giancarlo De Carlo, Federico Vender and Bernard Rudofsky. All of them with the aid of a camera had a primary purpose: to gain an understanding of a vernacular architecture as it relates to the geography of a land and the history of its people. Allen’s handsome book about vernacular architecture attracts the eye and engages the mind. The careful craftsmanship of the buildings described is paralleled by a disciplined photographic research. The aim of the paper is to clarify the role of Edward Allen as a global surveyor of structural forms with a renewed interest in architectural photography.