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Framework Houses

Bernd and Hilla Becher German

Not on view

Bernd and Hilla Becher found artistic inspiration in the underappreciated beauty of the built environment, specifically, commonplace industrial and residential architecture. The Bechers’ use of typological ordering, as seen here in a grid of fifteen framework-house studies, can be traced to Hilla’s interest in the concepts of taxonomy and morphology, which are systems of biological classification based on shape and function. They called their assemblages “typologies” and used this effective graphic structure to compare similar and different forms, as would a researcher studying a collection of fossils or butterflies.

Framework Houses, Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, active 1959–2007), Gelatin silver prints

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