Record, as everyone knows, is an architecture magazine, but, you could argue, it is actually a photography magazine on the topic of architecture. Yes, our editors and contributors report and write extensively on architectural projects and provide deep knowledge about construction, site conditions, materials, and technical particulars. We include drawings of plans, sections, and details. Yet it is hard to imagine architectural record without pictures, almost always in color-the ubiquitous language for translating the world of three dimensions into two. In this issue, we bring you stunning photographs of new projects, as usual-in this case, cultural centers from Taiwan to Ohio, with reports by writers who visited all of them. But in a special feature, we also explore the power of the architectural image, which shapes "the understanding of the work across time, positioning it in the universe of references that makes up the history of the field," as Pierluigi Serraino writes in "Partners in Time," an essay that looks at the impact of the great 20th-century photographers-Ezra Stoller chief among them-on how we have come to view the work of the Modernists who commissioned them (page 44). Since its very first issue 127 years ago, record has been part of that universe of references, fixing photographs into our collective image banks where architectural culture is stored. Today, we continue in that role, curating pictures from the best photographers for the pages of the magazine. Their work interpreting contemporary architecture is as critical as ever, especially in a world flooded with every kind of image, good and bad, on Instagram and the Web.
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