In the early nineties, having decided to restore my small Neutra house in the Hollywood Hills, I paid a visit to the Laurel Canyon studio of Julius Shulman, the legendary photographer renowned for his pioneering images of modernist architecture. In an anteroom stacked high with small wooden drawers, Shulman rooted out the photos he took in 1944 of what is called the Bonnet House. With typical but winning irascibility, he reminisced about the man who gave him his start: architect Richard Neutra, whose elegant, uncompromising vision defined Southern California at mid-century. I left with a vital record of my house (I was the Bonnet's third owner) and, more importantly, renewed inspiration for the task ahead. My visit was repeated many times over by other preservationists, and is emblematic of Shulman's unstoppable second career: Having been modernism's great recorder, he now tours the world to lecture about it.

Shulman with his Sinar camera in Phoenix, Arizona, 1950.(Julius Shulman archives)

Luckily, 987 of his photographs have been assembled in Taschen's three-volume Julius Shulman: Modernism Rediscovered ($300), which appears just in time for the Brooklyn-born photographer's 97th birthday on October 10. It's a stunning survey of Shulman's luminous images (in both black-and-white and color), which appeared everywhere from House & Garden to Western Architect and Engineer. "Even today," Shulman told me recently, "most architects don't know how to merchandise their work." Indeed, 20th-century American architecture owes much of its success to his far-ranging efforts.

Thanks to having what he calls a "natural eye," capturing the subtleties of a Mies van der Rohe apartment building or the dramatic interior of John Lautner's Chemosphere House came easily. But Shulman was determined to show how effortlessly people inhabited such formal-looking spaces: A woman arranging flowers in Pierre Koenig's Case Study House #22, for instance, gracefully illuminates an entire lifestyle. Shulman's commissions extended to such icons as the sci-fi Cadet Chapel at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and to overlooked gems like Paul Rudolph's Mayan-looking Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven. As Shulman says, and as this definitive retrospective attests, "Architecture must be seen as present in all facets of our lives."—DAVID HAY

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