This dissertation investigates Google Street View, a component of Google Maps, as both a visual and historiographical instrument in architectural study. It argues that Street View, through its automated panoramic imaging of the built environment, has become a vast but largely unacknowledged form of architectural documentation and urban representation. The project examines how this machinic archive can be understood within the historical lineage of architectural photography.

Street View is considered not simply as a mapping technology but as a representational system that produces, archives and circulates images of the built environment on an unprecedented scale. Unlike the singular image captured by a photographer who isolates and composes, Street View operates serially and indifferently. Yet through this process it generates a continuous record of streets, buildings and urban change. The dissertation’s central claim is that these images, though made without intent, inherit the documentary impulse that has long informed architectural and urban photography.

Cheryl Gilge describes Street View as a ‘spatialised image’ that fuses photographic and cartographic operations. Her analysis establishes the conceptual ground for understanding Street View as a hybrid visual infrastructure — part image and part interface.¹ This clarifies how the platform collapses distinctions between the photographic act and the mapped territory, between representation and navigation. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay’s conception of photography as a collaborative process², the dissertation also argues that Street View extends that relationship across code, infrastructure, and user. Meaning arises not at the moment of capture, but through acts of retrieval and reuse. The same relational logic can be traced backward through earlier photographic practices that sought to describe the city systematically rather than subjectively.

Eugène Atget’s work sits at the origin of this lineage. At the turn of the twentieth century, he documented Paris not as an artist but as a maker of documents for clients such as architects, artisans and preservationists who required visual records of façades, shopfronts and courtyards.³ His photographs were practical documents, yet their persistence and breadth turned function into history. What began as a commercial service to capture the built environment became an archive of urban space. His method established how photography could operate as both evidence and interpretation, a condition Street View later amplifies through automation.

Nigel Henderson, working in post-war London, extended this empirical impulse into the social realm. His photographs of East London neighbourhoods captured the vitality of working-class life, observing rather than idealising. Henderson’s method constituted a form of urban fieldwork that used the camera to register both physical and social texture. In his work the street becomes a site of enquiry, a space where architecture and life intersect.⁴

Ed Ruscha, in mid-century Los Angeles, brought this documentary logic into the realm of system and procedure. In Every Building on the Sunset Strip(1966) he mounted a motorised camera to his truck and produced a continuous photographic scroll of a single street.⁵ Like Atget and Henderson, Ruscha pursued the ordinary, but his method was mechanised, detached, and serial. His project converts the city into a linear, unbroken record assembled through movement. The work anticipates Street View’s automated survey, turning documentation into a procedural operation rather than a subjective act.

Together Atget, Henderson, and Ruscha define the methodological and conceptual ground from which Street View emerges — a history of image-making shaped by documentation, social immersion and automated infrastructure. Street View extends these tendencies and translates them into an industrial form of visual capture. What results is a record both total and impersonal, the city rendered as archival dataset.

Street View also occupies a central position in what might be called post-photographic practice. Contemporary artists such as Jon Rafman, Doug Rickard, and Mishka Henner have reappropriated its imagery to explore the shifting boundaries between authorship and automation. Their works expose the latent aesthetics of Street View and its capacity to record the incidental life of the city without intent or judgement.

Street View continues the lineage of architectural documentation while transforming its conditions. The image has become infrastructural, maintained by systems of corporate control and algorithmic surveillance that both preserve and obscure the city they record.

By situating Street View within this historical and methodological continuum, the dissertation redefines how architectural imagery can be mediated and used. It treats the platform not as a neutral mapping tool but as a living archive whose images reveal the conditions of the built environment. In doing so, it reframes architectural photography as a distributed practice, one enacted through systems rather than individuals. Street View’s automation does not end the work of the photographer; rather, it shifts attention from the moment of capture to the acts of selection and interpretation that follow. The ordinary city, endlessly imaged and re-imaged, becomes both subject and method — the ground through which architectural history continues to write itself.