Architectural representation and the perspective hinge. txt
Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Louise Pelletier /
- First MIT Press paperback edition
- 505 p. ill. 24 cm. book
Includes bibliographical references (p. [456]-497) and index.
Prelude-- Mapping the Question: The Perspective Hinge -- 3 - Translation vs. transcription. The poetic origin of architecture. -- 8 - Architectural meaning and the tools of the architect. The fallacy of neutral techniques. -- 10 - Theories of vision and the reciprocity between seeing and being seen. Perspectiva naturalis, medieval optics, and temporality. -- 16 - From natural perspective to artificial construction. The inception of perspectiva artificialis in the Renaissance. -- 29 - Binocular vision. The introduction of a second observer. -- 33 - Sectioning the cone of vision: the nature of theory. From footprints and faces to architectural representation as a set of coordinated projections. The origin of modern architectural representation in the European seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. -- 51 - The science of the observer. Transformations in the concept of light: from divine emanation (perspectiva naturalis) to quantifiable substance (perspectiva artificialis). -- 68 - Back to modernity and beyond. Projective optics and the speed of light. -- 80 - Casting light onto modernity. The use of projection in the modern world. -- 83 - From instrumental representation to collective participation? Variation One -- Architectural Representation and the Distorted Image -- 89 - Against a progressive history of the image. The use of projections in antiquity: Ptolemy. -- 97 - Scenographia and optical correction from Vitruvius to Perrault. Euclid's Optics and the priority of embodied experience. -- 105 - Model and scenography. From mode and module to scale model. -- 111 Sciographia and projected shadows. Barbaro and Scamozzi: the architectural section as shadow or imprint. The objectification and systematization of shadows in perspective. -- 125 - The extent of infinity. Girard Desargues's projective geometry and Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz's theories: two frameworks for the use of projection in architecture. -- 138 - Relocating anamorphosis. The initial disjunction of undis-torted presence and distorted appearance: from magical manipulation to innocuous game. -- 149 - Constructing a distorted order. Desargues's projection as totalizing vision. Caramuel de Lobkowitz's architectura oblicua: a "strange" symbolic order. - 158 - When the center becomes peripheral. Distorted appearance as a denial of perspective depth. -- 161 - The confrontation between theory and practice. Guarino Guarini's critique of Caramuel. Variation Two --- Cosmological Perspectives -- 177 - Setting the world in motion. The implications of a Copernican world-view. -- 185 - Redefining a hierarchical universe. Johann Heinrich Lambert's cosmological theory. -- 195 - Recentering the world. Lambert's reversible perspective theory and his perspectograph. -- 205 - The eccentric point of view. Lambert's perspective and its relationship to quadratura and scena per angolo. -- 214 - Perspective fantaisies. Jean-Laurent Legeay's disrupted perspective space. -- 227 - A world of scientific light and objective shadows. The beginning of scientific photometry. -- 230 - Framing the Earth. From mythical maps of temporalized space to Lambert's modern cartography. -- 243 - Cosmological volumes. The (Platonic) architectural structure of the cosmos: a theme for early parallel projection in Renaissance and Baroque perspective treatises. -- 266 - Truth as measurement: fortifications and isometry. Representation in Renaissance and baroque treatises on fortification. Filarete, Simon Stevin, Vauban, and others. Perspective as a military discipline in the eighteenth century. Back to natural perspective: the fusion of perspective and mechanistic optics. Different consequences of the "naturalization" of perspective. Variation Three -- The Image without an Observer in a Scopophilic World -- 281 - Between darkness and light. From the camera obscura to the camera lucida. The coincidence of scientific optics and descriptive geometry. -- 288 - From perspectivism to pure objectivity. Epistemological consequences. -- 292 - From physics to pataphysics. Science and architectural theory. -- 298 - The perspective hinge. Between reductive precision and self-referential poetic revelation. Perspective drawing as delusion. From descriptive to projective geometry: Durand and instrumentality. -- 307 - From measurement to abstraction: isometry and axonometry. Auguste Choisy's objectified history of architecture. -- 317 - The reversibility of axonometry. Lissitzky's Pangeometrie. -- 322 - The collapse of the image and the represented object. The trace and the index. -- 330 - Vision and depth. From perspectivism as the condition of modern/postmodern solipsism to a retrieval of projection as the site of ontological continuity. Marsilio Ficino, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Maurice MerleauPonty. -- 340 - Axonometry as collage: Le Corbusier's Poeme de Pringle droit. A poetic theory of architecture. -- 361 - Time into lived space: Le Corbusier's La Tourette. The architectural program as project and situation. -- Coda -- 371 — Projection revisited: the reversibility of optics. Projection revisited in art and cinematography. The chiasm of light and shadow as the site of truth. -- 377 — Digital space. The potential of absolute fluidity and the pitfalls of increasing fixation and reduction. -- 383 — Philosophical corollary. The world as technology. De architectura in ten notes. --