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ARCHITECTURAL REPRESENTATION AND THE PERSPECTIVE HINGE
By Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier. The MIT Press. 1998

This book covers an enormous subject area with considerable skill and erudition. Focusing on the Western tradition of art and architecture and how the visual world has been reconstructed by philosophers and artist-architects, it commences in antiquity with Euclid, Plato and Vitruvius, and concludes in the twentieth century with Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Le Corbusier. This is not however a straightforward survey of architectural representation. Indeed, the authors are critical of texts which describe perspective theories through a ‘progressive’ history of optics and painting. Instead, they set out to relate a complex genealogy in which perspective is described as a ‘hinge’ for architectural representation, one which connects profound notions about the making of images and of buildings.

While Vitruvius established the essential drawings required of a building, the authors argue that Alberti was the first to set out the fundamentals of the laws of perspective. These underwent several centuries of refinement ­ brought about by a clearer understanding of the physiology of the eye, and of light ­ until, that is, the realities of single-point perspective were undermined by astronomers and a changed philosophical viewpoint.
Enlightenment induced technology led to photography and its painterly antidote Cubism: Le Corbusier invented the promenade architecturale. Now there is computerized architecture in cyberspace, about which the authors are deeply sceptical. Nevertheless, time marches on, and the Internet will undoubtedly be used to discuss the many merits of this enthralling book.
ROBERT TAVERNOR