Perspective, Projections and Design: Technologies of Architectural Representation

by Mario Carpo and Frédérique Lemerle, Editors
Routledge, NY, NY, 2007
224 pp. Trade, $148.75; paper, $61.95
ISBN-10: 0415402042; ISBN-10: 0415402069.

Reviewed by Amy Ione
Director, The Diatrope Institute
Berkeley, CA 94704 USA

ione@diatrope.com

In their introduction to Perspective, Projections and Design: Technologies of Architectural Representation, Mario Carpo and Frédérique Lemerle note that the essays in this book were prompted by the awareness of an extended field of interaction between the new digital technologies of vision and the history of perspectival representations. Overall, the 14 chapter essays, which are presented in chronological order, examine various aspects of image-making technologies, geometrical knowledge, and tools for architectural design, focusing in particular on two historical periods (the Renaissance and the contemporary rise of digital technologies), both of which are marked by comparable patterns of technological and cultural change. The range is impressive. Jeanne Peiffer offers a compelling discussion on how sixteenth-century craftsmen in Nuremberg, notably Hirshvogel and Lencker, claimed to draw inspiration from Dürer and yet developed a radically different relationship to geometry. Thierry Mandoul looks at how August Choisy’s axonometric drawings generated images of global synthesis by combining the plan, elevation and section of a building into a single view. Phillippe Potié’s article on Sebastiano Serlio, which equates the shapes of the baroque with the generative power of computer software, proposing that the work of the seventeenth century will help us grasp the transformations now occurring in contemporary architecture, is complemented by an article on Sebastiano Serlio by Sabine Frommel and Pietro Roccasecca. Particularly thought provoking are the several articles that articulate how recently developed tools for digital imaging offer new ways to investigate and analyze traditional perspectival renderings. I was also taken with the papers that asked whether digital image-making technologies are creating a new visual environment that is an alternative to, rather than an enhancement of, the perspectival model that characterized the visual culture of the West from the Renaissance to our present day.

One extraordinary contribution that I am still pondering is “The Theory and Practice of Perspective in Vitruvius’ De architectura,” by Pierre Gros, which opens the collection. This fascinating look at Vitruvius, a Roman writer, architect and engineer who lived in the first century BC, emphasizes that in reading him today we must assess his actual practice without key visual materials because none of the drawings in the treatise have survived. (No doubt, there were few illustrations to begin with since there are few references to them in the work.) Despite our lack of sketches by Vitruvius’ hand, Gros carefully argues that researchers today have given the vanishing point too much importance when evaluating Vitruvius’ contributions. The interpretation of Vitruvius’ idea of Taxis (or organization), which essentially deals with the groundplan, elevation, and perspective, is at issue. Vitruvius says that the groundplan is made by the proper successive use of compasses and a ruler, by which we get outlines for the plane surfaces of buildings. The elevation is a picture of the front of a building, set upright and properly drawn in the proportions of the contemplated work. The perspective is a depiction of the front with the sides receding into the distance, the lines converging at the circular center. Although some say that Vitruvius’ analysis expresses the concept of the unified vanishing point, and perhaps far more accurately than any writer of the Quattrocento, Gros holds that this architect used the vanishing point to draw a 3-dimensional image of a building but not to unify the diversity of depicted objects within a geometricized space, and that the common interpretation reveals the anachronistic nature of any attempt to endow ancient theory or practice with a perspective system heralding the one employed by architects and humanists of the fifteenth century. An author can only cover a limited amount in an article and, in this chapter, I found myself often disappointed to find that fascinating ideas were summarized in a sentence or two, with footnotes pointing the reader to sources where they could find more details. As a reviewer who, too, struggles with the need to balance space limitations with the wealth of details related to a topic, it is hard to be critical of an author’s need to accommodate to the word limitations that always accompany an article. Still, I must confess, I frequently found myself wishing the footnotes offered a counterpoint that elaborated a bit, rather than only a citation.

As with Vitruvius, we must decipher Alberti’s ideas on perspective without the benefit of illustrations. Mario Carpo’s chapter, “Alberti’s Media Lab,” sheds light on this situation in a novel way. Having previously criticized the lack of illustration in Alberti’s writings, believing the verbal emphasis stifled his ability to communicate with the reader, I found Carpo’s perceptive essay illuminating and saw it as a cogent call to re-think my own views; particularly, his comment that Alberti was painfully aware of the mistakes copyists introduced into texts during reproduction and, for this reason, Alberti copied his own texts and also refrained from using visual illustrations in his books so that the images he offered would not be compromised by the risks inherent in manuscript transmission at that time. The fascinating hypothesis Carpo proposes is that, given the problems of accurate reproduction, Alberti replaced his drawings with a “grid” method and an early “digital system” by translating the images into numbers and digits that the reader could follow to render the image he described. Capro also notes that Alberti’s architectural rules were verbal, and his architectural drawings were one-offs, meant for point-to-point transmission and direct or personal use by their maker or their intended recipient. According to Carpo, Alberti did not want to disseminate his drawings publicly, although several sources, including Alberti himself, attest that many such architectural drawings by Alberti’s hand existed. [Unfortunately, all that has reached us is a single sketch of an architectural detail in a letter from Alberti to a master builder and the diagram of the plan of a bath, only recently discovered and attributed to Alberti.]

Overall, Carpo’s original and thought-provoking argument makes the claim that as we are moving out of the world of mechanically reproduced identicals, and into a new world of digitally produced variations, our world of algorithmically controlled variances that is much closer to the world of organic variability that preceded the mechanical age than it is to the very same mechanical age we are abandoning. (The term he uses for this flux is “mouvance.”) What he means by this is that the ease of changing our digital sources brings to mind the mutability of ideas accompanied the reproductions made by hand as compared to the crystallization brought about with the development of print technologies. A reconstruction of the map and drawing device described in Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae are among the examples introduced to show how Alberti conceived what we would call today a compatible platform of digital technologies, where images and three-dimensional objects could be recorded, transmitted, manipulated and reproduced via their translation into sequences of digits, or numbers. Carpo further states that the only significant difference between Alberti’s digital processes and our own is that the huge amount of numerical data generated by digitization are now automatically processed by electric machines whereas Alberti’s hand-operated machines would have been somewhat slower.

What is perhaps most impressive is how Carpo’s argument contrasts with the commonly assumed view that Alberti omitted illustrations because he was intent on celebrating the rhetorical primacy of ekphrasis. The chapter also compels the reader to think about Alberti’s place in time; he missed the print revolution by only a few years, although he missed it completely in terms of his publications. [Actually, although he lived for 20 years after printing was introduced into Italy, none of his work was mechanically reproduced and there is only one mention of the invention of printing in his entire corpus. We can only wonder how the use of mechanical reproduction would have impacted his presentation.] This chapter raised many question as I pondered it. One that I wished Carpo had commented on, even if only in a sentence or two, is how the work of the Italian painter, Piero Della Francesca (ca.1420-1492), who was known as a mathematician and geometer as well as an artist, fits within this digital hypothesis.

Two other original and far-reaching essays worth singling out are “Computer vision and painters’ visions in Italian and Netherlandish art of the fifteenth century” by Martin Kemp and Antonio Criminisi and “The Eye of the Sun: Galileo and Pietro Accolti on orthographic projection” by Filippo Camerota. Kemp and Criminisi begin with some thoughts on how computer vision exploits algorithms that in turn allow computers to analyze images or multidimensional data drawn from the external work. Then, using Masaccio’s Trinity (c. 1427), Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation (c. 1465), Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding (1434) and Robert Campin’s St. John the Baptist and Heinrich van Werl (1438), the authors examine how computer vision allows us to set up models that assist in understanding processes of seeing in general, in art, and to potentially extract information that lies beyond the power of the human eye and perception. Camerota points out that the dissemination of Galileo’s telescope should probably be credited with having favored the acceptance of the concept of the eye at infinity, a concept that, even for scientists, was still foreign to the physical reality of perception of that time.

Specialists will no doubt be drawn to this book’s depth, originality, and topical breadth. Generalists will find the articles accessible and stimulating in a way that encourages further study, particularly in regard to the tension between actual building and the needs of architectural design, a tension that seems to echo across the eras. As a generalist, I learned quite a bit about the late-medieval Gothic builders in Northern and Central Europe who frequently used orthogonal drawings in plan, elevation and section and realized how much debate accompanied the conflict between true measurements (obtained through parallel projections) and perspectival illusions (created by central projections). I am still digesting the many views on how the historical trajectory combines with contemporary ideas about art, technology, architecture, illusion, experiment, and rhetoric. That said, the high quality of the writing recommends the volume as does the sweep of its research.