To accompany the architectural installation of the exhibition “Happiness, City, Space – Constructed Utopias in Europe 1945-2000” at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin
The ultimate death of perspective was in the moment that the deconstructionists’ exhibition opened in 1998 at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York. Deconstructionist architecture put an end to constructed spaces, architectural elements and groups of buildings being depicted from a fixed point. A drawing, photograph or even digital virtual reality of any deconstructionist building serves as incontrovertible proof of this. Such a picture can be appealing, beautiful, even of artistic interest, but remains almost irrelevant as far as conveying information is concerned. With only slight exaggeration we can say that the man of today can hardly discern from such a picture what is up and what is down, what is concave and what is convex, and whether something is vertical or horizontal. The spatial experiences which live in our memories are much simpler than the spaces created by deconstruction. In the area of architecture, we are not even capable of using the techniques of abstraction and association that from the second half of the nineteenth century made it possible to accept and enjoy fine art, which changed constantly and radically.
A possible refutation of the above claim would be that at the moment when a point of view moves and thus loses its staticness, the space because understandable and knowable. We could say that it is not that our spatial experiences are limited and primitive, but rather that our built environment has become complicated. So much so that it is only the movement in it, the virtual or real visual experience that can make the space comprehensible and acceptable. This claim may be true, but we should be aware that spaces of similar complexity to – or greater than – deconstruction were already in existence in architectural history. But understanding the most extreme Baroque or Secession depiction of two-dimensional space did not pose problems for contemporaries. At the same time it is worth noting that with regard to other art-forms, our spatial sense is not stuck within the boundaries of classical perspective.
Why is it that while in painting, abstract, two-dimensional depictions have been able to break away from the rules of classical perspective (while preserving their capacity to pass on information), our architectural concept of space has increasingly become the slave of Euclidean geometry, at odds with artistic depiction? We could put the question another way: what is it that causes depictions of architectural spaces only to be accepted with a lag of a hundred years? It is interesting that the very same exhibition visitor capable of decoding the information content in a cubist painting can stand in front of a photograph of a deconstructivist building, lost for words. The solution to the mystery is in the architecture itself. But the reason why deserves more thorough explanation.
The last six centuries have produced a whole library’s worth of writing about perspective. Let us lift a definition from the literature as a starting point: “What we wish to express and what we see becomes one – the image and the visible world are subordinated to our optical experiences. Perspective creates an unambiguous relationship between the outside world (the world we see) and the viewer, and it is the identification of this defined and geometrically measurable relationship and the discovery of a consistent uniformity that lead to a new type of image that is unified and revisable, a picture that is captured precisely along the plane between the two”.[1] But let us start at the beginning. Though always a matter for debate, the person who discovered perspective is Brunelleschi, and it was Alberti who raised it to a scholarly level. Pliny’s name is also mentioned in connection the origins of perspective. Fully to understand the history of perspective, it is important that we first acquaint ourselves with the Pliny legend.
Once upon a time in Corinth, there was a daughter of a potter who did not want to part from her loved one. So she drew his silhouette before bidding him farewell. According to Pliny, this was not some kind of magic, but rather the birth of painting. Today maybe we would say that by drawing the contour of a face the potter’s daughter attributed particular significance to a particular part of the general visual space. The key element in the story is the drawing of the contour. For this is what greets us in Alberti’s Tractatus. The Renaissance theoretician puts such emphasis on the fact that a drawing of perspective can only be started by determining the contours that he rejects all other methods. Alongside the technical details, Alberti’s genuinely revolutionary innovation is his window metaphor: “we have to project the view onto a plane as if we were looking out of a window, and it is the frame of the window that separates it from its surroundings”, which “...means a unified worldview. All of the windows opened to the world by perspective drawings look at the same world and from the same viewpoint: from where the individual was placed by the objectivity of discovery.”
The two fundamental tenets of Alberti’s perspective continued to be seen as relevant during the twentieth century, when the so-called technique of the seven veils was still used at the Akademie der Künste in Munich: seven veils were draped between the student and the subject to be drawn, so only its outline was visible. This had to be drawn first, then the first veil was raised, revealing new details, and students could develop their drawings further. And so on, until the picture was finished. A much later story concerns the old and very ill Matisse, whose assertion at once rejected and asserted Alberti’s principle: Why have the picture on the wall at all? Better to cut a square out of it that you like, for what you see as you look through it no one can paint for you.
Perspective places the I, the subject, in the spotlight, but in doing so itself occupies that spotlight. The method, which can be expressed mathematically and described objectively, enjoys a pedigree of almost three centuries, ever since it received new momentum during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Alberti’s Tractatus and the trecento controversy as to whether the basic elements of architecture are the wall and the vault or the column and the beam were rekindled in the debate between Goethe and Laugier. By the nineteenth century the fundamentals of perspective as the only method of depicting our three-dimensional world in two dimensions were under attack. On the one hand, the identity of the subject was questioned (Ernst Mach), and, on the other, there arose the theory of multiple perspectives, the changing field of view from glimpses of the subject. This was connected to the dynamism of the Industrial Revolution, and the need for the depiction of progress as existence in continual flux. It is the duality of the subject in flux and the subject remaining static that led to the multiple perspective of Cubism. But this movement still remains hidden “behind” the visual plane Alberti describes. For five centuries, the “construzione legitima” ruled the “perspectiva artificialis”. With the inroads made by depiction of movement, from the start of the twentieth century perspective no longer played a role in the development of fine art. Yet in philosophy and aesthetics it again became the focus of attention (Panofsky and Cassirer’s interrelated lectures in the Warburg Library, and the now classic Panofsky book Perspective as Symbolic Form, 1927).
Classical perspective had thus largely disappeared when modern architecture was born. The first prophets of the developing new architecture almost returned to the beginnings of perspective, however. The theoretical architectural debate mentioned above (wall-vault or column-beam) was revived as if nothing had happened, and the moderns recommended exactly the same compromise that Alberti had made (albeit some five hundred years previously), that there should be a framework structure, i.e. column-beam, and that filling (not load-bearing) walls be the basis for architecture. In the light of this, no one should be surprised if the modernists alluded to the Gothic just as much as our Renaissance theoretician did. At the same time, the proponents of the new architecture rejected out of hand all architectural schools of thought where the basis for the structural system was determined to be a wall acting as load-bearing element. This excludes all architectural styles from the sixteenth century onwards. Foremost in the firing line of these rejections and criticisms – dare we say hatred – is the Baroque. Precisely the style in which the results of perspective research were increasingly used not just in fine art, but also in architecture. Neither does this almost irrational level of animosity leave out the later eclectic style and all types of “neo” movement (Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Classicist, etc.). This rejection would not be particularly interesting in and of itself, for we have witnessed similar emotional responses to the past during the onset of progressive schools of thought in other artistic fields. Architecture has its fair share of destructive activity on the part of new, sometimes progressive, movements motivated by political, economic, religious, ethnic interests, genuine or otherwise.
Neither is there anything particularly unusual in modernist architecture reaching back for something almost forgotten, if not in a declared fashion. We can find numerous previous examples of this in both art and architecture. And neither is it of interest that it only takes a simple act of retrospection to find the origins of the forms of modern architecture in the books of Brunelleschi, Alberti, Taylor, Dubreuil and Pisanello. In addition to the Golden Ratio used with such affection by the Renaissance, many other classical structural rules were returned to architecture’s armoury. For while it is true that the Baroque and the Eclectic also used the results of perspective research in constructed form – and in a far more complex and considered fashion than Palladio back in the early days – they are nevertheless rejected by modernism. Not to mention the practice of virtual (painted) architecture as introduced by the Baroque.
It is striking how little modernism accepts the development of perspective or ideas that transcend it. Particularly striking when the relationship between modern architecture and other artistic disciplines is so evident. It is hard to ascertain how Panofsky’s book (Die Perspektive als "symbolische Form") or Novotny’s text (Cezanne und das Ende der wissenschaftlichen Perspektive) can have influenced the architectural practice of the Bauhaus, but their connection to its wider artistic conception is clear. It is possible that in this instance, too, we are witness to the separation of the decoding systems of architecture and of other art forms.
If perspective is not classical, it is suspicious. Emphasising this, axonometry and isometry rejoin the methods at architecture’s disposal. These methods appeared at the Bauhaus exhibition in 1923 in great numbers, but it is thought that they did so under the influence of Theo van Doesburg and the De Stilj movement. The reason these so-called cavalier perspectives can be related to the methods of classical perspective is that they preserve their exactness, measurability, revisability, and in certain cases even imitate optical foreshortening, just that they happen to interpret the meeting of parallels at infinity in a literal fashion. So the parallels remain parallel on the drawing. The rejection of non-classical perspective variations elaborated in other art-forms as something fake and spurious not only went hand-in-hand with further obligatory simplification of the architectural space and its reduction to basic forms – this could almost belong to the list of reductive experiments of modern art (Malevich) – but led to the denial of the complexity of the space. Put more politely, architects conceded the presentation of the complexity of the space to other art forms, despite the fact that they had every means at their disposal to achieve it. And other spaces were indeed born – literary ones (the interaction of Rilke and Klee) and musical ones (Varése and Duchamp).
As a refreshing exception, we find Russian-Soviet constructivism, which during its very short life had a very strong influence. Here we see no sign of any return to the strict order of classical perspective. It may seem overly obvious, but it is nevertheless true that perspective was rejected by Russian painting almost as soon as it arrived. Until this time, icon painting ruled supreme, where the principle of design was founded on the principles of so-called reversed perspective. This means that the imaginary horizon was not “behind” the picture, but “in front” of it. So neither is it surprising that almost all participants in the exhibition mentioned at the start of the article in some way took the study of constructivism as their starting point.
If we accept that the trends of the 1950s and the progressive architecture that ensued still had their origins in the works of the early modernists, an abhorrence for the complexity of constructed spaces becomes even more striking. Indeed, those who nevertheless “broke out” of the fixed viewpoint of classical perspective found that their methods did not really become known, or that they were simply rejected. An example is the mirroring technique of Mies van der Rohe, which assumes a horizontal mirroring axis instead of the classical vertical one. This means that a real mirror image is produced, even for own shadows and projected shadows. In contrast, the use of the traditional horizontal axis does not actually lead to results, for the shadows of the two symmetric sides are not mirror-images of each other. Even in the most detailed studies, we only rarely find a description of the floor of Le Corbusier’s chapel at Romchamps, which is based on the perspective tricks of theatre set construction. Maybe it is no accident that it was “Corbu” who tried to construct acoustic perspective in the Philips pavilion at the Brussels World Exposition in 1958.
The withdrawal of modern architecture into classical perspective continued even as pioneers in other art forms started to deal with the novel problem of artificial space. From its very beginnings, cinema has gone almost directly against the spatial conception and depiction of modern architecture (Dr. Caligari), with the road leading along a long series of experiments to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the very essence of the modernist conception of an artificial space is cast into doubt. These intervening experiments had very little influence of general architectural thinking, however. As the modernist concept of space makes greater and greater inroads, and the more people spend almost all their lives in a built environment of this type, so the dichotomy between the artistic and architectural conceptions of space grows.
Our collective architectural spatial experience and conception has become infinitesimally simplistic. As a result, the two-dimensional portrayal of complicated man-made three-dimensional spaces can no longer rely on collective memory. Real-life experiences are necessary for the decoding of a two-dimensional image. Without inspiration, however, experiences and memory weaken, and see something novel and complicated as alien.
(Élet és Irodalom, 1 November 2002)
Bibliography:
The following articles from the volume Perspective – edited by Miklós Peternák and Nikolette Erős (C3 – Műcsarnok-Kunsthalle, Budapest, 2000-2001):
Peternák, M.: On Perspective. Roccasecca, P.: Alberti, Pisanello, Panofsky and the discovery of the “construzione legitima”; Viewpoints and not “punto di fuga”. Hajnóczi, G.: The scholarly codification of the painter’s perspective. Dumitrescu, S.: The threshold. Marosi, E.: The pilaster. Cohen, P. S.: Stereotomic permutations, 1993-1994. Moravánszky, Á.: Axonometry as a symbolic form. Weibel, P.: Perspective as the road to the principle of construction. Bacic, M.: The birth of perspective from the spirit of music. Wilheim, A.: Spatial notions in music. Pór, P.: Rilke and perspective. Bacsó, B.: Perspective and cognition. Beke, L.: Horizon and vanishing point. Epilogue to the Perspective exhibition (fictional essay).
Translated by David Robert Evans.
[1] Perspective (Ed. Miklós Peternák and Nikolette Erős, C3 – Műcsarnok-Kunsthalle, Budapest, 2000-2001; Peternák, M.: On Perspective, p. 7.)