Preston Scott Cohen’s Stereotomic Permutation attempts to reconcile the seemingly divergent orthographic and perspectival methods of projection, the result of which is a series of lavishly distorted recombinant layers. Fiver’s re-imagining of this idea as of the dichotomous pairing of perception and depiction is an effective way in which to understand an otherwise overly arbitrary idea. Replacing the word “depicted” with “experienced,” however, seems to more accurately convey PSC’s intended relationship between orthographic and perspectival projections.
With this new rubric, we can begin to understand Cohen’s intentions. Can the perception of architecture, both conceptually and physically, merge with the experience of architecture? In other words, is it possible to design a form whereby we both see and understand it simultaneously? In a sense, our brain does this already in the re-positioning of convergent lines as parallel in “our mind’s eye.” Using visual cues such as foreshortening and pattern recognition we project the equidistance of columns in a colonnade, knowing that our perspective of them tells us that they are getting progressively closer to o ne another. Our innate understanding of convergent lines allows us to understand that the column are the same height, despite the fact that we "see" them as sequentially shrinking.
Sterotomic Permutations seems an attempt to utilize this particular human trait in form generation. PSC's provocative line drawings, which read both flat and three-dimensional, revealing that perhaps the successful merging of these different projections lies in using in intersection, folding, and overlaps to create a powerful ambiguity.
In this study, perspectival effects of a simple colonnade are abstracted to a single axis, and recombined as series of layers.
Re-combinant variations redirect the investigation of perspectival (perceived) and orthgraphic (experienced) projection.
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