Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge

" . . . projection is literally the hyphen between idea and experience that is the place of culture . . ."

The essence of design, then, lies in representation - the translator of conceptual ideas into built form. This is, I think, the essence of Alberto Perez-Gomez and Louise Pelletier's "Architecture and the Perspective Hinge. According to them, the development of different types of representation has always coincided with a significant shift in the conceptualization of the built environment. The development of perspective drawings, for instance, occured simultaneously with a more humanistic world view. All of a sudden, the "viewpoint" of mankind mattered. Thus, artists and architects began developing ways to more accurately, descriptively, and expressively depict this perspective. Contrast this with the Gothic master builder who, without the use of scale or orthographic drawings, constructed magnificent spiritual edifices. This architecture was not seen as being a creation of the builder itself, however. Rather, the master builder was merely a vessel through which a supreme being instilled its order upon the earth.

Gomez and Pelletier began by critiquing contemporary architectural practice and its use of representation as "prosaic transcription" rather than "poetic translation:"

"Functionalist motivations of our technological world have promoted the pragmatic capacity of architectural drawing over its potential to construe a symbolic order. For architects, it is important to remember that a symbol is neither a contrivance nor an invention - nor is it necessarily a representation of absolute truths or transcendental theological values."

This line of inquiry proposes an important question: What comes first, the means of representation or the conceptual shift? On what side of the "perspective hinge" does architecture sit? Gomez and Pelletier would seemingly say that it lags behind, that it is struggling to keep pace with technological and cultural inovations - that contemporary architecture, the goal of which is to symbolize and respond to both time and place, is not rooted in either.