December 2016, Volume 18, Issueensp;3, pp 577–583| Cite as
Architectural Perspective Between Image and Building
- Authors
- Authors and affiliations
- Michela RossiEmail author
- 1.
Letter from the Editor
First Online: 06 September 2016
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Abstract
Perspective is an important example of “cultural heritage” in Western figurative culture. This issue provides an overview of the applications of perspective to architecture and their current validity in design. The sequence of topics underlines the relationships between historical literature and coeval realisations, and the connection with other applications, such as cartography. The affirmation of a shared rule of perspective was the result of a long process of practical experimentation. The starting point was the classical principles of optics in the applications to the wall paintings of Pompeii, where the fascinating story of architectural perspective began. Thus, in this context, the term lsquo;architectural perspectiversquo;, also refers to the set of perspective constructions realised on the surfaces of a wall or room to simulate a different space than those actually built. Several “real scale” examples document the broad experimentation of projective devices in which the image interacts with the space and representation becomes architecture, offering suggestions are still valid today for its possible applications in design.
Keywords
Architectural perspective Interior decoration Anamorphosis
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Introduction
The culture of perspective constitutes a scientific patrimony of indisputable technical value. Because of its profound roots in the visual arts and the numerous practical applications it has enjoyed over the course of centuries, it permeates Western figurative culture, for which it serves as an important point of reference and on which it bestows a character that is unifying and distinctive. It aptly expresses the capacity to conceive knowledge as the fruit of speculation based on the observation of physical reality and not as divine revelation, a conception that developed from the thinking of the philosophers of the Greek world, who sought in mathematics the possibility of explaining the laws of physical reality made of space and time, in order to re-elaborate them in practical applications for the benefit of technical progress (Penrose 2004).
Perspective is certainly not a new topic. A rich bibliography includes research on its mathematical essence, the role it has played in the representation and history of architecture, its use in theatres and the various projective applications to measurement and representation of surfaces. We might ask why we need a collection of studies devoted to architectural perspective, culminating in the phenomenon of quadratura, a technique that appears to be unique to Italy and was very widespread there between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries (Farneti and Lenzi 2004, 2006).
As a scientific topic in general, perspective traditionally involves various disciplines that are easily distinguished by the specific nature of their approaches. Art history, mathematics, descriptive geometry, drawing, architecture, stage design and other more technical fields of knowledge have applied geometric principles to the solution of practical problems such as architectural photogrammetry and cartographic representations. Since its theorisation at the dawn of the Renaissance, thousands of pages have speculated about and then proven the mathematical bases, forming a valuable body of technical-scientific literature, and then described and explained the applications to drawing and architecture, studying the works and treatises in a historical-critical body of literature that is so ramified that it might lead us to think that there can be nothing new to say (Andersen 2007).
This is not the case: the topic continues to attract scholars for various disciplines, constantly revealing new aspects with respect to both traditional approaches and possible applications to design. Digital representation, which appeared set to render the methods of descriptive geometry obsolete, and to replace the hand-drawn perspective representations of mathematically measurable space with virtual simulations of reality, has resulted in a leap forward in the quality of studies on perspective. In fact, digital tools have made it possible to verify, thanks to rigorous examinations of works, how in the past the geometric knowledge of artists paved the way for technological innovations by means of experimentation in architecture (Field
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