Includes bibliographical references (p. [456]-497) and index

Prelude. Mapping the question: the perspective hinge. Translation vs. transcription -- Architectural meaning and the tools of the architect -- Theories of vision and the reciprocity between seeing and being seen -- From natural perspective to artificial construction -- Binocular vision -- Sectioning the cone of vision: the nature of theory -- The science of the observer -- Back to modernity and beyond -- Casting light onto modernity -- From instrumental representation to collective participation? Variation one: Architectural representation and the distorted image. Against a progressive history of the image -- Scenographia and optical correction from Vitruvius to Perrault -- Model and scenography -- Sciographia and projected shadows -- The extent of infinity -- Relocating anamorphosis -- Constructing a distorted order -- When the center becomes peripheral -- The confrontation between theory and practice. Variation Two. Cosmological perspectives. Setting the world in motion -- Redefining a hierarchical universe -- Recentering the world -- Eccentric point of view -- Perspective fantaisies -- A world of scientific light and objective shadows -- Framing the earth -- Cosmological volumes -- Truth as measurement: fortifications and isometry. Variation Three. The image without an obsever in scopophilic world. Between darkness and light -- From perspectivism to pure objectivity -- From physics to pataphysics -- The perspective hinge -- From measurement to abstraction: isometry and axonometry -- The reversibility of axonometry -- The collapse of the image and represented object -- Axonometry as collage: Le Corbusier's Poeme de l'angle droit -- Time into lived space: Le Corbusier's La Tourette. Coda. Projection revisited: the reversibility of optics -- Digital space -- Philosophical corollary

The relationship between the architectural representation and its intended product - a building - has undergone a profound transformation over the centuries. Before the age of modern technology, the systematically predictive role of architectural drawing so taken for granted today was less dominant in the evolution from architectural idea to built work. The age of computer-aided design has brought with it a stricter standard of fidelity. However, contemporary architecture need not simply accept the inevitability of a technological imperative. This book demonstrates that representation is never a neutral tool or mere picture of a future building. Writing from inside the discipline of architecture, rather than from the more common extrapolations from the history of painting and philosophy, Alberto Perez-Gomez and Louise Pelletier focus on the implications of the tool of perspective (and the hegemony of vision) for architectural representation. Their primary thesis is that tools of representation have a direct influence on the conceptual development of projects and generation of forms, and that there are alternatives to the reductive working methods of most contemporary practice.