K.

MICHAEL HAYS: I brought you into my office

partly to make the point that the study of architecture
is not just about doing work in studio.
It also involves the reading and writing of text.
But mainly, I wanted to show you a particular book.
If you're going to study perspective as an object of knowledge,
if you're going to think about perspective as an object of reflection,
as I've claimed we can do, you can't avoid the book from the 1920s
by Erwin Panofsky called "Perspective as Symbolic Form."
The title comes from the philosophy of symbolic form, which studies knowledge.
Now, if you think of scientific knowledge,
you think of knowledge mainly being about the facts of science,
or the facts of nature.
But in the study of symbolic form, knowledge
is about the facts of culture.
And Panofsky was interested in the way perspective gives us--
perspective is like a cultural construct.
Perspective doesn't just describe a world which already exists.
Perspective actually constructs a world for a viewer.
So it is a mode of knowledge.
I want to read you a passage from "Perspective as Symbolic Form."
He does two things in this passage.
First of all, he actually compares perspective
to the cognitive achievement of the discovery of infinity,
or the cognitive achievement of the discovery of geometry.
And second of all, he then compares perspective and the knowledge
that we get from perspective to philosophy itself.
Listen.
"...not only did perspective elevate art to a 'science'...
the subjective visual impression was indeed so far rationalized
that this very impression could itself become
the foundation for a solidly grounded and yet,
in an entirely modern sense, 'infinite' experiential world."
So he's comparing perspective to the discovery
and the understanding of infinity.
And then he says, "One could even compare
the function of Renaissance perspective with that of critical philosophy."
Now, critical philosophy is a code word for the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
The reason they call it critical philosophy is for Kant,
philosophy does not just try to explain or study or reflect
on things that are in the world.
Critical philosophy reflects on the very possibility of knowledge,
on the very possibility of experience.
And it's these conditions of possibility that Panofsky
is comparing a perspective to, that perspective
is like a condition of possibility for knowing itself,
or for experience itself.
And then finally, he says, "The result was
a translation of psychophysiological space into mathematical space;
in other words, an objectification of the subjective."
So Panofsky puts to a very powerful point a point
that we made earlier, which is that perspective,
in an almost unique conceptual system, brings subject and object together,
brings viewer and the world together.
Now, if we're going to think of perspective as this structure,
as this template, as this mechanism for constructing knowledge about the world,
not just for describing a world that already exists,
then we need a couple of things.
We need a system.
And the system should have both a structure,
and that structure should relate elements one
to another within the system.
So imagine the perspective of a city.
In that perspective of the city, you not only
would use perspective to regulate buildings or to describe buildings,
perspective would also relate buildings to one another,
and indeed, following Panofsky, would open up,
would expand almost to infinity the possibility of spatial perception
and spatial experience.
What I'd like to do as one final example of perspective
as the architectural imagination, or as a component
of the architectural imagination, is look at three paintings
from the Italian Renaissance.
These paintings are normally referred to now as "The Ideal City" paintings.
You'll sometimes hear them called the Urbino panel, the Baltimore
panel, and the Berlin panel.
We think they were all painted in Urbino,
but now we describe the three different panels from the cities
that they're located in now.
The important point is that the three panels seem to be--
or we can be certain they are actually paintings
in a series that show systematic transformations of urban space
through the technique of perspective.
Let's look at these now.
The first one is the Urbino panel.
And you can see that it describes an urban space, very symmetrical
urban space, with this amazing circular temple,
or temple shape, right in the center.
The space itself is like a T shape.
You can see that it comes up toward the viewer
and then flares out like a T shape.
And that T shape then is framed by the surfaces of these various palazzi.
Now, if you look into the background, it's really a closed perspective.
Just to the right of the round temple, you can just
barely see hints of sky and mountains.
But more or less, it's a closed perspective.
In this panel, the floor of the space, the piazza itself, is only one level.
Notice that the buildings are on plinths, raised slightly.
And then look at the style of the buildings.
If you know a little more about stylistic history,
you would see that the style of buildings is very uniform.
And for the 15th century, it's very modern.
So this is a very modern, almost avant-garde, and very homogeneous
style of architecture that's used in this perspective painting.
And then one final thing I'll point out--
this will become important a little bit later--
is that the light, which perspective also controls,
is actually coming from the left and actually coming pretty high.
The second panel I want to show is called the Baltimore panel.
It's a very different scene.
It's a variation on the scene we just saw insofar as again,
the piazza itself is T shaped.
It comes forward from the center and then flares out.
But notice, rather than a single level floor, this floor has two levels.
It really looks like a proscenium.
And it was thought at some point that these paintings might be
prototypes for theatrical stage sets.
We now think that that's not the case.
We think they're actually almost like objects of meditation.
They probably would have become part of furniture.
In any case, look at the space that I've described as proscenium space.
And you notice that in the Urbino panel, the entire front
part of the painting, let's say the stage part of the painting,
is unoccupied by architecture.
The architecture is pushed back into the middle ground.
In the Baltimore panel, the proscenium is also absent of architecture as such,
but there are four columns.
And these are very, very symbolic columns.
They're not holding up anything.
They're just describing space.
Instead of those columns, what you get in the Urbino panel
are just these two wells.
And these wells are spread out very, very far to the edge of the space.
But the important thing is that where in the Urbino panel
the floor was flat, in the Baltimore panel, the floor has two levels.
All of the architecture is on the second level.
The rest of the architecture is removed from,
let's call it the proscenium or the stage.
Now, look at the architecture.
Look at the style of the architecture.
Compared to the Urbino panel, it's very, very eclectic.
You have this ancient triumphal arch.
You have what looks like an ancient coliseum,
but it's really too small to be a coliseum.
So it's sort of like an amphitheater probably.
On the other hand, to the right of the axis, this almost futuristic,
kind of stacked polygonal temple, and then the modern palazzi.
The backgrounds seem to vary as well because you
can see in the background of the Baltimore panel,
the triumphal arch is almost like a semi-transparent screen.
You can see through it, whereas the temple in the Urbino panel was closed.
Also, where the background in the Urbino panel
was closed, in the Baltimore panel, you can actually see through the city
to hills.
Here, some of the buildings are on plinths, some of them not.
So that may not be consequential yet.
But stylistically, as I said, they're very different.
This one's very eclectic, whereas the Urbino panel is very homogeneous.
And then finally-- and here's where the whole set,
the whole transformational process comes together-- is the Berlin panel.
The Berlin panel, in terms of where the architecture is
relative to the point of view, it's almost the inverse
because in the Berlin panel, we're not standing looking at a triumphal arch
or looking at a temple.
We're in this architectural organization.
And the four columns, though they relate to the four columns of the Baltimore
panel, now they're actually part of the architecture.
They're actually structural or constructional.
And you can see--
if you know stylistically-- we're standing in a very, very modern,
advanced Renaissance building.
The Berlin panel, in contrast to the single level of Urbino,
the two level Baltimore floor, now Berlin has three levels.
We're standing now not in the lowest level as before.
But we're standing in the highest level.
We can see that right after you step out of the triumphal arch--
or we think it's this construction that we're standing in--
just as you step off, you go down some steps.
The steps are hidden by the edge of the floor.
And then you're down a level.
The buildings here don't have plinths.
So we have a comparison that in Urbino, all the buildings had plinths.
In Baltimore, some of the buildings had plinths.
In Berlin, none of the buildings have plinths.
And then the background of the painting-- in Urbino, it was closed.
In Baltimore, it was semi-open.
And in Berlin, it's totally open.
What we're seeing is almost like an experiment in perspective,
or almost like a kind of combination of perspective and typology,
where what we're seeing are variations of an urban fabric,
variations of an urban form that, through perspective, can
be controlled in a highly systematic way, an almost mathematical way,
but at the same time proves capable of almost infinite variation.
And the important thing is that the variation is architectural variation.
It's spatial variation.
It's variation on the way the urban place or the urban form--
it's variation on the way the urban form works.
So in this example, we can see both that the system of perspective, because it
is a system, allows for variation in the arrangement of urban space,
and that that arrangement, because of the systematicity of perspective,
starts to construct a typology.
So again, this is why we think of typology and perspective, or typology
and perspective together, as examples of the architectural imagination.
But there's one more thing about a system like perspective,
a system that constructs knowledge rather than just
describing objects that already exist.
A system, if it's going to work, will always contain its other.
It will always contain, let's say, the undoing of the system.
Now, perspective represents this, or contains this, in a very dramatic way.
Think about that point of convergence, that point
where all lines converge in infinity.
And then think of that picture plane where we actually
see the representation that perspective gives us.
When we try to go back into infinity, and that picture plane blocks our way,
and we realize that we, of course, can't reach infinity,
but that somehow, we get the strange sense
that there's something looking back at us at the other end
of that line of vision.
That thing looking back at us might be perspective's other.
It might be the city itself, the social city that's
looking back at us as individuals, that we're
locked into this perspectival system by that point of view,
but that somehow, the social city and the collective is looking back at us.
Or it might just be the thing, that unthinkable thing that is not us.
And it's very interesting if we go back to the Urbino panel one last time
and look at a close-up of the door to that temple.
And notice that the painter painted that door slightly ajar.
Now, look even more closely.
When they cleaned the painting a few years ago,
they discovered-- you see that little spot just
to the right of the door in that space of very deep shadow.
They discovered the nail hole where the nail
had been from which the painters would pull
the string that represented all the converging lines of the perspective.
But that hole, that point of convergence,
that point where the thing exists that's looking back at us,
is inside the temple, inside the darkness, the void,
that the temple is enclosing.
It's almost as if architecture itself is somehow--
the whole reason for architecture is to contain that void and that moment
of convergence where the thing that's looking back at us,
that's challenging our very existence as subject, resides.