1st Edition
Perspective as Logic: Positioning Film in Architecture
Perspective as Logic offers an architectural examination of the filmic screen as an ontologically unique element in the discipline’s repertoire. The book determines the screen’s conditions of possibility by critically asking not what a screen means, but how it can mean anything of architectural significance. Based on this shift of enquiry towards the question of meaning, it introduces Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou in an unprecedented way to architecture—since they exemplify an analogous shift of perspective towards the question of the subject and the question of being accordingly.
The book begins by positing perspective projection as being a logical mapping of space instead of a matter of sight (Alberti & Lacan). Secondly, it discusses the very nature of architecture’s view and relation to the topological notion of outside between immediacy and mediation (Diller and Scofidio, The Slow House). It examines the limitation of pictorial illusion and the productive negativity in the suspension of architecture’s signified equivalent to language’s production of undecidable propositions (Eisenman & Badiou). In addition, the book outlines the difference between the point of view and the vanishing point by introducing two different conceptions of infinity (Michael Webb, Temple Island). Finally, a series of design experiments playfully shows how the screen exemplifies architecture’s self-reflexive capacity where material and immaterial components are part of the spatial conception to which they refer and produce.
This book will be particularly appealing to scholars of architectural theory, especially those interested in the domains of philosophy, psychoanalysis and the linguistic turn of architecture.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Positioning the Screen: Logic of Perspective
Reality Effect and the Mirror Stage
Shock Effects and 3D Mapping
Virilio’s Prediction
The Screen and the Fiction of Architecture’s Symbolic (2D-3D)
2. Problematising the Screen: Duality of Representation
Absence and Illusion
Problematising Architecture’s Symbolic
Demonstration and Perspective Projection
3. Analysing the Screen: Vision and Mediation
Facsimile: Fiction and the Undecidability of Moving Images
Para-Site: Impossible View and Impossible Point of View
The Slow House: The Question of Mediation
4. Questioning the Screen: Architectural Limits of Representation
Peter Eisenman and the Rhetorical Figure
Brunelleschi and Eisenman
Michael Webb and Two Names for Infinity
5. Demonstrating the Screen: Undoing the showing
Logic of Perspective
Suture and Retroaction: Layered and Recursive House
Perspective as Logic
Conclusion
Index
Biography
Stefanos Roimpas (Athens, 1989) is an architect who recently completed his PhD thesis entitled Screen: The Intersectional Element of Architecture (2022) at the University of Cambridge with the supervision of Prof François Penz. His diploma project at École Spéciale d’Architecture-Paris (ESA) entitled The Lens City with the supervision of Sir Peter Cook was shortlisted for the RIBA Silver Medal (2013). He has previously worked for Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam and co-curated the Cyprus Pavilion, Anatomy of the Wallpaper, at the 14th Venice Biennale (2014).
'It took not a third party but a second party, Stefanos that is, to reveal to the first party, me, what this somewhat ridiculous project concerning the temple on the island is all about. Through his ability to explain, a rare skill and one to be awarded the highest respect, he has brought forth a literary tour de force.'
-Michael Webb, Architect, founding member of Archigram
'This highly original book provides a deep perspective into seeing the screen as an ontologically unique element for the field of architecture. It provides a historically grounded, thought-provoking architectural logic of perspective that produces for the reader an intersectional (image) space unlike anything we have seen before.'
-Richard Koeck, Professor and Chair in Architecture and the Visual Arts at the University of Liverpool, UK.
'In this book of rare originality Roimpas develops a rich interpretation of how the screen has become a constitutive element of architecture. At home in the Renaissance as much as in contemporary art and philosophy, the author offers a captivating account of the screen’s architectural potential.'
-Maximilian Sternberg, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, UK.
