Disclosing Horizons. Architecture, perspective and redemptive space

Disclosing Horizons Architecture, Perspective and Redemptive Space | Routledge | 2007 | 319 pages | PDF | RAR | 7 MB

Product Description
Disclosing Horizons examines the influence of perspective on architecture, highlighting how critical historical changes in the representation and perception of space continue to inform the way architects design.
Since its earliest formulations, perspective was conceived as a paradigmatic articulation of space that influenced the rituals of everyday experience. Temple argues that underlying the symbolic and epistemological meanings of perspective there prevailed a deeply embedded redemptive view of the world that was deemed perfectible.
Temple explores this idea through a genealogical survey of the cultural and philosophical contexts of perspective throughout history, highlighting how these developments influenced architectural thought. This broader historical enquiry is accompanied by a series of case-studies of modern or contemporary buildings, each demonstrating a particular affinity with the accompanying historical model of perspective.

Introduction 1
1 Order and chaos, or "What to leave out?" 4
Taking measures 4
Nietzsche's perspectivism 12
Being-in-the-world 14
Alterity and infinity 20
Visible and invisible 21
What to leave out? 23
2 Number, geometry and dialectic 24
The origin of geometry 24
Pythagoras and the unutterable 27
The Meno 34
The Timaeus 38
Ad triangulum versus ad quadratum 42
Triangulating perspective 44
The School of Athens 50
Louis Kahn's Yale Art Gallery 65
3 Light, memory and colour 76
Medieval transformations 76
From memory to recorded document 78
Light metaphysics 81
Optical science 84
Grosseteste's light 86
The Bishop's Eye 88
Light and perspective 96
Light and the colour of experience 101
Steven Holl's Chapel of St Ignatius 102
4 Topography, rhetoric and the vanishing point 112
Horizontal and vertical worlds 112
Convivial settings 113
Alberti's eye 122
Nicholas Cusanus 140
The Papal Window 143
Álvaro Siza's Galician Centre for Contemporary Art 150
5 Unity in multiplicity 160
Baroque and universality 160
Distentio animi and the dome 162
Athanasius Kircher 166
Leibniz and the monad 173
J. B. Fischer von Erlach 178
Hofbibliothek 184
Peter Zumthor's St Benedict's Church 191
6 Nature and immensity 199
Transgressing boundaries 199
The picturesque and the sublime 203
Chambers and oikoumene 209
Boullée's visionary perspectives 213
Casper David Friedrich's studio 216
Rem Koolhaas' EuraLille and "l'Espace Piranesien" 221
7 Disjointed views 230
Attention and perspective 230
Attention and distraction 233
Illusion of a "mastering totalisation" 237
Magnification and distortion 241
Gustave Moreau's house 245
Eric Parry's artists' studios, London 250
Conclusion: architecture that looks back at us 262
Notes 270
Index 300

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