Oblique Drawing

Overview
For more than half a century, Erwin Panofskys Perspective as Symbolic
Form has dominated studies of visual representation. Despite the
hegemony of central projection, or perspective, other equally important
methods of representation have much to tell us. Parallel projection can
be found on classical Greek vases, in Pompeiian frescoes, in Byzantine
mosaics; it returned in works of the historical avant-garde, and remains
the dominant form of representation in China. In Oblique Drawing,
Massimo Scolari investigates anti-perspective visual representation
over two thousand years, finding in the course of his investigation that
visual and conceptual representations are manifestations of the
ideological and philosophical orientations of different cultures. Images
prove to be not just a form of art but a form of thought, a projection of a
way
of
life.
Scolaris generously illustrated studies show that illusionistic perspective
is not the only, or even the best, representation of objects in history;
parallel projection, for example, preserves in scale the actual
measurements of objects it represents, avoiding the distortions of onepoint perspective. Scolari analyzes the use of nonperspectival
representations in pre-Renaissance images of machines and military
hardware, architectural models and drawings, and illustrations of
geometrical solids. He challenges Panofskys theory of Pompeiian
perspective and explains the difficulties encountered by the Chinese
when they viewed Jesuit missionaries perspectival religious images.

Scolari vividly demonstrates the diversity of representational forms

devised through the centuries, and shows how each one reveals
something that is lacking in the others.
White City, Black City
Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa
By Sharon Rotbard
Overview
The history of Tel Aviv, presented for a moment as an architectural
history, can be seen as a part of a wider process in which the physical
shaping of Tel Aviv and its political and cultural construction are
intertwined, and plays a decisive role in the construction of the case, the
alibi, and the apologetics of the Jewish settlement across the country.
White City, Black City
In 2004, the city of Tel Aviv was declared by UNESCO a World
Heritage Site, an exemplar of modernism in architecture and town
planning. Today, the Hebrew city of Tel Aviv gleams white against the
desert sky, its Bauhaus-inspired architecture betraying few traces of
what came before it: the Arab city of Jaffa. In White City, Black City, the
Israeli architect and author Sharon Rotbard offers two intertwining
narratives, that of colonized and colonizer. It is also a story of a decadeslong campaign of architectural and cultural historical revision that cast
Tel Aviv as a modernist white city emerging fully formed from the
dunes while ignoring its real foundationthe obliteration of Jaffa.
Rotbard shows that Tel Aviv was not, as a famous poem has it, built
from sea foam and clouds but born in Jaffa and shaped according to its
relation to Jaffa. His account is not only about architecture but also
about war, destruction, Zionist agendas, erasure, and the erasure of the
erasure.

Rotbard tells how Tel Aviv has seen Jaffa as an inverted reflection of
itselfnot shining and white but nocturnal, criminal, dirty: a black
city. Jaffa lost its language, its history, and its architecture; Tel Aviv
constructed its creation myth. White City, Black Cityhailed upon its
publication in Israel as path-breaking, brilliant, and a
masterpiecepromises to become the central text on Tel Aviv.
Rail and the City
Shrinking Our Carbon Footprint While Reimagining Urban Space
By Roxanne Warren
Overview
The United States has evolved into a nation of twenty densely populated
mega regions. Yet despite the environmental advantages of urban
density, urban sprawl and reliance on the private car still set the pattern
for most new development. Cars guzzle not only gas but also space, as
massive acreage is dedicated to roadways and parking. Even more
pressing, the replication of this pattern throughout the fast-developing
world makes it doubtful that we will achieve the reductions in carbon
emissions needed to avoid climate catastrophe. In Rail and the City,
architect Roxanne Warren makes the case for compact urban
development that is supported by rail transit.
Calling the automobile a relic of the twentieth century, Warren envisions
a release from the tyrannies of traffic congestion, petroleum dependence,
and an oppressively paved environment. Technical features of rail are
key to its high capacities, safety at high speeds, and compactness
uniquely qualifying it to serve as ideal infrastructure within and between
cities. Ultimately, mobility could be achieved through extensive
networks of public transit, particularly rail, supplemented by buses,
cycling, walking, car-sharing, and small, flexible vehicles. High-speed
rail, fed by local transit, could eliminate the need for petroleumintensive plane trips of less than 500 miles.

Warren considers issues of access to transit, citing examples from

Europe, Japan, and North America, and pedestrian- and transit-oriented
urban design. Rail transit, she argues, is the essential infrastructure for a
fluidly functioning urban society.
The Architecture of Error
Matter, Measure, and the Misadventures of Precision
By Francesca Hughes
Overview
When architects draw even brick walls to six decimal places with
software designed to cut lenses, it is clear that the logic that once
organized relations between precision and material error in construction
has unraveled. Precision, already a promiscuous term, seems now to
have been uncoupled from its contract with truthfulness. Meanwhile
error, and the always-political space of its dissent, has reconfigured
itself.
In The Architecture of Error Francesca Hughes argues that behind the
architects acute fetishization of redundant precision lies a special fear of
physical error. What if we were to consider the pivotal cultural and
technological transformations of modernism to have been driven not so
much by the causes its narratives declare, she asks, as by an unspoken
horror of loss of control over error, material life, and everything that
matter stands for? Hughes traces the rising intolerance of material
vagariesfrom the removal of ornament to digitalized fabricationthat
produced the blind rejection of organic materials, the proliferation of
material testing, and the rhetorical obstacles that blighted cybernetics.
Why is it, she asks, that the more we cornered physical error, the more
we feared it?
Hughess analysis of redundant precision exposes an architecture of fear
whose politics must be called into question. Proposing error as a new
category for architectural thought, Hughes draws on other disciplines

and practices that have interrogated precision and failure, citing the work
of scientists Nancy Cartwright and Evelyn Fox Keller and visual artists
Gordon Matta-Clark, Barbara Hepworth, Rachel Whiteread, and others.
These non-architect practitioners, she argues, show that error need not be
excluded and precision can be made accountable.

Retracing the Expanded Field

Encounters between Art and Architecture
Edited by Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose
Overview
Expansion, convergence, adjacency, projection, rapport, and intersection
are a few of the terms used to redraw the boundaries between art and
architecture during the last thirty-five years. If modernists invented the
model of an ostensible synthesis of the arts, their postmodern progeny
promoted the semblance of pluralist fusion. In 1979, reacting against
contemporary arts transformation of modernist medium-specificity into
postmodernist medium multiplicity, the art historian Rosalind Krauss
published an essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, that laid out in a
precise diagram the structural parameters of sculpture, architecture, and
landscape art. Krauss tried to clarify what these art practices were, what
they were not, and what they could become if logically combined. The
essay soon assumed a canonical status and affected subsequent
developments in all three fields. Retracing the Expanded Field revisits
Krausss hugely influential text and maps the ensuing interactions
between art and architecture.
Responding to Krauss and revisiting the milieu from which her text
emerged, artists, architects, and art historians of different generations
offer their perspectives on the legacy of Sculpture in the Expanded
Field. Krauss herself takes part in a roundtable discussion (moderated
by Hal Foster). A selection of historical documents, including Krausss
essay, presented as it appeared in October, accompany the main text.
Neither
eulogy
nor
hagiography, Retracing
the Expanded

Field documents the groundbreaking nature of Krausss authoritative

text and reveals the complex interchanges between art and architecture
that increasingly shape both fields.
Contributors
Stan Allen, George Baker, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Beatriz
Colomina, Penelope Curtis, Sam Durant, Edward Eigen, Kurt W.
Forster, Hal Foster, Kenneth Frampton, Branden W. Joseph, Rosalind
Krauss, Miwon Kwon, Sylvia Lavin, Sandro Marpillero, Josiah
McElheny, Eve Meltzer, Michael Meredith, Mary Miss, Sarah
Oppenheimer, Matthew Ritchie, Julia Robinson, Joe Scanlan, Emily
Eliza Scott, Irene Small, Philip Ursprung, Anthony Vidler
Perspecta 47
Money
Edited by James Andrachuk, Christos C. Bolos, Avi Forman and Marcus
A. Hooks
Overview
Money plays a paradoxical role in the creation of architecture. Formless
itself, money is a fundamental form giver. At all scales, and across the
ages, architecture is a product of the financial environment in which it is
conceived, for better or worse. Yet despite its ubiquity, money is often
disregarded as a factor in conceptual design and is persistently avoided
by architectural academia as a serious field of inquiry. It is time to break
these habits. In the contemporary world, in which economies are
increasingly connected, architects must creatively harness the financial
logics behind architecture in order to contribute meaningfully to the
development of the built environment.
This issue of Perspectathe oldest and most distinguished studentedited architectural journal in Americaexamines the ways in which
money intersects with architectural discourse, design practice, and urban
form, in order to encourage a productive relationship between money

and the discipline. Contributions from a diverse group of scholars,

practitioners, and artists create a dialogue about money's ambiguous
position in architecture, reflecting on topics that range from the
aesthetics of austerity to the underwriting of large-scale art projects to
the economic implications of building information modeling.
Contributors
AOC, JT Bachman, Phil Bernstein, Mario Carpo, Christo, Peggy
Deamer, Keller Easterling, Peter Eisenman, Mark Foster Gage, Frank
Gehry, Thomas Gluck, Kevin D. Gray, Charles Holland, Hasty Johnson
& Jerry Lea, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Mira Locher, Vivian Loftness,
Gregg Pasquarelli, Cesar Pelli & Fred Clarke, Nina Rappaport, Todd
Reisz, Brent Ryan & Lorena Bello, Michelangelo Sabatino, David Ross
Scheer, Robert Shiller, Robert A.M. Stern, Elisabetta Terragni, Kazys
Varnelis, Andrew Waugh & Michael Green, Jay Wickersham &
Christopher Milford, Alejandro Zaera-Polo

Buildings Must Die

A Perverse View of Architecture
By Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacobs
Overview
Buildings, although inanimate, are often assumed to have life." And the
architect, through the act of design, is assumed to be their conceiver and
creator. But what of the death" of buildings? What of the decay,
deterioration, and destruction to which they are inevitably subject? And
what might such endings mean for architectures sense of itself?
In Buildings Must Die, Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs look awry at
core architectural concerns. They examine spalling concrete and
creeping rust, contemplate ruins old and new, and pick through the
rubble of earthquake-shattered churches, imploded housing projects, and
demolished Brutalist office buildings. Their investigation of the death of

buildings reorders architectural notions of creativity, reshapes

architectures preoccupation with good form, loosens its vanities of
durability, and expands its sense of value. It does so not to kill off
architecture as we know it, but to rethink its agency and its capacity to
make worlds differently.
Cairns and Jacobs offer an original contemplation of architecture that
draws on theories of waste and value. Their richly illustrated case studies
of building deaths" include the planned and the unintended, the
lamented and the celebrated. They take us from Moline to Christchurch,
from London to Bangkok, from Tokyo to Paris. And they feature the
work of such architects as Eero Saarinen, Carlo Scarpa, Cedric Price,
Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas and Franois Roche.
Buildings Must Die is both a memento mori for architecture and a call to
to reimagine the design values that lay at the heart of its creative
purpose.
Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters
Art Architecture and Activism
By Ai Weiwei
Edited by Ai Weiwei, Anthony Pins and An Xiao Mina
Overview
Outspoken, provocative, and prolific, the artist Ai Weiwei is an
international phenomenon. In recent years, he has produced an
astonishingly varied body of work while continuing his role as activist,
provocateur, and conscience of a nation. Ai Weiwei is under city arrest"
in Beijing after an 81-day imprisonment; he is accused of tax evasion,
but many suspect he is being punished for his political activism,
including his exposure of shoddy school building practices that led to the
deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In 2009,
he was badly beaten by the police during his earthquake investigations.

Ai Weiweis work reflects his multiple artistic identities as conceptual

artist, architect, filmmaker, designer, curator, writer, and publisher. This
monumental volume, developed in association with the artist, draws on
the full breadth of Ai Weiweis architectural, installation, and activist
work, with a focus on his use of space. It documents a huge range of
international projects with drawings, plans, and photographs of finished
work. It also includes excerpts from Ai Weiweis famous blog (shut
down by Chinese authorities in 2009), in which he offers pithy and
scathing commentary on the world around him. Essays by leading critics
and art historians and interviews with the artist, drawing out his central
concerns, accompany the 450 beautifully reproduced color illustrations
of his work.
Broadcasting Buildings
Architecture on the Wireless, 1927-1945
By Shundana Yusaf
Overview
In the years between the world wars, millions of people heard the world
through a box on the dresser. In Britain, radio listeners relied on the
British Broadcasting Corporation for information on everything from
interior decoration to Hitlers rise to power. One subject covered
regularly on the wireless was architecture and the built environment.
Between 1927 and 1945, the BBC aired more than six hundred programs
on this topic, published a similar number of articles in its magazine, The
Listener, and sponsored several traveling exhibitions. In this book,
Shundana Yusaf examines the ways that broadcasting placed architecture
at
the
heart
of
debates
on
democracy.
Undaunted by the challenge of talking about space and place in
disembodied voices over a nonvisual medium, designers and critics
turned the wireless into an arena for debates about the definitions of the
architect and architecture, the difficulties of town and country planning

after the breakup of large country estates, the financing of the luxury
market, the expansion of local governing power, and tourism. Yusaf
argues that while broadcast technology made a decisive break with the
Victorian world, these broadcasts reflected the BBCs desire to continue
the legacy of Victorian institutions dedicated to the production of a
cultivated polity. Under the leadership of John Reith, the BBC
introduced listeners to the higher pleasures of life hoping to deepen their
respect for tradition, the authority of the state, and national interests.
These ambitions influenced the way architecture was portrayed on the
air. Yusaf finds that the wireless evoked historic architecture only in
travelogues and contemporary design mainly in shopping advice. The
BBCs architectural programming, she argues, offered a paradoxical
interface between the placelessness of radio and the situatedness of
architecture, between the mechanical or nonhumanistic impulses of
technology and the humanist conception of architecture.