ABSTRACT

Throughout his career, the French engineer Auguste Choisy studied historic architecture and produced several books on the "art of building". Although the hundreds of drawings that accompany the Histoire seem at first to be simply retrospective illustrations, they actually transcend this function to act as projective models. Principally, Choisy brought forth a novel form of architectural pictorial representation via two related means - parallel projection and the worm's-eye view. Auguste Choisy applies similar transpositions in his drawings, and his introduction to the idea can be traced to his years at the Ecole Polytechnique between 1861 and 1863. Choisy first turned to parallel projection while measuring, documenting, and analyzing the extant ruins of Roman vaulting. With an architect father and a personal interest in archeology, the future civil engineer and professor was well positioned to synthesize a tectonic understanding of architectural artifacts with a spatial approach toward their measured representation.