ABSTRACT
The Spanish philosopher Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz was a man constantly frustrated by the limits of human vision. Writing in the seventeenth century, Caramuel thought of the architecture as a device that could rectify the imperfections of the eye—particularly the nagging tendency, made so explicit in perspective drawing, of parallel lines to converge at a point. The architectural image in the age of information technology is a strange descendant of Caramuel’s vision. The ease with which images, including architectural images, are transformed and circulated, has produced a visual culture and a contemporary understanding of images, which is less reliant on the individual, subjective view than at any point since the origin of perspective. The conventions of centric, axial, and symmetrical architecture, which had embodied a divine order with a comfortable place for humanity, lost their connection to divinity and anthropocentrism.
