ABSTRACT

Scale, and consequently proportion, as related to representation, has a long tradition of being related to the human body. With the Renaissance, humanist depictions of architectural space were innovatively delimited using linear perspective, in which the rendered image is fixed to a viewer's eye. Perspective remained the primary mode of pictorial representation late into the nineteenth century until another post-humanist, rationalist mode of pictorial representation challenged its authority: the axonometric. 1 Axonometric projection is a specific form of parallel projection in which the projectors are perpendicular to the plane of projection. Unlike perspective projection, in which the projectors meet at a fixed point in space, parallel projectors are said to meet at infinity. The three axes of an axonometric projection are uniformly measurable and precisely scaled relative to the axis system's angle of inclination to the picture plane. Many architectural critics assert that meaningful architectural representation was eroded by the technical instrumentality tied to a representation generated by the positivism of science. 2 Descartes's philosophy, and his Cartesian geometry, is thought to have objectified the subjective view of the world, so that the individualised, inhabiting, ‘embodied’ viewer was forced into the position of passive, ‘disembodied’ observer (Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier 1997: 313). This chapter counters that position with a critical consideration of the history of axonometry and proposes that Auguste Choisy's inventive development of the worm's-eye view parallel projection is a meaningful, immersive measure of man. Indeed, Choisy uses the subjectivity of his worm's-eye view to impart a sense of our own bodily scale within the measured, spatially materialised boundaries of architecture.