ABSTRACT
The chapter investigates two principal pictorial models: linear perspective projection and the digital array. It uses historical, theoretical and scientific discourse on the image to investigate the interplay of optics, geometry and technology. It reveals how this interplay determines, how the city is represented and, ultimately, how it influences the design of its form. The chapter proceeds to discuss image-making techniques that depart from the singular narrative space of linear perspective in favour of new, fragmentary and disjunctive modes of spatial representation. Next, it explores disruptive pictorial strategies, such as anamorphosis, continuing to the moving image and the work of the Soviet filmmakers, notably Dziga Vertov, whose filmic tactics exploited the eye's perceptual processes. It reveals how these tactics fundamentally shifted modes of filmmaking and urban representation and initiated new architectural design conditions. Finally, the chapter explores the relationship between the digital image and the city, newly resituated within a frame of pixel geometry, human optical cues and multiple urban viewpoints. It argues that the interplay between these fields fosters unique material assemblies for architectural design that both capture the ambiguity and complexity of the modern city and question established structures of control and ownership inherent within the Western canon's visual model.
