Thematic articles

The eye of the frog or perspective as mentality

Throughout the ages, architectural perspective - defined as one of the image-maker's tools for adapting to space, but essential as a mode of perception - has followed a lavish path of becoming. Sophisticated in the complex process of defining styles, amplified by the multiplication of reading planes, enriched by historical accumulations and superimpositions, perspective is a telling witness to the cultural evolution of a territory...

The contemporary taste for the cultivation of fragmentation and experimentation with dynamic imbalance bring an added element of surprise, spice and wonder to an area already saturated with values. The new eco-friendly tendencies, in a complementary movement to reconcile man with nature and to rediscover the path back to his origins, are fulfilling the prospect of a new fit between the founding man and his own history.

The urban perspective, as a tool for defining urban space - host for the architectural product and complementary matrix for architecture - follows a similar path, describing and organizing, in a manner specific to each era, the destiny of architecture caught between the telluric and the celestial.

The perspective urges and teaches us to look.

Let us look!

It is obvious that the history of perspective is accompanied by the Siamese history of looking, by the science of looking or, often, by the desire to guide the gaze of others. We recognize, with some embarrassment, that the gaze can be manipulated, that people see what you direct them to see, or simply what you allow them to see. (Just as we Romanians, passionately guided by the current political guides, now see only how much harm has been done to us and can still be done to us, and we have no desire to see how the planned government destabilization brings guaranteed profit on the international trading market, for those in the know.)

Another obvious fact comes to mind - that a privileged relationship is established between what is looked at (perspective) and the beholder (the beneficiary or the perspective's patron), from the evolution of which a mentality of the perspective-viewing phenomenon can be defined. In a laboratory exercise, we can imagine that a certain type of architectural/urban space - balanced, aristocratic, grandiloquent, socializing, etc. - is favored by a certain type of gaze - dignified, truculent, wide or one-sided. Beyond the speculative nature of the exercise, the resulting connections are of some interest. At the proposed level one can define the honesty of the social order, the balance between the political will / edifying force and the real potential. Because it is very important where the eye of the beholder, the all-powerful eye of the image-maker, is placed.