Constructing Vision

The course examines how designers have used means of representation not only to represent their work but, importantly, to construct architecturally based visual worlds. In that sense, the design of cities, landscapes, and buildings becomes the means by which models of representation are transformed into habits of seeing. The course proposes that a diversity of such \’visual constructs\’ has been developed throughout the history of architecture. These constructs utilize perspective and other means of representation in composite ways and combine the components of perspective with those of the architecture in order to produce specific types of spaces and types of seeing. Such visual constructs as the picturesque, the panoramic, the prospective, the field, the cognitive, and the virtual, will be studied at their origins (with the likes of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Humphry Repton, Louis Sullivan, Le Corbusier, Kevin Lynch, and Paul Virilio) and will then be observed as they get developed, and as they travel and evolve from one setting to another and across time. Importantly, they will also be brought to bear on positions and debates in contemporary architecture.