Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries

Robin Evans recasts the idea of the relationship between geometry and architecture,drawing on mathematics, engineering, art history, and aesthetics to uncover processes in theimagining and realizing of architectural form.
Winner of the 1997 Alice Davis Hitchcock MedallionAnyone reviewing the history ofarchitectural theory, Robin Evans observes, would have to conclude that architects do not producegeometry, but rather consume it. In this long-awaited book, completed shortly before its author'sdeath, Evans recasts the idea of the relationship between geometry and architecture, drawing onmathematics, engineering, art history, and aesthetics to uncover processes in the imagining andrealizing of architectural form. He shows that geometry does not always play a stolid and dormantrole but, in fact, may be an active agent in the links between thinking and imagination, imaginationand drawing, drawing and building. He suggests a theory of architecture that is based on the manytransactions between architecture and geometry as evidenced in individual buildings, largely inEurope, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century.From the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbeyto Le Corbusier's Ronchamp, from Raphael's S. Eligio and the work of Piero della Francesca andPhilibert Delorme to Guarino Guarini and the painters of cubism, Evans explores the geometriesinvolved, asking whether they are in fact the stable underpinnings of the creative, intuitive, orrhetorical aspects of architecture. In particular he concentrates on the history of architecturalprojection, the geometry of vision that has become an internalized and pervasive pictorial method ofconstruction and that, until now, has played only a small part in the development of architecturaltheory.Evans describes the ambivalent role that pictures play in architecture and urges resistanceto the idea that pictures provide all that architects need, suggesting that there is much morewithin the scope of the architect's vision of a project than what can be drawn. He defines thedifferent fields of projective transmission that concern architecture, and investigates theambiguities of projection and the interaction of imagination with projection and itsmetaphors.