Bringing the German Pavilion Back Home
This research investigates a correspondence between the architectural representational tool of drawing, and the translations of these into something recognised as ‘built’. It is fundamentally concerned around representation in architecture driven by the principles that our entire engagement with architecture is via representation. Architects do not produce buildings but produce images of buildings, and the role of two-dimensional representation plays a principal part in architecture. Architecture is always representational, and the more we engage with representation the more we might push the envelope with what we understand architecture to be. This thesis aims to establish within the contemporary discipline, what we understand about the responsibility of linear perspective as a representational tool. By understanding what lies behind the canon of perspective in architecture, this thesis questions whether the representation of conventional architecture could benefit from a new way of drawing linear perspective? The discovery of perspective during the Renaissance has influenced not only our way of representing architecture but also how we view, and therefore design it. It has become integrated with our understanding of architecture at an unconscious level. Architects no longer need control of projective geometry, and due to this cannot be critical of the system of representation or control its limits. This leads to mediate a shift in perspective, with the intention to generate a representation of new form. The motivation for this thesis was that from linear perspective, as it has done so for centuries, we can produce evocative and meaningful vocabularies that attempt to enrich architecture.