Perspective as Logic: Positioning Film in Architecture

Perspective as Logic offers an architectural examination of the filmic screen as an ontologically unique element in the discipline’s repertoire. The book determines the screen’s conditions of possibility by critically asking not what a screen means, but how it can mean anything of architectural significance. Based on this shift of enquiry towards the question of meaning, it introduces Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou in an unprecedented way to architecture--since they exemplify an analogous shift of perspective towards the question of the subject and the question of being accordingly.

The book begins by positing perspective projection as being a logical mapping of space instead of a matter of sight (Alberti & Lacan). Secondly, it discusses the very nature of architecture’s view and relation to the topological notion of outside between immediacy and mediation (Diller and Scofidio, The Slow House). It examines the limitation of pictorial illusion and the productive negativity in the suspension of architecture’s signified equivalent to language’s production of undecidable propositions (Eisenman & Badiou). In addition, the book outlines the difference between the point of view and the vanishing point by introducing two different conceptions of infinity (Michael Webb, Temple Island). Finally, a series of design experiments playfully shows how the screen exemplifies architecture’s self-reflexive capacity where material and immaterial components are part of the spatial conception to which they refer and produce.

This book will be particularly appealing to scholars of architectural theory, especially those interested in the domains of philosophy, psychoanalysis and the linguistic turn of architecture.

Stefanos Roimpas (Athens, 1989) is an architect who recently completed his PhD thesis entitled Screen: The Intersectional Element of Architecture (2022) at the University of Cambridge with the supervision of Prof François Penz. His diploma project at ESA (École Spéciale d’Architecture-Paris) entitled The Lens City with the supervision of Sir Peter Cook was shortlisted for the RIBA Silver Medal (2013). He has previously worked for OMA in Rotterdam and co-curated the Cyprus Pavilion, Anatomy of the Wallpaper, at the 14th Venice Biennale (2014).