Between the Retina and the Celestial Dome: Challenging the scaffolding of spatial imagination

Abstract

Taking as a starting point French artist Marcel Duchamp’s preoccupation with a poetic portrayal of stereoscopic vision and the red and blue expansion of depth in the technique of the anaglyph, Between the Retina and the Celestial Dome playfully challenges the disciplinary constraints and conventions of spatial thinking. The text takes the form of shorter or lengthier annotations on a twin ‘essayist drawing’ that exists in two versions: a hand-drawn gilding on parchment and a digital film. It proposes that our understanding of visual perception in combination with the perceived immediate environment and its expansion in the cosmos creates an underlying matrix that shapes our scientific and philosophical thinking and projects itself onto built form: an intellectual ‘scaffolding’ on which spatial thought is erected. This scaffolding is not one or constant, but shape-shifts historically, geographically and sociopolitically, affecting not only how we see but also how we conceive, design and construct spatial structures. Since the invention of perspective during the Renaissance, orthographic projection became a potent and often unquestioned scaffolding for architectural thought and representation. Between the Retina and the Celestial Dome uses the drawing’s playful character, which does not follow the rules of normative architectural representation, to question the forgotten, implicit or taken-for-granted aspects of orthographic projection: the curvilinear image created on each retina; stereopsis, how depth is formed by the combination of images on two eyes; and the existence of the flat picture plane. In search of an alternative scaffolding of architectural representation, the collection of drawn figures on the parchment and the digital film refers to the physiology of vision and stereoscopy; the picturing of the celestial dome in religion and popular astronomy; and specific instances of domed structures in architectural history.