Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier the Invention of Perspective

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Reading through the Mirror: Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: The Invention of Perspective and the Post-Freudian Eye/I Author(s): Lorens Holm Source: Assemblage, No. 18 (Aug., 1992), pp. 20-39Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171204Accessed: 22-05-2015 21:07 UTC

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Lorens Holm

Reading Through the Mirror: Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier The Invention of Perspective and the Post-Freudian Eye/I

Lorens Holm was educated at the University of Wales and at Harvard University. He was until recently assistant professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, where he co- founded and codirected the school of architecture's summer program in Rome. He is currently working with David Davis Associates on an addition to the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis.

Assemblage 18 @ 1992 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan uses the schema of a doubled, inverted triangle to map what he calls "the geometral structure of the scopic field." The same diagram describes the positions of the mirror, picture, viewer, and baptistery in Filippo Brunelleschi's demonstration of one-point perspective, as recorded by his biographer, Manetti, in The Life of Brunelleschi. This suggests that there may be stronger affini- ties than expected between the classical theories of perception and representation that were instituted by the invention of perspective, on the one hand, and the post-Freudian reconstruction of the subject that is usually taken to mark a break from these theories, on the other. This paper will trace the similarity between the diagrams. It will discuss their implication for Lacan's subject of perception, for Brunelleschi's demonstration, and for the classical episteme in which it is embedded. It will then project these insights onto the work of Le Corbusier. For this similarity has a significant bearing on recent critical study of Le Corbusier that employs the Lacanian concepts of the eye and the gaze.

Brunelleschi: The Mirror: The Subject Reflected It is a matter of speculation how Brunel- leschi invented one-point perspective as a pictorial form, or even how he appreciated its value. Like most origins, this one seems to be irretrievable. But Manetti outlines the experiment.' Brunel- leschi painted the view of the baptistery from the portal of the Florence cathedral. He then drilled a small hole through the painted panel so that someone standing behind it and looking through the hole could see the painting reflected back at him with a small mirror. Manetti says that the hole was located at that spot on the image of the baptistery where the viewer's eyes would be directed were he looking at the scene that Brunelleschi's image records; in other words, the eye was fixed at the vanishing point. Brunelleschi silvered the panel above the skyline so that it would reflect the real sky, whose moving clouds would give an even greater illusion of reality. Samuel Edgerton speculates that for his demonstration Brunelleschi placed his viewer where he had stood to paint the picture: the viewer would first see a reflec-

21


Narcissus, who was changed

into a flower, according to

the poets, was the inventor

of painting. Since painting is

already the flower of every

art, the story of Narcissus is

most to the point. What else

can you call painting but a

similar embracing with art of

what is presented on the

surface of the water in the

fountain?

Leon Battista Alberti,

On Painting and Sculpture, 1435

And so I believe that Pippo

di Ser Brunellescho the

Florentine found the way

to make this plan [linear

perspective] which truly was a subtle and beautiful thing,

which he discovered through

considering what a mirror

shows to you.

Antonio Averlino Filarete,

Treatise on Architecture, ca. 1460

I think it worthwhile to

bring [the conception of the mirror stage] again to your attention,... for the light it

sheds on the formation of

the I as we experience it in

psychoanalysis. It is an

experience that leads us to

oppose any philosophy

directly issuing from the

Cogito.

Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage," 1949


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tion of the painting; then, the mirror removed, he would see the real baptistery in the same position and relative size as in the painting.2 The mirror is the device of classical representation. Brunelleschi invented perspective with the mirror. He identified the section through the pyramid of vision with the picture plane. Alberti placed perspective painting - and representation in general - under the sign of Narcissus.' Painting reflects the world. The mirror produces an exact copy: it is the paradigm and natural model of the projection of a three-dimensional reality onto a two- dimensional plane.4 In his demonstration, Brunelleschi used the mirror as the standard and proof of the verisimilitude of his painting to the world. In effect, he used the power of the mirror to fold a two- dimensional image precisely onto a three- dimensional space, thereby identifying the perspective space of representation with the optical space of perception. Brunelleschi's architecture aspired to make clear this one-to-one correspondence between space represented and space perceived. Rudolf Wittkower writes that the naves of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito were designed as central projec- tions on the picture plane, for their aesthetic effect depends on seeing the naves as if the repetition of orders were dimin- ishing in proportion, even though we know that they really do not.5 If perspective is a two-dimensional representation of a three- dimensional space, then architecture becomes the three-dimensional representation of a two-dimensional space, perspective and architecture mirroring each other.

It was in Renaissance art theory that the artist was first positioned as an interior subject to an exterior object, paralleling the development of perspective that gave graphic expression to these relations.6 To

the gaze/ point of light

object

O

image/screen

picture

the subject/ geometral poiint

Picture w the sbjec0 geometrl I.'.

l a. Lacan's operational montage. The structure of the scopic field.

22


Holm

vanishing point virtual image/A Baptistry

\ / \ / 0/

mirror V C

x

v 0

_npa painted panel a

lb. Brunelleschi's demonstration. The dashed line indicates the virtual image of the mirror. The upper base line is drawn solid to indicate that the painted image corresponds to and exactly aligns with the baptistery. The eye remains dashed because it is only an image.'0

this, classical architecture assented. The standard metaphor for the picture plane is Alberti's window: painting a picture is like opening up a window in a wall (he was thinking of fresco), through which one might see the world.7 The subject and object of perception are mediated by the picture plane - which articulates the three-dimensional space of perception from the two-dimensional space of representation - as interior and exterior are mediated by the window. Architecture never seriously questioned the function of the threshold and the position of a subject inside it." But the mirror's power is also to deceive, to depart from and distort reality. It is the device of the fun house and of the magician. Brunelleschi's demonstration was part scientific experiment, part smoke-and-mirrors act.9 The mirror dis- rupted the image of the world, by placing within it an image of the eye of the perceiver, at the very moment that perspective became the model of perception and of our relationship to the world.

Lacan: The Operational Montage: The Subject Split The scopic field is the distribution of relationships that structure the conscious subject as the subject of perception and situate it vis-ai-vis the visual world. Lacan's diagram of the scopic field - which he calls an "operational montage" - invokes the power of the mirror to double and reverse. The first triangle of the diagram, Lacan writes in "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a," "is that which, in the geometral field, puts in our place the subject of representation, and the second is that which turns me into a picture. On the right-hand line is situated, then, the apex of the first triangle, the point of the geometral subject, and it is on that line that I, too, turn myself into a picture under the gaze, which is inscribed at the

23


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dement remarquer diucrfes particularitas, dont ie n n, ' Fig. p. 45.

...

\N

z z

IX~~ti

defire icy \vous atlcrtil, alin quc vous en facies eI'x-

2a. Descartes, diagram of vision from La Dioptrique. The invisible subject.

2b. Brunelleschi, nave of San Lorenzo, Florence. Classicism identifies space perceived and space represented in the invisible subject.

apex of the second triangle." The "geometral point" is where the light rays focus on the eye, the apex of Alberti's pyramid of vision. This is the central point of projection of the image in the perspective construction. So far Lacan's diagram corresponds to Brunelleschi's. But Lacan notes that this does not explain the phe- nomenon of visibility, for a blind person can conceptualize the triangulation and mapping of space by means of optical relations.12 To place the subject in the visible world, the subject must be both the punctal receptor of images and also itself an image. In Lacan's diagram the gaze is the point of light from which the world "looks at me." It is that point - necessary within the syntax of one-point perspective - from which the subject, as image, is projected. The subject is always also an image in someone else's picture, a construction projected from outside itself. The conscious subject is determined by a split between the eye at the geometral point and the gaze that fixes the eye in the visible world. It is this reciprocal function of me looking at the world and the world looking at me that structures the subject of perception and the visible world. The subject is thus a montage. Lacan based this work on an earlier paper, "The Mirror Stage," in which he explains the identity and development of the conscious subject (loosely, the ego) as a function of its projected/reflected image (its other). Lacan argues that the very young child first becomes aware of himself as a discrete and extended individual through his reflected image. This is generalized to include the image that other people may have of him, which they project back to him in personal interactions. In either case, the image is external and acquired."1 "In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representa-

tion, something slips, passes, is transmit- ted, ... and is always to some degree eluded in it - that is what we call the gaze.""14 So Lacan defines the register of the imaginary and the disposition of the gaze as absence. The subject, like the imaginary, is structured by signification and absence. "The signifier is the first mark of the subject."" The subject is determined by the objet a, which symbol- izes "the central lack of desire," an object from which the subject has been split by an originary "mutilation" and that it desires in order to be whole again.16 The objet a is that which can never be signified. In the imaginary register, the objet a is identified with the gaze, the imaginary object of desire, initiated during the mirror stage, from which the subject (the eye) remains alienated. "In the scopic field, the gaze is always outside."'7 It marks the point in representation at which something appears to have vanished, a point lying beyond the visual in the register of the real.'" The subject is an effect of the (ever-frustrated) desire to image what the visual field always posits as its beyond but can never represent. It is not surprising that the mirror should play an originary role in both classical representation and the post-Freudian subject, for both painting and subject involve the projection of an image on a surface. Lacan indeed acknowledges his debt to Renaissance one-point perspective painting." Of the numerous points of convergence between Brunelleschi's and Lacan's work, the most pertinent involve issues of extension. Lacan's concept that consciousness is a "resist," a shadow on the picture of the world, finds its comple- ment in Brunelleschi's eye hole. "In every picture, this central field cannot but be absent, and replaced by a hole - a reflection, in short, of the pupil behind which is situated the gaze."20 Lacan's work suggests

24


Holm

that the presence of the image of the eye in Brunelleschi's picture is not a contin- gency that could be eliminated through more sophisticated techniques but an inevitable aspect of the visual world. The dimensional parameters of the demonstration (the width of the eye hole, the thickness of the panel, the size of the mirror and its distance from the panel) might be manipulated, but this would never erase the eye.21 Conversely, Lacan's concept of the split subject - the displacement or alienation of the subject as site of perception from its own image - finds its literal analog in the distance that Brunelleschi's subject must hold the mirror in order to correctly align the reflection with the world. Brunelleschi's and Lacan's work, taken together, suggests that the dimensional parameters imposed by the physical- ity of the visible world prevent the total collapse and erasure of the (image of the eye)/I.22 There is an irreducible dimen- sionality and materiality to identity, consciousness, and perception that fixes us in the world as an image and yet holds us separate from that image. Consciousness has dimension.

Lacan says that his subject, so constructed through the image, stands opposed to the Cartesian cogito, which marks the center of the classical episteme.23 In the Medita- tions Descartes would think away all his attributes but thought itself. He would construct his psychic life and the exterior world entirely from this unitary and logi- cally prior point of thought and consciousness.24 In La Dioptrique the optical field is constructed entirely from the point of the eye. As though his own imagery were subconsciously to belie the inexorable logic of his argument, Descartes depicts the cogito encased in a black box, inacces- sible to the optic rays that triangulate the space. An additional perceiving subject is

positioned outside the box to complete the circuit of perception, as if a perceiver were necessary to perceive the perceiving to account for a perception that posits blindness at its core.25

Brunelleschi's architecture constructs Descartes's predicament. When he came to build, he similarly ignored the implication of the hole in the panel. Conceived as they are from the central projection, the naves of his cathedrals position the subject as the privileged but invisible point from which the architecture is constructed. Occupation occurs through the line of sight. The gesture that classicism makes toward the closure of space around this unitary point of reference suggests the conceptual collapse of space and the subject at the geometral point. This indicates a far greater subversion of classicism than any of the gestures of recent architectures toward the fragmentation of forms and the multiplicity of frames of reference. The destruction of classicism seems to lie in the extreme of fixity: a classicism that takes its own devices and representations to the logical extreme, where absolutely nothing moves, where stressed to the limit, they begin to implode. Such destruction would remove the classical subject entirely from classical architecture by eliminating the subject's displacement from its image. This absolute degree zero of architecture would resemble nothing so much as Descartes's black box, the con- tracted world of the tomb.26

It has taken five hundred years to under- stand the implications of Brunelleschi's mirror for the structure of the subject in the visible world. Notwithstanding the commentary of Alberti, Leonardo, Des- cartes, and other theorists of representation and perception who have ignored the implications of the hole in the panel, the (image of the eye)/I has mutilated the

world from the moment perspective was instituted by Brunelleschi's demonstration. That is, the image of the eye dis- rupted the classical subject-object relation at its origin. The Lacanian split does not threaten the integrity of the classical episteme from without; Lacan effected a transformation of the classical theory of perception by exploiting a problematic of its own devices - the mirror and optical syntax. Like all deconstructions, it is already in the subject matter. Thus our understanding of the classical episteme evolves from an internal complexity at its origin.27 The presumed unity and priority of the subject is a misunderstanding.

It remains to project these findings onto architecture in the age of mechanical reproduction. The importance of the photograph in Le Corbusier's discourse and the way that he co-opted the strate- gies of advertising and mass-media culture in his practice have been charted elsewhere.28 Here it may help to imagine, parenthetically, two of Le Corbusier's temporary architectures: first, the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau and the Ville Contemporaine that was displayed in it, which for the purposes of the following argument are perhaps best understood as a single project, and second, the exhibition at the Salon d'Automne of a furnished model apartment interior. Both projects, in different ways, insist on their status as images. This insistence sheds light both on the function of representation in Le Corbusier's thought and oeuvre and on the idea of an architecture that represents/ reproduces itself. Such an architecture would provide the counterpart to Lacan's operational montage, involving the image- producing relation and its inverse; this architecture would elucidate Lacan's imaginary register.

25


assemblage 18

Le Corbusier: Toward a Mirror Architecture The Ville Contemporaine was a hypotheti- cal city intended to address contemporary urban problems. Originally designed in 1922 for an exhibition at the Salon d'Au- tomne concerned with improvements to the city of Paris, in 1925 it was published in L'Esprit Nouveau 28 (the final issue) and resited in the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau along with the Plan Voisin de Paris, a practical application of the plan and ideas of the VilledContemporaine to the renovation of Paris. In 1927 both projects were published with extensive commentary in Urbanisme.29 The Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, built for the Exposi- tion Internationale des Arts Decoratifs, showcased Le Corbusier's art, furniture, and various modern utensils. By exhibit- ing the Ville Contemporaine as well, Le Corbusier transformed the pavilion into a comprehensive display of decorative arts, interior design, architecture, and urbanism, and so encompassed the full territory of what is "proper" to architecture.

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3a. Cover of L'Esprit Nouveau 28 (January 1925). The opening of the Pavilion de I'Esprit Nouveau coincided with the cessation of publication of the journal. Around the same time, Le Corbusier's architecture practice took off. He seemingly relinquished the representation of architecture in two dimensions for its construction in three. The status of the art object in publications, as an image displaced from its origins, infiltrates, intentionally or otherwise, Le Corbusier's architecture.

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3b. Entry (side) faqade of the Pavilion de I'Esprit Nouveau, a prototype maison en sdrie. As an assembly-line machine a habiter, the pavilion was to be mechani- cally reproduced over and over again and so have the same nonoriginary status as both the objet-types of modern life displayed within it and its many images in Le Corbusier's publications.

4. View of the Pavilion de I'Esprit Nouveau. The pavilion on the fairgrounds was both architecture - full-scale, durable, occupiable, functional - and a model of architecture - part of a display, a typical unit, reproducible, involved in relations with other images that situated it visually within the city. It was, at once, an architecture and a representation of an architecture. Architecture in the imaginary register is a construction of two- and three-dimensional images. The classical distinction between object and image is undermined when the object turns out to be an image as well.

26


Holm

5a. Drawings of the display for the Ville Contemporaine diorama. The Ville Contemporaine came complete with instructions for its "erection," as if, in the rarefied realm of the theoretical project, or mass-media advertising, there were no distinctions between an object and its image.30

5b. Section of the diorama in the Pavilion de I'Esprit Nouveau

5c. Panoramic view of the Plan Voisin de Paris. The ville was sited in the pavilion and the pavilion situated visually in the city.

When the Ville Contemporaine was resited in the pavilion, in an addition that was built to accommodate the diorama, the exchange between architecture and image intensified. The pavilion was a model unit of an immeuble-villa block, hence a representation. These villas constituted the urban fabric of the modern city. The diorama allowed the visitor to the pavilion to look through a strip window onto a view of the city at large, of which the pavilion was itself a constitutive fragment.

27


assemblage 18

~Jflhflg. Cthet us Axis vimiajim

Paine of reflecnoun

dP.

6a. Mirror diagram. The mirror plan provides the general form of an architecture that represents itself. It contains a symmetry produced by the cutting and folding of the mirror, where the trace of the cut remains in the plan. The symmetrical plan has a proper center that positions an occupant, but here the line of the mirror subverts the usual expectations for occupation.

6b. Mirror notation. The dotted line signifies the mirror as a displaced center or displaced faqade.

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I-. / J~ / /''"

ZI

'/k~,'' //

6c. The notation for such an architecture can be extracted from Le Corbusier's sketches: the plan evaluates the strip window.

6d. The frameless large glass suggests montage rather than perspective. The window maps a two-dimensional space onto a three-dimensional space.

28


Holm

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7a. Palladio, Palazzo Antonin Antonini, Udine. A mirror architecture is produced by cutting and montaging a (randomly selected) suburban villa.

7b. Descartes's tomb. The project collapses on itself because the center has been surgically removed. This is perhaps the theoretical limit of classicism.

7c. Immeuble-villa. The project is cut and aggregated. The facade has been "modernized." (The suburban villa is one of the sources of Le Corbusier's project; that is, the imagery of nature, the polemic of the park in the city/the city in the park.)

29


assemblage 18

8a. Pavilion de I'Esprit Nouveau as a mirror plan fragment. The house is a machine for viewing images of the city.31 Descartes's eye emerges from its (opened) black box. This architecture is incomplete, suggesting always that there might be something beyond it to make it whole again.

8b. Immeuble-villa block as an aggregate of mirror fragments. The predicament of the fragment is reiterated but never resolved. So long as the central element between the symmetrical halves is a partition, and not a space, it will never be whole.32

9b. The L-shaped plan of the immeuble- villa seems to be a quarter fragment of a courtyard palazzo generated by reflection. This suggests that the facade,

as well as the orthogonal partition, marks the trace of the mirror. The facade

abandons its traditional function of masking interior from exterior; its blankness - its invisibility - is the cut of the mirror, the site of montage or reflection.

9a. Palazzo Farnese, Rome, quartered. The courtyard palazzo is one of the formal sources of the perimeter block and one of the historical paradigms of the urban fabric.

The Imaginary Interior The exhibition of dquipement intirieur d'une habitation at the Salon d'Automne in 1929 was another full-scale model architecture. It was an apartment interior - a collection of modern period rooms - in which was displayed furniture designed by Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret. In the photographs of the exhibition that Le Corbusier published in Architecture vivante and elsewhere, it is possible to discern, compressed into the design of the furniture and the layout of the rooms, his discourse on the making of space and the conditions for its occupation. Le Corbusier's investigations have two trajectories: the "furniture-objects" (tables, chairs, and so on) that relate directly to the human body and the casiers standards (rectilinear frame-and-panel wall systems) that relate to enclosure.33

30


Holm

10a. Montage of the Salon d'Automne

1 la. Furnished living room in the Salon d'Automne

11 b. Detail of a casier standard in the Salon d'Automne

10b. Side view of a fauteuil basculant

1 ic. Diagram for assembling the metal sections of a casier standard

The chair asserts its objectlike status as prime occupant of the space, a replacement for the human: "decorative arts represent a kind of orthopedics"; "furniture ... as artificial limbs." Le Corbusier's chairs assume the essential characteristics of the human bodies whose positions they usurp. Like the body, each chair is understood visually in terms of the articulations and trajectories of its various moving parts.34

The ultimate container for any type of object, comparable to the gridded canvas of the purist still life.3s The diagram rivals the Domino frame as the spatial structure of a purist architecture. The casiers standards present a condensation of Le Corbusier's wall types and replicate every surface, where the surface is a repository for representations. The extreme juxtapo- sition and implied equivalence between surface and space - whether opaque, reflective, transparent, open framed, or printed on - suggests a rapid-fire interaction between space represented and space perceived. Elsewhere, this has been called phenomenal and literal transparency.36

31


assemblage 18

12a-b. The imaginary bathroom/bedroom wall. If in the Salon d'Automne model apartment we see the invisible wall, it is because it is supposed to be there. This may be unproblematic, because expected, in a tableau architecture. But what happens when the imaginary status of the wall is carried into architecture?

13a-b. The imaginary lobby/lounge wall. In the Pavilion Suisse, completed in 1932, three years after the Salon d'Automne exhibition, the wall is no longer invisible, but it remains imaginary. The imaginary wall always plays on its ambiguous status as image, undercutting its ability to define a space by enclosing it. The aesthetic impact of the space depends on the irresolvable crisis it provokes at its edges, between space perceived (enclosed) and space represented (image).37

14a-b. The imaginary faqade from within. The living-room faqades of the Villas Savoye and Church seem to mirror their interiors. Like the mirror placed at the threshold, the imaginary wall subverts the possibility of distinguishing interior and exterior space.

32


Holm

Le Corbusier: The Camera: The Subject Represented Classicism identified space perceived (eye) with space represented (gaze) through the agency of the mirror. In the classical diagram derived from optics, the triangles are aligned. Lacan uses the mirror to delaminate them. In his diagram, they are reversed and superimposed and cross only at the image/screen. Lacan realizes that this is tantamount to disen- gaging representation from the conditions of perception, which is precisely what the camera does: "The gaze is the instrument ... through which I am photo-graphed. "8 The camera is the modern analog of the mirror, a latter-day standard of verisimilitude in representation. The camera is "a mirror with a memory."39 It shares with the mirror the power to effect an exact correspondence with three-dimensional space as well as the power to construct, conflate, and replicate. The camera replaces the mirror in Lacan's thought as he develops the concept of the gaze, from its beginnings in "The Mirror Stage" to "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a." The realm constructed through the camera is one in which the subject is first and foremost an image, and only secondarily a point of perception. "Photo-graphed" indicates not only that the subject is inscribed in the scopic field through the agency of the gaze, but also that the gaze is related to signification, which is shot through with absence. Brute vision would be a meaning- less plenitude. All representations are graphic, that is, signifiers, and it is signification that structures and gives sense to the visual. The camera, which produces a graphic image without the presence of a witness, introduces the possibility that the point by which the image is structured - the gaze - might mark the site of an absence.

15a. Albrecht Durer, Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman, 1525. The perspectival window/veil of reality.

15b. Lee Friedlander, Self-Portrait, Route 9W, New York, 1969. The mirror reflection of reality. Friedlander, like Lacan, montages the veil and the mirror.

33


assemblage 18

16a. Opening spread of "Les Traces regulateurs" in Vers une architecture. Delamination of space perceived and space represented.

It is one of the contentions of this paper that Le Corbusier's architectural argument is advanced in the interaction between his photographs and his architecture. The classical object, which purports to stand separate from and constitute the origin of its image, is complete. But in the imaginary register, even the object is an image. Le Corbusier's architecture, inhabited by the attributes of the image, is always proposing its imaginary - retracted - other half. His interior spaces seem to provoke a continuous and irresolvable exchange between space perceived and space represented (which are never quite identical as they are in the classical interior). There is a corresponding split in the (image of the eye)/I - within his photographs, his spaces, and their occupants. Le Corbusier's photographs of his spaces explicate this imaginary register. In the double-page spread that introduces "Les Traces regulateurs" in Vers une architecture, Le Corbusier uses the binding to break down Alberti's costruzione legittima into its constituent elements of gridded ground plane and gridded picture plane, as though the structure of the optical space of perception could be separated from its two-dimensional representation.40 On the verso (which ends the previous chapter),

16b. (Photograph of) the studio of the Maison Ozenfant. Relamination of space perceived and space represented.

an invisible subject - the reader - is positioned in the space of the rooftop garden; on the recto, the flatness of the arch elevation prevents the positioning of any subject, reader or otherwise. Le Corbusier relaminates the costruzione in his photograph of the three-dimensional gridded crystalline cube that lies embedded (like the eye in La Dioptrique) in the plan of the Ozenfant studio of 1923, which appears in a later chapter, "Maisons en Serie."41' Together these photographs express the essentially heterogeneous aspect of the photographic space: that it is constituted by both the optical depth of the eye/I and the two-dimensional plane of representation, as if it were already a montage. The window is the site, in architecture, of the subject-object relation.42 And we can expect it to be problematized in photographs of Le Corbusier's interiors. In the (photograph of the) Ozenfant studio, a fenetre en longueur is montaged onto Alberti's veil.43 The registration of the horizon line on the mullion of the strip window montages the landscape onto the (image of the) studio, as if it were itself an image. This disrupts the classical relation of inside to outside and subject to object, because the relation is not effected by the

orthogonal line of sight and the implied continuity of ground plane (as it is in the rooftop photograph, where the perspective grid leads into the landscape) but by the horizontal line of incision, a process that involves an image without a perceiving subject." No eye/I sees this landscape. Ozenfant has been removed from the space as a privileged subject, the site of a perspective construction, and resurrected through his effects (the opened paint box and arranged chairs) trapped in the cubic net of the picture. Lacan writes that "as subjects, we are literally called into the picture, and represented here as caught."4s The site of perception - Ozenfant - is displaced to the reader. Since the camera is located in the section at the height of the eye, we may assume that these effects are not just a contrivance of the photograph.46 The perceptual condition of the space is the same as its representation. Being in the Ozenfant studio is like being in the photograph of the studio.

In (a photograph of) the living room of the Maison Church at Ville d'Avray, a fendtre en hauteur is montaged against a fenetre en longueur; when the fenetre en longueur turns out to be a mirror, the landscape and the fenetre en hauteur that frames it are reduced to the status of an image. At the moment of perception, perception becomes representation. The camera, observed taking a photograph of itself, underscores this point. Le Corbusier uses the mirror to double and invert the space, thus reproducing Lacan's operational montage. The structure of this mirrored and photographed space corresponds to the scopic field, in the kind of one-to-one correspondence that we expect from the mirror or the photograph. With reference to Lacan's diagram, the space consists of three planes: the mirrored rear wall is the object; the fenetre en hauteur is the image/ screen; the photograph is the picture. At the apex of the triangle whose base is the photograph is the camera - the picture-

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making machine that is the gaze; at the apex of the triangle whose base is the mirror should be the eye of Le Corbusier - the subject - but he has vacated the room, leaving only the reader looking at the picture with a camera aimed at him. No subject escapes the picture: Le Corbusier's architecture is the instrument through which even the reader is "photo- graphed."47 The camera, positioned by the mirror outside the space into which it aims, suggests that the interior of the room, as well as the landscape, might be a montage upon the window. This image/screen lies at the intersection of two triangular schemas: this outside is an object of nego- tiation between two insides. Representa- tion constitutes a limit between inside and outside. The camera reminds us that every inside is also an outside, that each limit - be it window, mirror, or photograph - can be conflated, that the reader's and the picture's space can be reversed. Every perceived space is also subject to the gaze, as is the camera itself and, ultimately, the reader. The (photograph of the) room and the space of the reader have the heterogeneous structure of montage. The mirror and camera are not used to reflect a fully constructed space, distanced from the subject by the picture plane that functions as a limit, as it does in Brunelleschi's architecture, but to construct a new space in which the reader participates. The photograph leaps forward, and in a vertigi- nous reversal of roles, engages the reader.

The Conditions of Occupation The comparison between Brunelleschi and Le Corbusier through the resist of Lacan provides a compelling case for the argument that the most informed architecture of each age aligns itself with a characteris- tic mode of representation and constructs its occupant, the subject of perception - not vice-versa. Brunelleschi's naves posit

17a. Living room of the Villa Church, redux. An uncanny view shows just how empty the room is. The subject disappears and the reader is called into the picture.48

the center point of Renaissance human- ism; Le Corbusier's purist interiors, the distributed Lacanian subject. Architecture continually postulates a relation between itself and its occupant. It structures the limit between inside and outside and determines the conditions under which that limit can be crossed. In an architecture constructed through one-point perspective, the subject is reduced to the apex of the visual pyramid. In San Lorenzo the subject is placed along a line in the center of enclosure. In an architecture reconstructed through the camera, the subject is displaced from its status as cogito only to be reintroduced as an image. The problematization of the limit replaces the orthogonal penetration by the line. The Maison Church living room and the Ozenfant studio restore extension to the subject through the distribution of relations among the images that they activate. Occupation occurs through the image, and the image is a surface distributed around the room. Room and subject are coextensive and superimposed, suggesting perversely that architecture and its occupant are the same. Modern architecture thus stands as a critique of classical architecture through its restructuring of the occupant.

17b. Edgerton photographing Brunelleschi. The camera displaces the subject of perception and enters the picture. The reader is again called into the picture.

This intense dynamic of surface and the consequent repositioning of the subject is nowhere more poignantly corroborated than in Samuel Edgerton's photomontage reconstruction of Brunelleschi's demonstration: a photograph of a mirror reflection, over which are drawn the perspective lines and vanishing point, reconstructs what purports to be a neutral reflection of the world. An image of the subject replaces the punctal site of depth. There is always a blind spot in the center. ("Reality is marginal.")49 Brunelleschi could not have invented perspective without it. The dynamic of the horizon line in the Maison Ozenfant erases it into the veil. The opacity of the window in the Maison Church places it in our eye, reminding us of the artificiality and opacity of all looking from our inside to the world outside. We live in an elliptical world in which we can no longer securely posit ourselves as its single center. We construct the world from our own perspective; but consciousness is a figure negotiated between two triangles, which lies like a blind spot in our field of action. "You never look at me from the place from which I see you."'5 A camera gazes out of the page; you, reader, are photo-graphed.

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Notes 1. Quoted in Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975), chap. 9, "The Discov- ery of the Vanishing Point."

2. Ibid., chap. 10, "Brunelleschi's First Perspective Picture."

3. Leon Battista Alberti, On Paint- ing and Sculpture, trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon Press, 1972), bk. 2, par. 26. 4. This marks a radical change from previous conceptions. Painting had been understood as a concretization of spirit, a manifestation, through the use of established models, of the inner life of the artist. See Erwin Panofsky, The Codex Huygens and Leonardo Da Vinci's Art Theory (London: Warburg Institute, 1940), 90.

5. See Rudolf Wittkower, "Brunelleschi and 'Proportion in Perspective,"' in Idea and Image: Studies in the Italian Renaissance (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1978). 6. "In its attitude toward art the Re- naissance thus differed fundamen- tally from the Middle Ages in that it removed the object from the inner world of the artist's imagination and placed it firmly in the 'outer world.' This was accomplished by laying a distance between 'subject' and 'object' much as in artistic practice perspective placed a distance between the eye and the world of things - a distance which at the same time ob- jectifies the 'object' and personalizes the 'subject"' (Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory: A Study in the Definition and Conception of the Term 'Idea,' from Plato to the 17th century, When the Modern Defini- tion Emerged [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1966]).

7. Alberti, On Painting and Sculp- ture, bk. 1, par. 19. 8. Piranesi's Carceri are perhaps a notable exception. 9. Brunelleschi had to employ very "modern" representational strate- gies. His image was a montage conflating categories of representation (illusionistic two-dimensional painted image and reflected three- dimensional reality) and the reflected real eye of the subject of perception, which would otherwise have remained outside the representation as its unacknowledged spon- sor.

10. Leonardo, writing about eighty years after Brunelleschi's demonstration, supports this diagram: "Per- spective employs in distances two opposite pyramids, one of which has its apex in the eye and its base as far away as the horizon. The other has the base towards the eye and the apex on the horizon. But the first is concerned with the universe, embracing all the mass of the objects that pass before the eye, as though a vast landscape was seen through a small hole, the number of the objects seen through such a hole being so much the greater in proportion as the objects are more remote from the eye; and thus the base is formed on the horizon and the apex in the eye, as I have said above. The second pyramid has to do with a pecu- liarity of landscape, in showing itself so much smaller in proportion as it recedes farther from the eye; and this second instance of perspective springs from the first" (The Note- books of Leonardo Da Vinci, trans. and ed. Edward MacCurdy [New York: Braziller, 1954], bk. 33, "Per- spective," 1000). The second pyramid is the virtual pyramid formed on the picture plane by the diminu- tion of elements toward the vanishing point, which marks its apex.

11. Jacques Lacan, "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a," in The Four Funda- mental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 106. 12. In La Dioptrique Descartes uses the analogy of a blind man with a stick to make intelligible the optical structure of space. This is the first triangle only. The second triangle accounts for visibility. In the scopic field there is no way to attribute extension and other qualities to the subject unless it, too, is subject to the same structure - a projection through a plane from a point - as has been constructed from it: in other words, unless it, too, is looked at. See Rene Descartes, The Optics, in Discourse on Method, Optics, Ge- ometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul Olscamp (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1965). 13. See Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). The idea of himself as a unified entity that the subject forms is imaginary, that is, embodied in an image - and like any image it stands in an external relation to himself. The mirror stage occurs before the child can physically con- trol himself. Thus long before the body functions as a unified coordi- nated entity, the subject has an image of himself as such. This double movement of frustration with the body and anticipation, though the image, of a future unity, from which the subject is essentially distanced and alienated, structures the conscious self (the ego) thereafter. 14. Lacan, "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a," 73.

15. Ibid., 62.

16. Ibid., 105.

17. Ibid., 106.

18. The imaginary register is the world as it is embodied in images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined. In Lacan's schema, the imaginary is as real as it gets. Lacan takes great pains to distinguish this from a kind of idealism according to which we live in a world of appear- ances that mask a difficult to attain reality (both of which, presumably, are available to signification). The imaginary register stands in a relation to the symbolic and the real. By the symbolic, Lacan means signification; by the real, that which has no adequate signifier but to which signification will always - un- successfully - return, precisely because signification can never apprehend it. The real is the nothing that marks the limit of the symbolic and the imaginary. 19. Lacan, "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a," 86.

20. Ibid., 79.

21. Samuel Edgerton, Martin Kemp, and Eugenio Battisti each discuss the possible dimensions of the demonstration. If the hole gets too small in diameter, because the panel has a thickness, the cone of vision will be too narrow to see enough of the reflected image in the mirror. Likewise, if the mirror is too small, it will not reflect the whole painting; or if too big, it will reflect the body of the viewer and ruin the illusion. Similar problems occur if the mirror is held too close or too far away from the painting. See Edgerton, "Brunelleschi's First Perspective Picture"; Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), app. 2, "Brunelleschi's Demonstration Panels"; and

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Eugenio Battisti, Brunelleschi: The Complete Work (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), chap. 7, "Ex- periments with Perspective." 22. "The (image of the eye)/I" equals Lacan's subject. The I (an entity, the Cartesian point of thought and perception) and the image of the eye (the image of the conscious subject) are interrelated in the context of the scopic field. The separatrix indicates that this is a relational entity. 23. Lacan mentions both La Dioptrique and the Meditations. See "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a," 87, 85. 24. See Rene Descartes, Medita- tions on First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Distinc- tion of the Soul from the Body Is Demonstrated, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publications, 1979). 25. This launches a vicious, infinite regress: at each step there is a blind spot that requires an additional perceiver. According to this account of perception, we would need eyes in our eyes in our eyes in our eyes ... 26. The scopic field models the annihilation of the classical subject in Brunelleschi's architecture and Descartes's thought, where the subject is stripped of all attributes, in- cluding extension. The alienation of the subject from its image - the split between the eye and the gaze - is the dimension of the subject. This operation of annihilation can be understood by reference to the syntax of mirror reflection. In Lacan's diagram, the image/screen has extension only so long as x is greater than zero. But when x equals zero, the image loses its extension and the subject as an entity in the world disappears. 27. Other theorists have deter-

mined that the precondition of the subject of perception is that it is embedded in the visible. Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes that the possibility of seeing is grounded in the seer's own visibility ("The Inter- twining - the Chiasm," in The Vis- ible and the Invisible [Evanston: Northwestern University, 1968]). He delimits the concept of the flesh of the world, a world of absolute contiguity not unlike the space in a Cezanne landscape, which stands against the Cartesian world of objects distributed in a metric space ("Cezanne's Doubt," in Sense and Non-Sense [Evanston: Northwestern University, 1964]). He also refers to the subject as relational and distributed: as a double circle, the one slightly displaced from the other. Roger Caillois writes that the identity of the subject depends on its ability to distinguish itself from its spatial context. The mimetic function in insects - whereby, for ex- ample, a moth tries to resemble a leaf - is not related to survival (for as many of these moths can be found in the stomachs of birds as moths that do not disguise them- selves as the inedible); rather, the mimetic function indicates the psychic collapse of the subject: the in- ability of the subject to distinguish itself, as an image, from its context, the spatial field surrounding it. The subject is structured by the dihedral of action that resides in the subject and moves with him and the dihedral of representation that is the (visual) image that he has of himself. When these are brought together, the subject is annihilated and can no longer distinguish himself within a spatial context. Caillois refers to the experiences of the schizo- phrenic. "'I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I'm at the spot where I find myself.' To these dispossessed souls, space seems to

be a devouring force .... Life takes a step backwards" ("Mimicry and Leg- endary Psychasthenia," October 31 [Winter 1984]: 28-30). Lacan makes reference to the work of both Merleau-Ponty and Caillois. But the power of Lacan's work is that he is able to tie it to the discourse of optics/representation and the device of the mirror, which plays such a central role.

28. "Mechanical reproduction" is the term employed by Beatriz Colomina in documenting how Le Corbusier uses the photograph to construct space and produce meaning in his architecture. Much of the following argument was inspired by Colomina's comments when she vis- ited Washington University in St. Louis for the Graduate Seminar Program in the spring of 1990. See Colomina, "Le Corbusier and Pho- tography," Assemblage 4 (October 1987): 7-23, and idem, "L'Esprit Nouveau: Architecture and Publicite'," in Architectureproduc- tion, ed. Joan Ockman and Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Ar- chitectural Press, 1988), 56-99. In Architectureproduction, Colomina explains that Le Corbusier used the publication, not as a reflective medium that mirrored his work in words and images, turning it into an object of contemplation as did Nar- cissus of his own image, but rather as a productive medium that constructed a new object in the space of the page (p. 238). This process is akin to advertising, whose strategy is always to concoct something from nothing. It is cognizant of the epistemic condition of twentieth- century representation and the parallel restructuring of the subject-object relation in perception. Representation is no longer Alberti's mirror of nature, reflecting, imitating a prior constituted object.

Instead, it also reflects back the interior condition (the ideas and in- tentions) of the author. The mirror is scratched. In "Le Corbusier and Photography," Colomina explains the role of the photograph in Le Corbusier's formal discourse, with reference to the Villa Schwob. The architecture project begins in the realm of ideas; design and construction implement it in a manner in- evitably contaminated by the contingencies of the world; photographs of the built project, suitably adjusted, return it to the realm of ideas. It is in this context - and not as a mere falsification of reality - that Le Corbusier's practice of doc- toring images must be understood.

29. For a history of the projects, see Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979), 187-90. 30. Among the drawings for the Ville Contemporaine are axono- metrics and details for the display of the drawings. The diorama con- sisted of a panoramic perspective and a stagelike structure with a forced perspective and curtains, suggestive of the circus magician's set-up for creating illusion. This device had pilotis and a strip window. See The Le Corbusier Archive: Early Buildings and Projects, 1912-1923 (New York: Garland Publishing; Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1982). 31. Le Corbusier often uses the building to position and frame a view. See, in particular, the project for an apartment house in Algiers, 1933, and the Cartesian skyscraper, 1938, which Le Corbusier developed as general building type and applied to many of his urban projects. 32. We could develop a taxonomy based on the mirror plan. 1. Variations on the center surgically

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removed: a. The vacated center: the entry ramp that passes between the two lobes of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, 1961- 64. b. The unoccupiable center: the ramp of the Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1929-31, the column line in the Maison Cook, Paris, 1926, and the balcony that diagonally divides the project for the Maisons en Serie pour Artisans, 1924. c. The center removed and the trace (wall) displaced: Maison Planeix, Paris, 1927. d. The center traumatized: the entry sequence to the Porte Molitor apart- ments, Paris, 1933. 2. The project intended to complete itself by reflection (mirroring itself vertically ) so that the entry is in the center of the body: the Palace of Justice, Chandigarh, 1952. This is indicated by numerous sketches, as Robert Slutzky notes in "Aqueous Humor," Oppositions 19-20 (Spring-Winter 1980): 39. 3. The mirror plan: Maison Clarte, Geneva, 1930-32, the projects for houses in Loucheur, 1929, and a residential tower in Pessac, 1923. 4. The mirror plan fragment: Palais des Nations, Geneva, 1927, and Maison La Roche-Jeanneret, Paris, 1923. 5. The mirror plan where the faqade is the trace of a cut: the villa for his mother, Lac L6man, 1925. 6. The mirror faqade, of which more later: Villa Savoye, Maison Cook, Maison Ozenfant, Paris, 1923, and Villa Church, Ville d'Avray, 1928- 29.

33. Renato de Fusco, Le Corbusier, Designer: Furniture, 1929 (Wood- bury, N.Y.: Barron's, 1977), 18-19. This work contains an extensive portfolio documentation of the different pieces of furniture.

34. The chairs can be classified ac- cordingly: the fauteuil grand confort (1928) moves up and down; the chaise longue a riglage continu (1929) rotates vertically to describe the circumference of a circle; the fauteuil basculant (1929) moves forward and backward; and the different versions (stool and armchair) of the fauteuil tournant (1929) rotate horizontally. Le Corbusier, quoted in ibid., 17.

35. The casiers standards are a modular wall storage system com- prised of a structural frame and in- terchangeable panels, doors, shelves, and drawers. Their development can be traced through three exhibitions: the room partitions in the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, 1925, the wall units in the Salon d'Automne, 1929, and the basic unit on pilotis in the Model Home for a Young Man, Brussels International Exhibition, 1935.

36. Robert Slutzky and Colin Rowe, "Transparency: Literal and Phenom- enal," Perspecta 13-14 (1971). They refer to the extreme stratification of space, parallel to the faqade. 37. There are numerous other ex- amples. A similar exchange between perceived and represented space, based on the wall as bearer of images, occurs in Le Corbusier's photographs of the mirrored wall in the dining room of the Maison Cook, which reflects the strip window behind it.

38. Lacan, "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a," 106. Walter Benjamin first understood that the photograph marks an epistemic break between representation and the conditions of perception. See "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc- tion," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969). 39. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.;

quoted in Rosalind Krauss, "Corpus Delicti," in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L'Amour Fou: Pho- tography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 78. 40. See Erwin Panofsky, Renais- sance and Renaissances in Western Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 123-27. 41. Both of these images mark im- portant moments in Le Corbusier's thought. The double-page spread is a significant detail in the construction of Le Corbusier's text. It introduces the chapter in which the two main themes running through his thought intersect: the optical theme that valorizes pure volumes (in light) and the theme of rationality that extols the plan as generator and site of clear intention. The regulat- ing lines are those that determine, primarily, the elevation of the plan into three dimensions: they regulate the confrontation of an idea with the light of day. It is significant that this exposition appears in the same chapter in which Le Corbusier introduces the primitive hut, his ver- sion of the foundation myth of architecture. See Vers une architecture (Paris: Editions Cres, 1923), 48-49, 54-55. At the time of Vers une architecture's publication, the Ozenfant studio was Le Corbusier's only built project to realize the double-height space of the immeuble-villa. In the English edition, the image of the Ozenfant studio is inserted in the chapter "Mass-Production Houses" (Maisons en se'rie) in the discussion of the immeuble-villa unit designed for mechanical reproduction as both photograph and housing. 42. Several critiques have shown that the debate between Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier-Pierre Jeanneret ("Petit contribution 'a l'6tude d'une fenetre moderne," in

Almanache d'architecture moderne [Paris: Editions Cres, 1925]) aligns the fenetre en hauteur with the classical subject and the fenetre en longueur with space represented. Perret identifies the vertical window with man and abhors the implications of the horizontal. The vertical window provides the perspective frame of reference that fixes the eye in the privileged position vis-a-vis an exterior. It constructs the spatial continuity of fore-, mid-, and background, organized by the axis from eye to vanishing point. Le Corbusier-Jeanneret present the strip window as an inevitable conse- quence of technology and evaluate it with the photographer's light meter. The strip window under- mines perspectival depth by crop- ping out the foreground and background and making visible only a middle ground at an indetermi- nate distance. This window substi- tutes the horizontal coordinate for the depth coordinate, which tends to emphasize surface movement across the plane of representation as opposed to movement through perspective depth from the eye. See Bruno Reichlin, "The Pros and Cons of the Horizontal Window: The Perret-Le Corbusier Controversy," Daidalos 13 (September 1984): 65- 78.

43. Alberti, On Painting and Sculp- ture, bk. 2, par. 31. Alberti refers to the gridded picture plane - gridded for accuracy of placement of figures - as a veil. Since Alberti's codifica- tion of perspective in 1435, the discourse of representation has been saturated by contradictory meta- phors that belie the seamlessness of this world and suggest - like symp- toms - a discord under the surface. The veil indicates that this transparent media might be as much a con- cealer as a revealer of reality, that it

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might have woven into its surface, a fiction.

44. The horizon line no longer functions as a device for construct- ing depth through spatial continuity; instead, it builds a picture through contiguity and superimposi- tion. The horizon line has been placed above the vanishing point located by the converging lines of the studio. No repositioning will align the vanishing point with the horizon line: if the line of sight angles up- ward, the landscape will fall; if the subject climbs the ladder at the back of the studio to the loft, the landscape will rise. This kind of dis- junction in the structures of representation suggests a phenomenal opacity of the picture plane. There is a blind spot in the veil, traced by the difference between where the horizon line is and where it ought to be, which corresponds to the displacement by the camera of the subject (as punctal site of perception). 45. Lacan, "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a," 92.

46. In "L'Illusion des plans" Le Corbusier underscores how the idea - the space - of the plan must be perceivable from eye level. The plan that does not so reveal itself is illu- sory. See Vers une architecture, 157- 60.

47. Except that he is, of course, not there either. A contemporary Las Meninas: Velasquez has momen- tarily paused from his task, he emerges into the viewer's gaze from behind his canvas and looks at his object, the viewer. A mirror in the background renders someone visible. The invisibility at the base of all perception/representation is displaced elsewhere.

48. According to Lacan, anamorphism gives the general definition of the image as a projection on a

screen. Anamorphism raises the issue of view and/or projection point. An image normal for one is anamorphic for another, as would be evident if the reader could see the image projected through the screen in the Diirer woodcut. Anamor- phism, which makes things weird, involves a change of viewpoint; that is, a change in the subject, not in the object. This seeing things from another point of view than one's own, this understanding things in a new way, accounts for the uncanny. To live in an anamorphic world would be to inhabit a world from someone else's point of view, in this case, the camera's.

49. Lacan, "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a," 108. 50. Ibid., 103.

Figure Credits la. Redrawn by author, from Jacques Lacan, "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a," in The Four Funda- mental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). ib, 6b. Drawn by author. 2a. Rene Descartes, La Dioptrique, in Oeuvres de Descartes: Discours de la methode et essais (Paris: Cerf, 1902), bk. 6. 2b. Rudolf Wittkower, Idea and Image: Studies in the Italian Re- naissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). 3a. L'Esprit Nouveau 28 (January 1925; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1968). 3b, 4c, 6c, 8b, 9b. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre complete, 1910-1929 (Zurich: Les EIditions d'architecture, 1964). Fig. 9b modified by author.

4a-b. Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris. From H. Allen Brooks, ed., The Le Corbusier Archive (New York: Garland Publishing, 1983), vol. 1, 1912-23, fig. 30.833, and vol. 2, 1923-27, fig. 23147.

5, 8a. L'Architecture vivante (Winter 1925; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1975). 6a, 17b. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Lin- ear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 6d. Le Corbusier and Franqois de Pierrefeu, The Home of Man, trans. Clive Entwhistle and Gordon Holt (London: The Architectural Press, 1958). 7a. Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi, Le fabbriche e i disegni di Andrea Palladio (1796; reprint, London: Alec Tiranti, 1968), bk. 3, pls. xii and xiii.

7b-c. Drawn by author, derived from Scamozzi.

9a. Paul Le Tarouilly, Edifices de Rome moderne (1860; reprint, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1984), modified by author. Printed by permission of the pub- lisher.

10a, Ila, 12a, 14b, 17a. L'Archi- tecture vivante (Spring 1930; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1975). 10b. Maurizio Di Puolo et al., eds., Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret: "La machine a' s'asseoir," exhibition catalogue (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1976). 1 lb-c, 12b. Renato De Fusco, Le Corbusier, Designer: Furniture, 1929 (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron's, 1977). 13a-b. L'Architecture vivante (Winter 1933; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1975). 14a. Le Corbusier and Pierre

Jeanneret, Oeuvre complate, 1929- 1934 (Zurich: Les Editions d'architecture, 1964). 15a. Albrecht Diirer, Master Printmaker, exhibition catalogue (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1988). 15b. Rod Slemmons, Like a One- Eyed Cat: Photographs by Lee Friedlander, 1956-1987 (New York: Harry Abrams, 1989). 16a-b. Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: Editions Vincent, Fr6al, 1958).

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Article Contentsp. 21p. 20p. 22p. 23p. 24p. 25p. 26p. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32p. 33p. 34p. 35p. 36p. 37p. 38p. 39

Issue Table of ContentsAssemblage, No. 18 (Aug., 1992), pp. 1-129Front Matter [pp. 1-5]The Folly of S/M, recto verso [pp. 6-19]Reading through the Mirror: Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: The Invention of Perspective and the Post-Freudian Eye/I [pp. 20-39]Architecture, Authority, and the Female Gaze: Planning and Representation in the Early Modern Country House [pp. 40-61]The Strictly ArchitecturalPence Springs Resort [pp. 62-81]

Urbanism after Innocence: Four Projects: The Reinvention of Geometry [pp. 82-113]The Imaginary Real World of CyberCities [pp. 114-127]Re:assemblageOf Socks and Other Things [pp. 128-129]

Back Matter

Documents

Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier the Invention of Perspective