The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries

By Robin Evans

Book Overview

Robin Evans recasts the idea of the relationship between geometry and architecture, drawing on mathematics, engineering, art history, and aesthetics to uncover processes in the imagining and realizing of architectural form.

Anyone reviewing the history of architectural theory, Robin Evans observes, would have to conclude that architects do not produce geometry, but rather consume it. In this long-awaited book, completed shortly before its author's death, Evans recasts the idea of the relationship between geometry and architecture, drawing on mathematics, engineering, art history, and aesthetics to uncover processes in the imagining and realizing of architectural form. He shows that geometry does not always play a stolid and dormant role but, in fact, may be an active agent in the links between thinking and imagination, imagination and drawing, drawing and building. He suggests a theory of architecture that is based on the many transactions between architecture and geometry as evidenced in individual buildings, largely in Europe, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century.

From the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey to Le Corbusier's Ronchamp, from Raphael's S. Eligio and the work of Piero della Francesca and Philibert Delorme to Guarino Guarini and the painters of cubism, Evans explores the geometries involved, asking whether they are in fact the stable underpinnings of the creative, intuitive, or rhetorical aspects of architecture. In particular he concentrates on the history of architectural projection, the geometry of vision that has become an internalized and pervasive pictorial method of construction and that, until now, has played only a small part in the development of architectural theory.

Evans describes the ambivalent role that pictures play in architecture and urges resistance to the idea that pictures provide all that architects need, suggesting that there is much more within the scope of the architect's vision of a project than what can be drawn. He defines the different fields of projective transmission that concern architecture, and investigates the ambiguities of projection and the interaction of imagination with projection and its metaphors.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262550385
• ISBN13: 9780262550383
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 452 Pages
• Weight: 3.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.5" x 10.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Evans should be emulated

There have been times when after reading an assignment from this book, my students will ask me how the subject-matter was pertinent to what we had been studying. I tell them: in no way. I just want them to read Robin Evans so that they can learn how to write. No one writes like Evans.

must buy

While Translations from Drawing to Building is perhaps Evans' more often referenced publication, The Projective Cast is even better.

A must read!

This book is a must read for any architect interested in the geometries and shapes of buildings (which I hope is every architect) If you have second thoughts about buying it, buy it... it is informative, entertaining the diagrams and pictures are beautiful and it will take 2 (amazing) months to go through it.

Typical Evans. Clear, breath takingly obvious.

Robin Evans has a knack of getting right to the point of many a subject with expertise. Extremely versatile and knowledgable, he uses this base to write profoundly. Evans takes criticism to another level by getting to 'the obvious' quickly, then building on pre conceived theory with frightening clarity to form an original alternative view. This is a marvelously laid out book with fantastic illustrations and plates from Renaissance history to Eisenman. He is not caught up in the hype of self-preserving discourse or traditional methods of interrogation. The book has a wealth of information that acts like a reference book. So easy to read and so refreshing in opinion. RIP Robin, this is a classic work.