225divert the gaze. The frame of the delimited vista is exploded,
the image plane is broken open, as continuous wall slabs blur
distinctions between interior and exterior, and the panorama
window is dilated so far laterally that the edges responsible
for framing views vanish from the field of vision. The per-
spectival effects of architecture no longer bind the beholder
through targeted positioning and by focusing the gaze; such
bonds have become loosened.
Stepping into the foreground instead is the perspective’s
other role, namely its systemic function, i.e. its provision of
neutral scaffolding for the visibility of space and for the es-
tablishment of order within it. In this respect, incidentally, it
resembles other types of projects, such as axonometry. Origi-
nally, the constructive lines and axes of perspective facilitate
the structure of graphic depiction, but they are also material-
ized in the ordering grid of architectural structure, for exam-
ple in the modern skeleton frame structure, so to speak as
the isotropic spatial grid of a homogeneous coordinate space.
In such – in principle – homogeneous spaces, to be sure, the
perspectival gaze still emanates from a visual focus, but its
position and orientation are nonetheless arbitrary. While the
primarily subject-determined perspective in architecture was
constructed in such a way that it accentuated important align-
ments, centres, visual goals, framed views, and vistas, objec-
tivized perspective, as the perception of a ‘homogeneous but
fragmented space’ (Lefèbvre 1977), proffers exchangeable
components of views and images to the gaze. If in the first
conception, everything depends upon the standpoint, then
this becomes arbitrary in the context of its counterpart. Com-
pared with subjective perspective, it almost seems aperspecti-
val, or better: multiperspectival.
In fact, a full perception of architecture occurs only
through a complex of changing – but not arbitrary – angles of
vision. Elmar Holenstein (1985) has pointed out that the ori-
gin of ego-centredness need not coincide with the body, nor
with the eye-position of perceptual perspective. This does not