Chapter 4
Perspective
An understanding of perspective is essential in order to
gain a full appreciation of the aesthetic quality of towns,
and is necessary in order to be able to draw them well.
Many cities, especially those based upon classical
principles of town planning, exploit perspective in their
arrangement of streets and squares, and if you do not
understand the principles of perspective you can hardly
be expected to draw them adequately. Likewise, many
building interiors are so arranged that a grasp of
perspective is essential not only if you are going to
attempt to sketch them, but in order to understand their
spatial qualities.
Designers are able to visualise the volumetric
arrangement of their buildings simply by conceiving them
in terms of true perspective. Sir Christopher Wren was
one of the first architects to admit that an understanding
of perspective was vital for the design of a building.
Perspective allows the architect or designer to anticipate
the relationship of the parts of the design without making
a model or drawing a line. As we see towns in terms of
the routes and streets we take, and buildings in terms of
room and corridors, a grasp of linear perspective is a
fundamental starting point for spatial comprehension.
The discovery of true perspective was one of the high
points of Renaissance art. A handful of artists working in
Florence in the fifteenth century stumbled upon the rules
of perspective, and quickly exploited it in their paintings.
Soon afterwards it was adopted by architects, who
arranged their buildings and squares with mathematical
precision. The resulting environment seems almost to
have the expression of perspective as the central point of
the design. Proportional harmony and repeating bay sizes
lent themselves to presentation through perspective
either in the form of paintings or architectural sketches.
Later, in the Baroque period, town planning exploited
perspective by creating long vistas of streets or tree-lined
avenues ending almost at infinity or terminating with a
public building. Without the discovery of geometrically
correct perspective, grand designs such as Versailles or
the Nash terraces in London would have been
unthinkable.
To draw such towns one must understand per-
spective, but sketching in the street does not require
the production of drawing-board perspectives based
upon rotating picture planes and mathematical precision.
In fact, these elaborate perspective drawings can
become so complicated that they discourage you from
drawing on location at all. It is a case of the science of
perspective becoming an obstacle to learning the simple
principles of perspective.38 Understanding architecture through drawing