Exploring Wrong Perspectives: “What happens when the convention falls short for the idea at hand?”

Our proposal should be considered as a reflective conversation between three different parties: an architect (A), an artist (B) and a mathematician (C). All three of us are involved in teaching (aspects of) drawing/ visualisation for architecture students and share a mutual interest in exploring the boundaries and extensions of perspective drawing.While the method of linear perspective with one, two or three vanishing points has been under attack from many different angles (psychology, philosophy, art theory, anthropology…), architecture and design remain rather ‘faithful’ to the system. Moreover within these disciplines the projective foundations constitute the convention to communicate ideas about form and space. Yet, conventional perspective only visualises frozen one-eyed snapshots of the world. This contradicts the dynamic, multisensory experience of time, form and space. Acknowledging this discrepancy has consequences for the drawing instruction. Architectural drawing can be considered as a peculiar faculty of drawing. Metaphoric on the one hand, descriptive on the other. While metaphoric drawings drive the creative process, descriptive drawings drive production processes. ‘Wrong’ perspectives position themselves in-between these modes. In the (drawing) courses we teach, we started exploring the consequences, possibilities and challenges of extending linear perspective in architectural design processes and its education.Our paper intends to reflect upon geometry, observation, imagination and invention in architectural design and its learning processes. To structure the dialogue we started sending drawings to each other. (A) provided a set of design drawings that visualise more than one can see (fig.1). (B) provided an analysis of a historical drawing to reflect upon geometry and perception. (fig.2) (C) provided a series of explorations to geometrically construct ‘wrong’ perspectives (fig.3). Combined they provide a backdrop to reflect upon pedagogic challenges for - and possibilities of ‘wrong’ perspectives.