Building a modern vision: Auguste Choisy\u27s graphic constructs

The illustrations created by the engineer Auguste Choisy for his principal work, the Histoire de l\u27architecture of 1899, express a deliberate correspondence between the mode of visual expression and the architectural idea of building. His novel development of the worm\u27s-eye view axonometric merits scrutiny. This dissertation investigates Choisy\u27s use of parallel projection in communicating not only his tectonic theory of architecture, but the ways in which this drawing form came to communicate uniquely the dynamic patterns characterizing nineteenth century French epistemological and architectural discourse. The intellectual content of Choisy\u27s education, career, scholarship, and teaching of architecture while associated with the pre-eminent technical institutions, the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, are examined. The dissertation tracks the invention of axonometric projection, detailing its pragmatic genesis in 1820 as isometrical perspective in England to its ultimate theoretical refinements within the fields of mathematics and geometry in Germany and France. The study demarcates the spatial divide in parallel projection between the oblique cavalier perspective and orthogonal axonometric perspective. It proceeds to analyze how Choisy used these forms of parallel projection and exploited the new rotational space of axonometry in his conception of the inside view to document the spatio-tectonic fundaments of vaulted structure in his first illustrated work in 1873, L\u27art de bâtir chez les Romains. The imagined worm\u27s-eye view is explored as a critical device that equilibrates the geometric, homogenized object in parallel space via an inhabiting observer. Shifting the examination to the Histoire reveals an abundant use of cavalier perspectives and limited examples of axonometric perspectives; Choisy guides their inherent spatial differences toward divergent theoretical purposes. This dissertation concludes that Choisy\u27s cavalier perspectives operate comparatively, ultimately structuring an iconic technique through which the built artifact becomes a theoretical proposition, and that axonometric perspectives idealize tectonic space, implicitly positing space as one of the necessary elements in the artful assemblage of architectural form.