Orthographic Projection

Definition

Orthographic projection is, in Lois Weinthal's account, "the fundamental drawing system in interior architectural design for grounding a project in true measurement in order to convey information to builders" — "a universal form of visual communication by utilizing a set of variables that have reached a level of objectivity." Its mechanics: "a field of parallel lines meets a perpendicular surface"; "Plan, section, and elevation inform one another across invisible hinges that result in a collection of two-dimensional views folded up to convey a three-dimensional form." The system's constitutive relation is neutral until activated — "The perpendicular relationship is neutral until the draughtsperson activates the latent field of invisible parallel lines received by the passive surface patiently awaiting the drawn line, also known as the picture plane" — and the receiving surface must be flat, "otherwise a ripple in the picture plane would disrupt the rules and potentially cause misinterpretation." Point, line, and plane "help translate back and forth between one, two, and three dimensions, where the point can be seen as the fundamental element upon which everything else is built"; what appears as a point or line in one view may appear as a plane in another — hence multiple views, and the hinge as the system's binding device.

The concept's critical weight lies in what the hinge binds out. The system "provides true data under the assumption that only physical elements are documented": "As the design appears on paper, the drawing requires that the form being recorded hold still, as if being drawn for a still life. This works for static elements but is unaccepting of the temporary and fleeting. This matters not so much for architecture, but it matters in interior design, where the practice is responsible for designing the temporary and fleeting." Time is "a variable inherent to the temporal, but absent from this drawing type" — occupants moving while the room is drawn leave no trace, and "orthographic drawings like it that way; it keeps the space clean and objective rather than muddy with the ephemeral shoes of people walking through it." Weinthal's test case is the ballet pirouette: "dynamic and static at the same time," capturable in plan as a dot at the pointe shoe (with "no distinction as to whether it is static or dynamic"), but in elevation "the body becomes a blur, which the orthographic system does not like" — the system "fractures at approximately one inch above the plan view."

The system is nonetheless not closed. It already contains "a moment of disbelief… inherent in the orthographic drawing – such as the rule that allows the dotted line to represent what is behind or in front of the picture plane, while still allowing the variables to remain constant"; Anna Pavlova's posthumous stage-light (see light-tracing) and Callaghan & Palmer's core vertical axis (see space-shape) both show movement's data being admitted through the same "rules and variables"; and the baroque anamorphic technique — rules transformed out of perspective's conventions while retaining precision — models how "another reading" could be derived by rule-change. Weinthal's verdict and programme: "The degree of objectivity that the variables and principles of orthographic projection have arrived at result in a set of rules distilled to fundamentals that are unarguable. The missing piece is the integration of movement that has yet to find a way into the drawing that can become part of the professional construction document set" — movement too may "be distilled down to a set of rules, but it may have to be derived from the documentation of movement first."

Key Thinkers

• Lois Weinthal — the concept's analyst: probes the orthographic system "to find where it loses its grip on supporting the work of the designer," locates the fissure where "the temporal activities on the interior are left off the orthographic drawing," and proposes movement-rules derived from movement-documentation.
• (Named in the source, not yet paged — see log: Jane Callaghan & Catherine Palmer, industrial engineers whose 1944 Measuring Space and Motion built an orthographic-mimicking stage for documenting the moving body.)
• (Named in the source, not yet paged — see log: Jules Étienne Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, the chronophotographers whose sequence-of-frames registration of change Weinthal cites as the alternative to the single orthographic moment.)
• Alberto Pérez-Gómez & Louise Pelletier — the hinge's historiographers (via Weinthal's note 7): Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (1997), the book whose title Weinthal's "orthographic hinge" answers.

Related Concepts

• Representation — the system is representation's most institutionalized register: "true data," "a universal form of visual communication," rules "distilled to fundamentals that are unarguable" — constructiveness and constraint at once (what cannot be represented will not be built).
• Perspective — the sibling projection system: converging rays against parallel lines; Weinthal's title answers Pérez-Gómez & Pelletier's "perspective hinge," and her proposed rule-change follows the anamorphic precedent perspective itself produced.
• Temporality — the system's excluded variable: "Time is a variable inherent to the temporal, but absent from this drawing type"; the hinge binds views, not moments.
• Light Tracing — the admitted substitute: light as "a replacement for the body," "an intermediate step toward an alternative iteration of the drawing. After all, the same rules and variables apply."
• Space-Shape — the system's empirical double: Callaghan & Palmer's stage-set of cameras and mirrors reconstructing, in three dimensions and in motion, what orthographic views fold up in two.
• Movement Perception — the moving body from the other side: not the perceiving observer in motion (Venturi's highway) but the moving body as the object the drawing cannot hold.
• Interior Design — the discipline the failure weighs on: "it matters in interior design, where the practice is responsible for designing the temporary and fleeting."
• Truth and Illusion — the system's licensed fiction: the dotted line as the "moment of disbelief" already built into "true data," and the anamorphic "another reading" as rule-governed illusion with retained precision.
• Partition of Space — the plan as political document: the orthographic plan's sequences and distributions as the drawn form of social organization (the corridor, the symmetrical hierarchy, the distributed democracy — via Evans and Vanucci).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• A pirouette on the orthographic hinge (Weinthal 2018) — the concept's source: the system's rules and variables (parallel lines, perpendicular surface, picture plane, point-line-plane, invisible hinges), the still-life requirement, the pirouette's one-inch fracture, the Pavlova light-point, the Callaghan & Palmer axis, the dotted-line disbelief, and the anamorphic programme for evolving the system.
• Inside-out and outside-in (Vanucci 2018) — the political register: "The representation of architecture and its interior, in fact, has traditionally been expressed through orthographic projections in a Euclidean space. Plan and section are traditionally considered to be vehicles to communicate the organization and political dimensions of the architecture and its interior." The plan "organizes a particular sequence of spaces and describes the nature of its human dimension. It manifests the intention of a specific social and political structure; a symmetrical and centralized plan aligns with a hierarchical organization, whereas a fragmented and distributed plan instigates a more open and democratic occupation of space." The section, similarly, "is a representational tool that can be used for organizing the hierarchy of social strata." Via Robin Evans's "Figures, Doors, and Passages": the corridor's addition — the drawn plan's most consequential political device — "introduced the separation of different social strata within a single home. Privacy, distance, and the segregation of the aristocracy from servants were manifested in architectural forms for the first time thanks to the addition of corridors and ancillary circulatory spaces." Where Weinthal's register asks what the system cannot draw (movement, time), Vanucci's asks what it has always drawn: power — the plan and section as the interior's political documents. See partition-of-space, privacy.

Open Questions

• Weinthal's fracture threshold is "approximately one inch above the plan view" — is this a literal claim about scale drawings (the band where a standing body's mark ceases to be a registrable point) or a figure for the system's two-dimensionality? What precisely happens between one inch and full elevation?
• The dotted line is "a moment of disbelief… inherent" in the system: if the construction-document set already tolerates one licensed fiction, is the integration of movement a rule-extension (dotted time) or a new hinge (a temporal sheet folded with the spatial ones)?
• Allen (via Carraher) observes that digital software still defaults to "a perspectival frame and an orthographic coordinate system": does the orthographic hinge survive BIM and 4D simulation as one sheet among many, or does the "coordinate system" continue to govern what interiors can be proposed at all?
• Callaghan & Palmer needed simultaneous capture and a shared axis to align their views; dance notation, motion capture, and sensor logs each supply simultaneous data now. Which of these can be "distilled down to a set of rules" that a builder could price — and is that the right criterion for a drawing of the fleeting?
• Woolf's reversed gaze (the servants watching Orlando) ends the chapter with observation itself set in motion. Is the orthographic system's "objectivity" — the observer set apart from the observed — a position any drawing can give up and still be a construction document?