Alberti's Window: A Phenomenological Dilemma

Abstract

From traditional hand-drawings to contemporary CAD visualisation, Alberti's Window has persisted as a fundamental instrument of architectural representation for over half a millennium. Writing from a phenomenological standpoint, architect and scholar Juhani Pallasmaa has criticised Alberti's Window for perpetuating a visually-biased design culture that marginalises the importance of other sensory modalities to spatio-temporal experience: this is the phenomenological dilemma of Alberti's Window . He has gone so far as to call for its rejection altogether. This paper seeks to establish a discursive foundation to address Pallasmaa's justifiable concerns. Adopted in its current form from Alberti's treatise on the art of painting in perspective De Pictura in 1435, the method was distilled mathematically by Cambridge scholar Brook Taylor in the early eighteenth century. Read in a phenomenological context, aspects of Brook Taylor's scholarship present a critical foundation from which to extrapolate the instrument's more complete conceptual potency within an architectural context.