Elective ‘Architecture and Art’
Reverse Perspective
Architect Wim Goes and philosopher Dr. Volkmar Muhleis
As research output from the ADO “Reverse Perspective” (2018-2020), Wim Goes and Volkmar Mühleis published the book Reverse Perspective (Ghent: Grafische Cel, 2020). It reflects on the art historical background of this notion from Byzantine art via cubism until contemporary art (David Hockney among others), in relation to architectural interpretations of it, regarding three examples from the practice of Wim Goes. Sarah M. Whiting, who works as architect on the Doppler Effect, invited the authors to present their research at Harvard Graduate School of Design in the series “Five on Five”/”Books and Looks” on 21 March 2022 (see www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/five-on-five-books-looks/, and for her research on the Doppler Effect in architecture: Robert Somol and Sarah M. Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism”, in Perspecta 33, Mining Autonomy, New Haven, 2002). Reverse Perspective as well as the Doppler Effect contain strategies to design beyond a Euclidian, dialectic approach in contemporary architecture. It is a rare opportunity to compare both ways of conceptualizing space and gain insight to their common and different potentials.
Studio assignment
The elective is open for architecture and art students. The elective is both practical and theoretical.
The elective organizes crossed sessions with the Academic Design Office ‘Reverse Perspective’. Architects and artists meet and discuss. They peer review each other’s work.
Architect Wim Goes, philosopher Dr. Volkmar Mühleis and Dr. Sarah M. Whiting will lecture (recorded). We all present and discuss work in progress.
We start from references. Something speaks or sparks, it evokes, we feel presence. We search for a reference alike, evoking something allied.
Can we transform the sense of ‘presence’ in our own work?
In a favoured medium (music, film, painting, model, drawing, poetry, photography, or…)? Does it motivate others to act, to involve? How do others perceive your work? And why, how? Is it stable in time? Is there a common ground, something we share?
How to involve personal space, meaning, context, aspects of identity, the unknown, …? What are the elements of Reverse Perspective? What could they be? What do they do?
Can we find them in the icon, can we find them in contemporary art and architecture, e.g. in the work of Hockney, Tarkovsky, Bruno Taut,..?
We compare ‘Reverse Perspective’ with ‘Doppler Effect in architecture’? (Doppler effect in architecture is not the same as Doppler effect in physics)
We make our work and insights presentable, so we can share our research..