Maybe some of you will remember Sous le sable[1] (France 2000), a beautiful and poignant film by director François Ozon (1967) from several years ago. For those who haven't seen it, the film tells the story of Marie (played by Charlotte Rampling, 1946) and Jean Drillon (Bruno Cremer, 1929–2010), a middle-aged couple who have been married for many years. He is French and she is English; they live in Paris and have no children. One day, during a summer vacation, Marie falls asleep on the beach while Jean goes swimming. The man, however, disappears into thin air, perhaps drowned. Having completed the formalities with the local authorities, Marie, returned to Paris, tries to start living again, while the police continue the investigation into the disappearance of her husband. However, her life develops daily as if Jean had never disappeared: in fact, she talks to him, makes love with him and astonishingly refers to him, with her friends, if he were present, there with her. And in the film he really ‘is’ with her: we see him undressing Marie, eating with her … But the truth, evident to all, is opaque only in her eyes, even when the police of seaside village recover her husband's body drowned. In the movie’s final scene, Marie returns to the beach that has seen them happy together, for the last time, and suddenly she sees, in the distance, the silhouette of Jean on the shore, walking away. Marie starts running to reach him: the scene, on which the credits fade with the beautiful score of Philippe Rombi (1968), is destined to never end. In fact, Marie's race towards Jean's ghost is not concluded, nor could it ever be. It seems that she approaches him, but in reality he remains unreachable: the image thus continues ad infinitum in a moving loop.
I believe that this scene explains perfectly, better than a thousand arid projective and mathematical demonstrations, in a poetic way, what a 'vanishing point' is: a fake image of something so far away (infinitely distant) that is never reached. The same phantasmic essence of Jean in the background, never reached by Marie, seals the failure of the human vision in trapping (and reaching) what is no longer among us and which, perhaps, never was. After all, the perspective, and the representation in general, is in some ways precisely this: the death of the object, its hypostatization. Yet this deadly scene from Ozon's movie also visually explains to us what the term 'resistance' means: opposing the inevitability of nature, destiny, the known and unknown forces that surround and condition us, of our ego and oppose our desire to it, our will and also our unreasonableness. The scene therefore seems to allude to a form of resistance to the impossibility of representing the infinite, in this specific case, from a merely human position and therefore eternally condemned to failure. The etymology in this case comes to our aid: the term derives from the late Latin resistentia, derivative of resistere, "resisting", to indicate the action and the fact of opposing something or someone, but also the way and the means themselves with which such actions take place. It has various semantic nuances, for example in the military field (defense action against the enemy or the adversary), but also legal (the right to oppose, even by force, any attack or threat affecting the fundamental and inviolable rights of man by the established power). But I would like to dwell on its mechanical meaning where the verb 'resist' alludes to any force that opposes the motion of the body to which it is applied: this definition therefore seems to fit perfectly, in its double articulation, to the conventional domains of the architect, that of the representation and of building. The first involves a process of objectification of the real, through the aid of a mechanism external to the observer, which in the specific case consists of a projection. Projection, in the cultural status of an architect, is a transformative action that allows objects belonging to domains characterized by three dimensions to be brought back to their flat representation with the inevitable loss of one of them: a process therefore of reductio and translatio that makes clear a strong mechanical action de-anthropomorphizing resistance.
Any architectural projection constitutes a form of profound abstraction with respect to reality and therefore implies a form of logical-rhetorical construction that eliminates the object and which, through the projective vehicle, transforms it into an archetype, or a model. Descriptive Geometry— like all other forms of representation, even ethnographically distant from that which dwell in Western culture—therefore arises from constructions of thought and from an observer-independent projective process, even in its most optical application, that of the monocular perspective. However, today the context in which the architect works has violently changed. With the advent of the digital, representation seems to have lost memory of its projective origin: entire universes that, in the past, have been narrated to us as born from the projective act of biblical fiat lux or of primeval Om whose acoustic echo reached everywhere to organize matter and spirit, today in the horizon of the eidomatics seem to lose more and more sense. On the other hand, the architect's resistance is expressed in his or her desire to contrast the laws of gravity that dominate the phenomenal world; resistances that seem to me to be historically well-summarized in the stereotomic configuration procedures that today have a natural analogon in the tools of some digital modeling software, to the point of appearing to be created specifically for this purpose—impression corroborated by the close ties that can be established, at that placement, with rapid prototyping, imaginable as a sort of a digital Maitre Maçon. The geometric construction thus manages to translate into the construction of physical elements through a process of phylogenesis totally controlled by the architect. Stereotomy testifies how the knowledge of geometry, even before Gaspard Monge (1746–1818), could develop all its imaginative power by introjecting in its practices of projections and determinations of the true forms (or sizes), tectonic criteria handed down in the secret of the stonemasons’ guilds, at least up to the act of rupture with the silence made in the treatises, by Philibert de L'Orme (c. 1514–1570).
From a historical point of view, stereotomy constitutes a charade that has been baffling scholars for decades: in fact, when only the practices of manual roughing of the stone prevailed, the stonecutter already exercised in his mind the control of the form through the wise identification of the plans of cutting and contact between the blocks, modeling surfaces with double curvature with a naturalness disguised by years of practice, but never explicitly resorting to auxiliary graphics. Again, one might say, a form of internal resistance. The space of representation was therefore entirely entoptic, 'internal', carried out in the mind of the operator, which, as Charles Howard Hinton noted in his studies on the fourth dimension[2], became a place of virtual prefiguration where the modeling action was carried out through completely abstract sculptural procedures, yet with concrete effects in the act of making the work. The sixteenth-century graphics elaborated by de L'Orme, in the illustrative apparatus of his treatise Le premier tome de l'Architecture (1567), didactically show these passages, previously confined to the opaque space of the mind, but still did not linguistically solve the gap that separated them from the understanding shared by the community of operators: cryptic in form, exact in methodological approach, they needed, for their unanimous understanding, a 'Rosetta stone' which, in the 18th century will prove to be classical Descriptive Geometry. Thanks to it, the methods of sizing, measurement and the equivalence of the projection-section operations assumed a displayed dignity and a common Esperanto that would eliminate the distance between scholar and construction work site practice. Above all, the equivalence—postulated by Jean Victor Poncelet[3]—between the operation of projection and that of section, here also assumed in a physical sense, appeared to be the keystone in the understanding of the common procedures for configuring the form between mental imagination and the space of the phenomenological experience: the idea that the hyperuraneous and ethereal lines, which pile up the tables of the treatises on descriptive and projective geometry, can become the analogon of physical instruments that operate in corpore vivi on the stone, unravels a series of infinite possibilities and equivalences between the world of theory and the world of practice that perhaps Girard Desargues (1591–1661) had already guessed when he used botanical terms or nautical jargon to define the elements of his geometry. These observations appear even more meaningful when referring to contemporary architectural production, oscillating between two behavioral extremes: on the one hand, the increasingly accelerated push towards the use of complex forms which, in an attempt to accommodate the designer's ideas, require the development of theoretical and operational approaches for its engineering, often unrelated to the architect and delegated to other technical-scientific skills; on the other hand, the corrective trivialization of the profession that adopts pre-packaged solutions from industry in an uncritical manner, helping to debase the horizon of the contemporary urban landscape. Today the new forms of artistic expression can give new life to the configurative imagination of the architect, showing how even the most complex constructions can be translated into forms that can be experienced in the phenomenal space of an installation, making the space of geometry no longer an elsewhere, but a 'here and now.'