This body of work begins with a single nineteenth century volume, a treatise on perspective built as an instructional tool for draftsmen and architects; its plates teaching the correct rendering of columns, capitals, arches, and geometric solids through construction lines, proportional ratios, and annotated figures.
The book was among the first works of its kind brought to the United States and it now resides in the Redwood Library’s collection as an object of record rather than a manual of instruction. Treatises of this type occupied a specific role in the eighteenth and nineteenth century training of artists and architects, translating the mathematics of linear perspective into a visual grammar that a working draftsman could apply by hand.
In this project, each object, with its lines and curves drawn from the intaglio construction, is fabricated at the scale of the original engraving, not enlarged nor referenced as intended. The result sits in the distance between a diagram and a thing, at the scale of the page
