Hubert Damisch Book order

Trained as an art historian but viewing architecture from the perspective of a 'displaced philosopher,' Hubert Damisch in these essays offers a meticulous parsing of language and structure to 'think architecture in a different key,' as Anthony Vidler puts it in his introduction. Drawn to architecture because it provides 'an open series of structural models,' Damisch examines the origin of architecture and then its structural development from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. He leads the reader from Jean-François Blondel to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to Mies van der Rohe to Diller + Scofidio, with stops along the way at the Temple of Jerusalem, Vitruviuss De Architectura, and the Louvre. In the title essay, Damisch moves easily from Diderots Encylopédie to Noahs Ark (discussing the provisioning, access, floor plan) to the Pan American Building to Le Corbusier to Ground Zero. Noahs Ark marks the origin of construction, and thus of architecture itself. Diderots Encylopédie entry on architecture followed his entry on Noahs Ark; architecture could only find its way after the Flood

This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The author's basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud.

The second part of the book brings the historical invention of perspective into focus, discussing the experiments with mirrors made by Brunelleschi, connecting it to the history of consciousness via Jacques Lacan's definition of the "tableau" as "a configuration in which the subject as such gets its bearings.".