Perspective - An Introduction

I did perspective layouts by hand in the early part of my career. When 3D modeling came along I jumped on board eagerly. So… in regard to this blog I have to ask myself…

Does anyone need to know how to do layouts by hand?

If you are relatively young, and only know computer modeling, you might view hand layouts as anachronistic and useless. Indeed, when dealing with basic renderings they ARE useless.

But if you want your rendering to stand out from the crowd you have to know when to step outside the CAD “box”. And, when you step outside the box you’ll find it handy to have a basic understanding of perspective. 

So, yes, I’m going to publish a number of posts on laying out perspectives.

Following are examples from my files where knowledge of perspective came in handy.

Placing a modeled structure into an existing aerial photograph takes a good eye, and a sense of vertical convergence; as in this rendering of the observation tower at Niagara Falls.

… Or in this proposal for Olympic venues outside New York City.

…Or in this master plan aerial perspective of the Rutgers Camden campus across from Philadelphia. In all these cases understanding basic perspective helped to make a coherent image of the project.

Rendering a simple building in the computer is quick and satisfying, but working out the context in detail is hard. A photo-montage is the quickest solution, but making the final image seamless and believable is not so easy. This performing arts center at Georgetown University is an example.

…As is this office building in Providence, Rhode Island.

…As are these additions to the Kansas City Auditorium.

An existing interior has the same problems of perspective “fit”.  This view of the Minneapolis Symphony Hall changed the color scheme and carpet. The believability of the carpet demanded a clear idea of receding surfaces in perspective.

Although a bird’s eye perspective can be produced in a CAD rendering program, it is useful to know the basis for the mechanical layout of such a view.

The same goes for a worm’s eye view, although the only reason I did this one was to see if I could actually pull it off.

So… in the next few months I will post on one point perspective, two point perspective and three point perspective, as well as some notes on marginal drawing types. The information will not include detailed instruction on layouts (there are plenty of websites that cover the nuts and bolts of perspective layout), but rather will focus on basics that will help anyone integrate hand work, computer rendering and photography.

Other posts on Perspective:

Perspective- An Introduction

Perspective - One Point Perspective - History to Beaux Arts

Perspective - One Point Perspective - Exterior Elevations

Perspective - One Point Perspective - Interior Elevations

Perspective - One Point Perspective - Aerial

Perspective - One Point Perspective - Using a Diagonal Vanishing Point

Perspective - One Point Perspective - Distortions & Complications

Perspective - One Point Perspective - Portfolio & Comments

Perspective - Two Point Perspective - Distortions & Complications
Perspective - Three Point Perspective- Hand & CAD

Deadly Data

(Note: this post has nothing to do with art or architecture, but is instead an escape into another side of me.)

Historically, there has been a debate among intellectuals about the source of violence in humans. Some have believed that humans are animals, “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson put it; or as Thomas Hobbes had it, life outside civilization was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Others have believed that civilization, especially individual ownership of property, made humans more violent, following Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s views. One side saw violence as inherent in human nature; the other saw the noble savage living in Eden. One side thought we could find salvation only in an afterlife; the other thought we could “get ourselves back to the garden.”  

The Rousseauian view is still alive and well in politics and the culture, but in the sciences specifically dealing with the problem, the natural violence of humans is largely accepted. The debate has moved on to the question of “What sparks human violence: tangible resources, such as food; or intangible things, such as jealousy, cultural differences, and revenge?” And conversely, if humans have a latent violence that can be elicited by some things to create inhumane terrorism but that can be moderated by other things to create peaceful order, what are the things that create peace and order? 

The partial answer is that it is not all a matter of food and shelter. Humans are more often drawn to violence by abstract ideas and perceived deprivation. This is obvious when you look at war between Western states in the past few centuries, but it is surprisingly the case when anthropologists study primitive tribes. Food is not the driving factor; stealing women, and revenge, is.  

Starvation will eventually lead an individual or group to violence, but under normal circumstances humans don’t wait until starvation is on them to kill. We seem to have an imaginative brain that has evolved to rely on violence when we think our options are shrinking.

This argument over the sources of human violence goes back to the dawn of history, but its more recent incarnation is as a war of statistics.  Rates of violent death are marshaled to prove or disprove each side’s case. I’m not a statistician, but several articles and books have tumbled over my desk recently, and I want to post them if only to have a record of the information they contain.

Ape ancestors…

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (pay wall unfortunately), Jane Goodall, Richard Wrangham, and Dale Peterson wrote that the average “conservatively estimated risk of violent death” among chimpanzee populations in Africa was 271 per 100,000 individuals per year (though not all chimpanzees are so aggressive. And bonobos do not hunt in groups and have a very low rate of violent death).

Primitive tribes…

There are many early societies that academics believe may have been peaceful (the Tiwanaku, a precursor of the Inca in South America, for instance).

Steven LeBlanc, in Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, makes a thorough case for the natural violence of animals and humans, specifically noting that the highland New Guinea tribes, before contact with civilized humans, had a violent-death rate of 25 percent among their men.

War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, by Lawrence H. Keeley (1996), uses archaeological evidence to argue that prehistoric societies were generally more violent than modern societies. He also cites anthropological data on existing tribal societies. 

Steven Pinker referred to this graph in The Blank Slate. The tribal statistics range from 8,000 per 100,000 individuals per year to 60,000 per 100,000 individuals per year. That is massively more than the rate among the chimpanzee population, but also much more than deaths caused by warfare in the 20th century in the United States and Europe (World War I and World War II). 

Modern warfare at its worst (Paraguayan War of 1864-70) killed at an average rate of 14,000 per 100,000 individuals per year, or toward the low end of the tribal-society range. But wars in tribal societies occur regularly, while wars in the modern world are rather rare, although much more lethal. The wartime violent-death rate during WWII for Europe was roughly 500 per 100,000 per year for seven years in a row. For the United States it was only 80, and for only four years. This beats the chimps. Moreover, the peacetime violent-death rate for the United States and Europe is closer to six per 100,000 per year, and that rate has held throughout my lifetime.

The most violent “peacetime” country today is Guatemala, which has a rate of 75 per 100,000 per year--  considerably lower than the chimpanzees in Africa.

It looks as though we have not eliminated violence but, rather, channeled it into short periods, interspersed with longer periods of relative peace. Between wars we have gotten more and more peaceful over the centuries…

In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), Pinker writes that “Violent deaths of all kinds have declined, from around 500 per 100,000 people per year in prestate societies to around 50 in the Middle Ages, to around six to eight today worldwide, and fewer than one in most of Europe.”

When I was researching Native American tribes back in college, I found only one that seemed to have discovered the way to have a civilized culture and no war: the Hopi Indians. But pushed to the limit by Spanish oppression and attempts to convert them to Catholicism, the Hopi and Pueblo groups united to massacre the Spanish, killing the converted Hopi men, removing the women and children, and completely destroying the pueblo of Awatovi, where the conversions had occurred. Apparently there are limits to “turning the other cheek.” 

There it is. I have no resolution to the debate, but I would say this: My opinion is that humans are naturally aggressive, and will tend to expand and dominate the world around them until something serious stops them. A tribe or civilization that is deeply dedicated to peace and sacrifice will probably be conquered or destroyed by their more aggressive neighbors.

We in the West seem to be of two minds about our own civilization. At times we think we are the civilization, embodying rationality, beauty, technology, and life. At other times we think we are the source of all evil, embodying madness, ugliness, brutality, and death.

Of course, we are correct. We embody all of that, in all its glorious complexity and gory madness. We are the killer ape, with the biggest killer brain; but we are also the organizing ape, with the biggest contemplative, compromising brain. The way we balance, channel, and rationalize these opposing drives is what makes us the complicated, charming, and dangerous animal that we are.

We are stardust.

Billon year old carbon.

We are golden.

Caught in the devil’s bargain.

And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

-          Joni Mitchell