Disclosing Horizons Book

Illustration credits     ix
Acknowledgements     xi
Introduction     1
Order and chaos, or "What to leave out?"     4
Taking measures     4
Nietzsche's perspectivism     12
Being-in-the-world     14
Alterity and infinity     20
Visible and invisible     21
What to leave out?     23
Number, geometry and dialectic     24
The origin of geometry     24
Pythagoras and the unutterable     27
The Meno     34
The Timaeus     38
Ad triangulum versus ad quadratum     42
Triangulating perspective     44
The School of Athens     50
Louis Kahn's Yale Art Gallery     65
Light, memory and colour     76
Medieval transformations     76
From memory to recorded document     78
Light metaphysics     81
Optical science     84
Grosseteste's light     86
The Bishop's Eye     88
Light and perspective     96
Light and the colour of experience     101
Steven Holl's Chapel of St Ignatius     102
Topography, rhetoricand the vanishing point     112
Horizontal and vertical worlds     112
Convivial settings     113
Alberti's eye     122
Nicholas Cusanus     140
The Papal Window     143
Alvaro Siza's Galician Centre for Contemporary Art     150
Unity in multiplicity     160
Baroque and universality     160
Distentio animi and the dome     162
Athanasius Kircher     166
Leibniz and the monad     173
J. B. Fischer von Erlach     178
Hofbibliothek     184
Peter Zumthor's St Benedict's Church     191
Nature and immensity     199
Transgressing boundaries     199
The picturesque and the sublime     203
Chambers and oikoumene     209
Boullee's visionary perspectives     213
Casper David Friedrich's studio     216
Rem Koolhaas' EuraLille and "I'Espace Piranesien"     221
Disjointed views     230
Attention and perspective     230
Attention and distraction     233
Illusion of a "mastering totalisation"     237
Magnification and distortion     241
Gustave Moreau's house      245
Eric Parry's artists' studios, London     250
Conclusion: architecture that looks back at us     262
Notes     270
Index     300