Vesper No. 6 | Magic | Spring-Summer 2022
Emanuele Garbin
Promontorium Somnii: The Invisible Border of
Architecture
The
architectural drawing has always been mostly a drawing of contours, where every
contour is a limit between what is seen and what is not seen: insofar as such
drawing necessarily partakes of what is visible and what is invisible. In the
contour, what is apparent is what is visible – not always all that is visible, and
not the same each time – but that edge is also the place from where one can imagine and
‘see’ what is invisible and incomprehensible. What is invisible
presses upon the drawing from the inside – in which case what is pressing is
what one does not see within and under the closed contours – and from the outside, in which case what
presses is what one does not see behind or in front of the drawing and on the
plane upon which the image composes itself. There is an invisible that sits
just inside or just outside the frame of the drawing: what is outside is
excluded by the intention that frames the object, what is inside is hidden by
the attention and by the very evidence of the object. Finally, there is the
extreme limit of the visible and comprehensible, that is, the circle of the
horizon having its centre in the object and the subject of the representation,
and of that portion of the world which contains them both.
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