The mosaic above depicts the metal grill on top of which Saint Lawrence was cooked alive in 258 AD Rome, after being sentenced for distributing material goods from the church to locals in poverty. This type of grill, known as a gridiron, was typical of Roman cooking, and became the object held by Saint Lawrence in depictions of himself throughout history. The mosaic can be found on the southern wall in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna, Italy, and was made between 425 - 450AD. It is claimed as a small example of early axonometric perspective within Western art history. Axonometric perspective, where all lines are held in parallel, with no central vanishing point, holds a viewpoint unachievable by the human eye. It was more typical within Asian art history, whilst western depictions of space favoured the single point perspective as experienced by an individual person. Axonometric perspective has been claimed as a ‘true’ perspective, as an objective vision - in that it conveys geometric fact instead of a semblance of space as we see it with eyes.
It provided the groundwork for the development of handscroll paintings from the 8th century onwards in China. These paintings would be rolled and only viewed in segments, which would be browsed at important visits or festivities, scrolling across a seamless timeline of scenarios which would blend from one scenery into the next within its axonometric format. Often following a route or journey across their width, the drawings traversed mountain landscapes, cities and forests. They would be rolled and stored in sealed boxes, unrolled they could be up to 25 metres in length. In the late 1600s, during the Qing dynasty, Wang Hui’s studio was commissioned to produce a series of 12 scrolls that depicted Emperor Kangxi’s inspection tour of Eastern China. In 1900, during the invasion of Bejing (by the ‘Eight-Nation Alliance’ of Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the USA, Italy and Austria-Hungary) the 6th scroll from the series of 12 was looted by a French general, alongside a huge number of Chinese artefacts, which began to wash up in the capital cities of Europe. The scroll arrived in France, and, in 1936, on the death of the French general, was cut into 7 sections to be inherited by his 7 children, rupturing its axonometric continuum and reducing them down to sizes between 2 and 3 metres. This now allowed them to be on permanent view, pinned open in display cases, able to fit inside more achievable dimensions of glass picture frames, and held in several separated locations. In auctions since 2010, a collector from Hong Kong has been acquiring the separate pieces of the scroll, which was displayed in it’s reassembled full length in October 2020.
At the turn of the 19th century, the industrial revolution in Europe demanded the ability for construction and manufacturing manuals to be clear and understandable for reproduction and distribution. The axonometric perspective was adopted, due to it’s compatibility in clearly depicting mechanical processes and machinery, and then this was further geometricised to become isometric perspective. Within isometric perspective all measurements (X, Y and Z) were true and in mathematical scale to an object: the drawing could be measured and these measurements applied exactly to the physical object it represented.
This later filtered into the architectural workings of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose 1912 book ‘The Japanese Print’, established isometric perspective as the foundation of the modernist architecture movement, the limitless format of the equal grid providing the perfect foundation for modernism’s drives of modular structures and multiplicity. If linear perspective limits space toward a central point, something finite and closed, then axonometry is said to open perspective into infinity, it is the visual arena of multiplicity and distanceless. This became the footprint for the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements, the forerunners of the modernism that was enveloping Europe and the USA, later spilling into the domestic space of the post- war via two Scandinavian developments in the 1940s - Ikea and Lego. Both used isometric perspective within their instruction manuals and its format became central to their philosophy of modularised creativity. In 2009 a number of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings were translated into limited releases under the LEGO Architecture branch, including the Guggenheim in New York and Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania. Whilst it is hard to depict a mountain or forest within the geometric limits of Lego, the model buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, stemming from the same isometric format as Lego, became instant collectables and now resell for thousands of dollars.
I used to put Legos in my mouth as a child, ingesting small traces of the petrochemical processes , that leeched from the plastic surface when in contact with the acidic bacterias of my saliva. These micro-plastics hovered in fluoro clouds throughout my arterial networks, haunting my bloodstream. These little Lego bricks hold the same physiological stress as mined diamonds, through their own history of compression, years of organic material and decaying vegetation, heated under deep pressure, forming crude oil and natural gasses, dredged up from the earth exponentially over the last 100 years, processed and moulded into the various materials and products that have catalysed and hosted the culture and constructions of the 20th and 21st century.
These new materials allowed a slickness of surface and uniform distribution of bold colour not easily achievable with earlier organic materials such as wood, stone and ceramics. This slickness of surface was a byproduct of design since the 1950s, the development of stable plastics, who’se surface was bold enough to be able to gloss over the inherent force and damage necessary for the processes of material extraction needed to produce themselves. It is hard to see the labour and pressure of these material’s own production when looking at a surface so smooth and bold, which eclipses the image of the warped lungs of the plant operators who inhale the thick surplus of these petrochemical activities.
I later spent hours on Rollercoaster Tycoon , a series of PC computer games, appearing at the turn of the millennium, in which the player cultivates and maintains theme parks, adding new rides, food refreshments and foliage to sustain the entertainment of an ever increasing amount of visitors. In the same way that the rollercoaster was a mutation from the railroad, Rollercoaster Tycoon was a descendent of the previous Transport Tycoon (from 1994). Also designed by Chris Sawyer, Transport Tycoon tasked the player with globalising a miniature world of disparate towns, linking them with rail routes, airfields and motorways, to increase and smooth the transportation of people and goods. Rollercoaster Tycoon maintains the same financial orientation, expanding and managing fictional communities, but moves from logistics into leisure. An early business and management game that paved the way for a multitude of tycoon themed games (in zoos, shopping malls, hospitals). Rollercoaster Tycoon entered the world at the same time as Sims (2000), another creation game existing on the same isometric framework. (In both of these games, due to the isometric perspective of gameplay, you can never see the horizon). Rollercoaster Tycoon was one of the earliest computer games to use this isometric map, instead of holding an aerial or 2D frontal view, used on previous games for home computers or arcade machines. On designing the Rollercoaster Tycoon games, Chris Sawyer has said that “there’s a Lego-like philosophy to my games” and that he “was especially turned off by the trend for games becoming more violent and destructive”.
Not only in the material finish of the last 100 years is there an obscuration of the violence inherent in it’s own production, but this violence could be both inherent and obscured in the geometric harmony of the isometric perspective itself, which was necessary in order to prepare the way for these material advances to take place. In the same way that plastics and other petro- and fluoro- chemical materials (and their residues) have infused our diet and now inhabit our internal biotic flora communities, it has been said that due to osmosis the large majority of the world are starting to experience their dreams from an isometric viewpoint.
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