He had adopted the architect's tool of
axonometric projection, "where they use a diagonal or an oblique view of space in order to think about its outside and its inside".
This is evident in, what Bell considers, the most quintessential feature of Tosa's spatial characteristic,
axonometric projection (150).
Indeed, the designs of projects in Poland, which are juxtaposed (although not physically) with the projects developed by the same architects in Africa and the Middle East, are presented through the medium of
axonometric projection, a type of line drawing that shows an object in a skewed direction in order to reveal multiple sides of the object in the same picture.
Illustration:
Axonometric projection of Bavarian dairy farm of the future for 160 milking cows with cow-kennels, two milking robots, automatic feeding, biogas plant, and photovoltaic cells on all roofs.
This technique allows Aronson to hold onto a sense of normative viewing, whereas the
axonometric projection into four directions leads to distortion.
"just as
axonometric projection eliminates every fixed, unique viewpoint," writes Yve-Alain Bois in his essay "Metamorphoses of Axonometry" (1981/1983), "so it has been used throughout history in a multiple, contradictory fashion."Sofie Thorsen's recent work evokes parallel complexity, exploring axonometry through wall drawings and panels in a series of "Screens Within Screens," 2014.
Her first move was to turn to painting--not just any painting but the Suprematist abstraction of Kazimir Malevich--to rework the standard conventions of architectural representation (plan, elevation, perspective,
axonometric projection) and, in doing so, to develop an abstract language for her own practice, one that might advance the dynamic possibilities of architecture.
Similarly, the presence of multiple and contradictory spatial systems, especially the combination of
axonometric projection with photographic elements in plan, elevation, or one-point perspective, yields in the late '30s to the perspectival reorganization of space around a dominant horizon line, as seen in Kulagina's 1938-39 photo panels for the Siberian pavilion at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition.