- Reichlin in his essay discussed the decisive contribution of “axonometric” drawing to architectural representation. With the manifestation of actual projects and architectural presentations by Eisenman, Gropius, Hejduk, Lissitzky, and Hilberseimer, Reichlin argued that “the complex relationship and the divorce that had come to exist between the architectural product in its perceptible and consumable reality on the one hand, and the virtuality of concepts, the design procedures and the way they were formalized in the instruments of representation on the other. The axonometric representation … becomes almost a symbol of this problematic issue.” The author further offered three acquisitions: (1) axonometry is not so much a means of representation as a tool for work. it can be as perspicuous as you like. nonetheless it, first of all, reveals a poetic viewpoint and calls for specialized knowledge; (2) although architects had never hitherto insisted so strongly on the social ends of architecture, the new architectural conformation does not, however, aim to signify socializing or symbolic contents in accordance with a centuries-old custom that immediately made them understandable to common sense; and (3) axonometry favors a methodological innovation – axonometric drawings synthetically substantiate – at a level that might be defined as “meta-design” – the intersection between the needs (functional, constructional, process and expressive) that the object has to satisfy and the diagram of the physical structure that satisfies them.
LIYANG DING 