Rem Koolhaas and the inverted perspective of Villa Dall’Ava

Abstract

In the mid of 1980s, Rem Koolhaas was commissioned to build a villa in the hills of Saint Cloud, south of Paris. He took the occasion to leave Elia and Zoe Zengelis, the co-founders of OMA. They were involved in design competitions that could not provide real opportunities to build and designed a housing manifesto capable of expressing his urban research in New York and his interest in the media in a modernist guise.
The seven years required to develop the project and build the villa, which was vehemently opposed by the neighbours, offered time for the elaboration of a sophisticated media framework composed of drawings, images and photographs that serves as an art-oriented “metatext” of the villa and explains much of Koolhaas' intent and modus operandi. Madelon Vriesendorp, who produced most of Delirious New York’s original illustrations, created a series of isometric representations of pictorial quality; Rem Koolhaas dedicated himself to sketches, photomontages, and a famous surrealist photo shoot complete with a giraffe in the garden and swimmers lined up along the pool on the roof. Amid this visual material, initially received with perplexity and irony by the magazines, there is a small frontal drawing of the villa that subverts the usual concept of perspective. It is an "inverse" or "inverted" perspective to take up the definition that, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian scholar Pavel Florenski had given a particular way of painting icons. According to this procedure, the so-called vanishing point is moved from the bottom to the foreground. It causes a deformation of the depicted subject that is contrary to a traditional linear perspective, eventually revealing the faces that are generally hidden. Suppose Florenski demonstrates that such a projective heresy is intrinsic to the painter's need to elaborate a compelling image (as well as the time of the narrative) in the context of a project representation, apparently aimed at anticipating the proper form of a building to be built. In that case, such an image gives a particular meaning to the whole project and to the role of the architectural representation itself. It is no coincidence that the link between Koolhaas and Florenski, however referable to the Russian artistic revolution, is the Italian artist Gino de Dominicis, who, just around 1987, began working on a series of works on the theme of the inverse perspective.