HarvardX GSD1 course assignment on Brunelleschi and perspective

     Here I have decided to share some of my assignments during my online certified course "Architectural Imagination" from Harvard. 

Prompt 1 : In one to two paragraphs, reflect on how the idea of perspective orients the viewer and helps construct a specific understanding of the Renaissance architectural imagination. Review the prompt and the following images of Brunelleschi's church of San Lorenzo. 

     While considering Brunelleschi's church of San Lorenzo we can deduce that linear perspective plays a major role on its construction. Argan analyzes the church on his essay as "a construction of a succession of imaginary planes seen in perspective from the foreground to the horizon" from which we can rightfully assume that perspective was a fundamental key of this building on Brunelleschi's mind way before it came to its final state. And from Argan's own words, this perspective which is the process we arrive to proportion, indeed determined the organization of the church's space as immensely proportioned or in other words " a place of pure mental abstraction" thus undoubtedly uniform. It becomes apparent the moment you look at it's image that the uniformness of its construction positions the viewer so that he/she is looking directly at the vanishing point.

     To further this point, perspective or the idea of it is crucial in understanding architecture forms, proportions and harmony as a whole. As the construction of the layered planes helped us in understanding the church's dimensions without conducting any measurements, so perspective helps us in a wider scale imagining and even comprehending architecture as a factor on its own. It becomes even more important in helping us understand the architecture imagination behind Renaissance buildings, as it held a crucial role in the architectural creation of this Era with Brunelleschi being a perfect example on the fundamentality of the succession of planes and linear perspective.