Reassembling Guarini
Guarino Guarini’s Archittetura civile (1735) is often referenced for its manipulation of Euclidean geometries. Circles, cones, and cylinders are projected through one another to engender more complex and slightly less familiar geometric forms. While this assertion is fair to assume from both the text and illustrative diagrams, little attention has been given to the method by which he develops these forms. The orthographic projections, traits, and templates used to arrive at the distortions are often separated. Organized more by the economy of page layout, than by the projective relationships that define them, the drawings exist within distinct projective fields regardless of their inherent bonds. This project seeks to re-assemble Guarini’s method of projection to understand the unique and perhaps idiosyncratic devices by which he elongated, truncated, and otherwise transformed the circle and the line.