1. L’Art de Batir chez les Romains is certainly a book, causing each individual drawing to be combined with the others as well as the text. 2. August Choisy, both as the author of the text and the drawings (‘Dessine par A. Choisy’) is always speaking in the first person singular. 3. Looking particularly at the drawings themselves, Choisy’s rationalist theory presented is shrouded in narrative. In this case, unlike Piranesi, one without human figures. The viewer becoming the subject of exploration and discovery. 4. Choisy’s ‘presented society’ is opposed to the historical society of Beaux-arts Architectural teaching and representation. In his adaptation of Roman subject matter and engineering-based axonometric projection, he is critiquing the use of ‘styles’ without functional necessity, arguing for a historical precedent for the practical use of new materials, such as iron, steel, and reinforced concrete. 5. The ‘model space’ is here the practical application of parallel projection: isometric, dimetric, and trimetric orientations. This creates a space that is irrational and flattened for the viewer, yet simultaneously wholly rational in terms of measurability relational arrangement. 6. The same argument can certainly be applied to locating Choisy’s model society ‘outside of our system of spatio-temporal co-ordinates’. The axonometric projection, combined with the use of the worm’s eye view removes the structures from our understood spatio-temporal reality, producing a stilled and suspended ‘elsewhere’. 7. These floating islands are not only suspended in and a suspension of space, but their perfect depiction belies all influence of time. Neither of these intrinsically Earthly laws, space and time, here apply.
Choisy’s use of the utopian narrative serves to produce a mirroring or an inverted double of society, causing another paradox, for utopia, as Choay writes, “which is no place, is nevertheless first of all a space.”64 The reflection, which exists ‘without’ the known Earthly rules, is based upon a real space contained ‘within’. In the drawings, this perception of mirroring is only heighted by the worm’s eye viewpoint, which in itself acts like a reflection, not unlike Narcissus whose gaze down into the pool is in search of his own unattainable beauty. Choisy’s depiction of idealized Rome is in search of Western society’s own unattainably beautiful heritage in order to reflect the possibility of a perfected future. A tumbling down to the underworld or a satirical mirrored reflection are twinned representational devices of the day. Important to add to those already mentioned is Lewis Carroll’s contemporaneous Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865, and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1871. Here we see Alice’s accidental discovery of an underground, fantastical world in the first, and the chessboard looking-glass world of the second. Though thoroughly
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