Disappear Here runs until October 7 at the Architecture Gallery in RIBA’s HQ at 66 Portland Place, London. It charts the history of perspective and its use by both architects and artists to capture and communicate ideas and building designs.

The exhibition, a new commission by Sam Jacob Studio, has been designed as an interactive space. It features both physical manifestations of perspective alongside original historical drawings selected from the RIBA Collections archive, one of the largest in the world with over four million drawings and publications.  

Perspective drawing has been applied to the art of building for centuries and has been used as a tool to evoke illusory architectural spaces. It was a way of seeing, which became a way of building, according to RIBA’s head of exhibitions and curator of Disappear Here, Marie Bak Mortensen. 

She said: “By translating three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface, it became the ultimate quest to depict realistic impressions of a complex world.” 

Constant

From the Renaissance to the present day, perspective has been a constant in architectural writing and illustration. This exhibition, sponsored by Colt, explores how perspective spans truth and illusion, linking the disciplines of art, architecture and mathematics. 

“Perspective is a fundamental tool in helping us visualise the world around us, but it is also a kind of tyranny,” said Sam Jacob. “It forces its own logic onto the worlds we create – so this exhibition is an opportunity to consider how it creates and organises our world, as well as illustrates it.”

Straddling the worlds of art and architecture, Disappear Here is both a theoretical and historical show, which looks back to the 15th century and forward to the future with a digital display created by the gaming company Shedworks. It investigates the “power and influence of the vanishing point” as used by illustrators and designers as diverse as the Jacobean John Smythson, the neo-classical Andrea Palladio, Edwin Lutyens and the radical Italian practice Superstudio.

It features images of vast imaginary spaces and imposing mega structures, alongside more practical drawings and structures.

Colt’s business development director, David Fitzpatrick, said: “We are proud to be sponsoring such an important and thought provoking exhibition. As our industry becomes increasingly digital, it is timely to consider how the perspectives now generated by computer were first captured by human visionaries and how they inform so many aspects of the building systems we design today.

“Disappear Here forces you to reappraise how you see the world and examine how designers and architects have visualised projects for more than 500 years.”

For further information, visit: www.architecture.com/disappearhere