Architectural form is always paradoxical. It remains estranged and autonomous because it escapes the cultural categories by which it is assimilated and situated. The programs that necessitate and the materials that give body to form are also protagonists in the struggle against its self determinacy and autonomy. With regard to the demand for it to be categorized, form is instigative and reactive; autonomy thrives on contestation. Accordingly, the formally autonomous project of architecture continually reasserts and transgresses its authoritative paradigms of argumentation and reconfiguration.

What are some of the remaining legible paradigmatic operations to be transgressed? One could begin with the distortion of symmetry, seriality, linearity, progression, scale, elasticity, intersection, folding—operations that can attempt, but never fully succeed, to separate and rationalize themselves. It could be argued, however, that the exponents of paradox in architecture are not configurative but rather inscriptive. One such instigator can be found among the conflicts and synonymies of perspectival and stereotomic techniques of projection. This is where the project Stereotomic Permutations begins.

Perspective and orthography are instrumental to a discipline that produces artifacts that are not self identical with their medium. Is it possible for the disparity between drawings and buildings to correlate with the discrepancy between paradigms and their distortions? In Stereotomic Permutations, opposing systems of projection are peculiarly combined in order to become techniques of formal transgression. The Distance Point method of perspective projection introduces a distortion of symmetrical and serial operations and configurations; stereotomy is deployed to refute the categorical distinctions between perspective and orthography.

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