Seeing from Above

Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the art, architecture and urbanism atelier Metis.

• > List of Figures> Acknowledgements> List of Contributors> Introduction/Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin1. Intimate Communiques: Melchior Lorck's Flying Tortoise/ Marina Warner2. The Meaning of Roman Maps: Etienne Duperac and Antonio Tempesta/Michael Bury3. Thomas Baldwin's Airopaidia, or the Aerial View in Colour/Marie Thebaud-Sorger4. European Cities from a Bird's-eye View: The Case of Alfred Guesdon/Jean-Marc Besse5. Nadar's Aerial View/Stephen Bann6. Transfiguring Reality: Suprematism and the Aerial View/ Christina Lodder7. Aerial Views and Cinematism, 1898-1939/Teresa Castro8. 'The Domain of Rrose Selaby": Dust Breeding and Aerial Photography/David Hopkins9. The Aviator and the Photographer: The Case of Walter Mittelholzer/Olivier Lugon10. From the Sky to the Ground: The Aerial View and the Ideal of the Vive Raisonee in Geography during the 1920s/Marie-Claire Robic11. The Figure from Above: On the Obliqueness of the Plan in Urbanism and Architecture/John Macarthur12. The City Seen from the Aeroplane: Distorted Reflections and Urban Futures/Nathalie Roseau13. Vectors of Looking: Reflections on the Luftwaffe's Aerial Survey of Warsaw, 1944/Ella Chmielewska14. The Aerial View and the Grands Ensembles/Frederic Pousin15. Robert Smithson and Aerial Art/Gilles A. Tiberghien16. On Google Earth/Mark Dorrian> Index

Flying became possible because it was imagined. This is what a history of seeing from above discloses: we visualised angelic mobility before we could design it. In this fascinating collection the open eye of Google Earth retains at its vanishing point a turbulent history of self-elevation... An extraordinarily timely survey of earth from the sky, full of virtuosic new insights, ethical as well as aesthetic implications, and not without its share of vertigo.' - Paul Carter, author and artist 'This book brings out aeriality's multiple dimensions with such force that by the end one feels that - despite our imprisonment to gravity - we really live not on the earth, but at the bottom-most layer of a vast exospherical mirror filled with everything that makes us human.' - Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT 'This remarkable collection of richly illustrated essays... will become a landmark for any scholar interested in the field of visual culture.' - Vincent Piveteau, Director, Ecole Nationale Superieure de Paysage de Versailles 'In its mapping of what has become our defining world picture, this is truly explication in excelsis.' - Steven Connor, Grace 2 Professor of English, University of Cambridge