JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This image really lifted itself from the page–it is from 1880 and has to me a very heavy scent of M.C. Escher to it.  This would be a very “found” aspect of pre-Escher (1898-1972), but it does have an indefinable quality to it that seems very 20th-century. What we are seeing here is a perspective of the construction of the “New Church of the Oratory of South Kensington” (known as the Brompton Oratory), but I think given the various stages of completion of the structure the whole of it takes on a spherical, three-dimensional quality, and has a somewhat impossible-looking aspect, as though from multiple viewpoints. I think we’re looking down through the naive, and though it is supposed to be representating a three-dimensional figure it seems profoundly not so. 

[Source: The Building News, June 25, 1880; Herbert Gribble, architect.]

What it reminds me of directly is Eshcer’s  relativity, from 1952:

I know that what I’ve said about the Building News image is reaching, and it wasn’t dealing with unusual geometries, or tessellations, or the oddish curved perspectives of Escher, but, well, it does somehow have that quality.  

And an interesting detail: