Drawing indeterminate architecture and the distorted net

James Perry Wilson studied as an architect at Columbia University and practiced for twenty years until the depression when he became a diorama painter at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). He brought the rigour of architectural measured perspective to his new discipline and developed his Dual Grid method of projection onto the curved diorama shell. The author studied Wilson’s methods by building a set of cameras specific to one of Wilson’s dioramas at the Yale Peabody Museum that accomplished all of his geometric actions in one photograph. To understand when Wilson implemented his method the author built a set of dioramascopes to determine which projection techniques Wilson used on his Mule Deer diorama at the AMNH. This chapter documents that research and discusses the implication of these techniques to architectural drawing.