Negative Architecture

You’ve probably seen this picture before. It’s one of several images that people use to show how perception works. You either see a vase or two faces looking at each other. In the terminology of Gestalt Psychology, one becomes the figure and the other becomes the ground. We can switch between the vase and the faces but we can’t see both at once. The distinction we automatically make is that one is the figure, the object of our perception, and the other is the background, or ground.

It might...