Over the millennia, ornamentation has been used in architecture and design for countless reasons. For some, the design isn’t complete until it has a few smaller pieces or a border attached to a main structure as a reinforcement of the design’s theme. This is very apparent in Louis Sullivan’s work, where the terra cotta decorations on his skyscrapers reinforced the organic theme of the building. Louis Sullivan’s ornamentation on the Van Allen building In classical design, one purpose of ornamentation is to reveal the elements of a building that were originally wooden, such as dentils. Dentilation used on a classical…
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Below are two examples of athroisis. The first is a building designed by Antonini Darmon called Arches Boulogne. The images are available here at archdaily. I found the following quote very instructive with regards to Fractal Design: The width of these balconies varies according to their orientation; they are narrower to the north thus maximizing illumination. However to the South, East and West the arches provide shade against natural overheating in summer. Athroisis is an effect. The causes are multiple, just as in nature. In this case, while the intent was to vary the lighting, the result is still a clustering of…
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Once again, Paul Laseau and James Tice, authors of “Frank Lloyd Wright, Between Principle and Form” reveal an element of Frank Lloyd Wright’s fractal intuition. A fractal pattern called an “Apollonian Net” or “Apollonian Gasket” is composed of a triplet of circles, each of which is tangent to the others. A complete description can be found at Wolfram MathWorld. This is not as common as other fractals, but it still represents self-similarity of scale. The three circles do not necessarily have to be within another circle, as the MathWorld entry shows. The image below is from Paul Laseau’s and James Tice’s book,…
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When we hear the definition of a fractal, it usually includes the words, self-similarity of scale. What does this mean? It sounds abstract, something an engineer or a physicist would use. It’s certainly not an everyday term. However, the truth is completely different. Intuitively, we all know what this means. Our everyday experience tells us the answer. Self-similarity of scale is the notion that the same shape appears in the same pattern no matter the distance you’re looking at it. Try an experiment. Take out a sheet of paper and draw a mountain. Start with the main shape, the big view.…
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Any examination of Frank Lloyd Wright’s homes leaves one with a feeling of transcendence. Wright’s strong, linear shapes and geometries imply a sense of order and artificiality. Yet these shapes evoke something deeper, something within nature. Wright himself said that he was freed from the box. While simply breaking free from the basic box-like construction of a building does add a naturalness, to me it doesn’t finish the picture. There has always been something unique with his designs, and I believe he used his intuition to imitate the fractal nature of the world. Cruciform, Weave and Additive Paul Laseau and James…
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When we look at Nature, we take a snapshot of her with our mind. In a single moment, we see a glorious balancing act, both expansion and contraction, building and destruction. We experience her in the eternal present; and because this snapshot is frozen in time, we can easily forget the process that builds up to that moment and likewise recedes from it. Without time, all we see is equilibrium. All the forces disappear. Because of this we extrapolate the present into the future and the past and we think that everything emanates from our present. Far from an equilibrium,…
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Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings are considered masterpieces of modern art. This method drips and flicks paint onto a surface laid out on the floor. Pollock employed this technique to produce rhythmic, energetic paintings. Initially his works received mixed reviews by critics, such as the quote from art critic Emily Genauer the paintings ‘resemble nothing so much as a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out.’ But as the years went by, these paintings were accepted as works of genius. The patterns created are not simple splashes of paint thrown onto a surface, but a deliberate display of…
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Below are two examples of athroisis. The first is a building designed by Antonini Darmon called Arches Boulogne. The images are available here at ArchDaily. I found the following quote very instructive with regards to Fractal Design: The width of these balconies varies according to their orientation; they are narrower to the north thus maximizing illumination. However to the South, East and West the arches provide shade against natural overheating in summer. Athroisis is an effect. The causes are multiple, just as in nature. In this case, while the intent was to vary the lighting, the result is still a…
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Once on a trip across the country, my plane was flying across a cloudless sky. Up ahead I could see a flat layer of clouds. From a distance, the clouds looked like someone had unrolled a carpet in the sky. The cloud was one, single blanket that abruptly started and continued for miles. However, as we passed over the layer, it became clear that there was no fixed border for the clouds. In fact, the edge became porous, and thinned as it moved outward. Each portion of the fringe had a sculpted look that resembled the main border. The edge…
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In my previous post on Order and Disorder, I discussed the idea that Nature is perceived as disorder because, when left on its own, it will destroy our created works. But nature is a fractal system, so it is not really disordered. Perhaps one could say that the fractal, chaotic system of nature is a superset of our Euclidean system. As it has all the advantages of a living system, it will eventually overtake our own artificial environment. When looked at this way, the natural and artificial realms are simply two different systems. We know intuitively that, when utilized with…