Rowe and Slutsky point out in their essay on transparency, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, there are two types of transparency, Literal and Phenomenal. Literal is what they call a material condition. Think typical glass...
Please consider the following passage from Kepes’ Language of Vision; “If one sees two or more figures overlapping one another, and each of them claims for itself the common overlapped part, then one is...
Webster’s defines figure ground as follows: a property of perception in which there is a tendency to see parts of a visual field as solid, well-defined objects standing out against a less distinct background....
I really like completing a drawing and then posting it the same day. Somehow, the immediacy of this action is better than posting a drawing done say two years ago. I was thinking about...
Paul Scheerbart in 1914 wrote, “We live for the most part within enclosed spaces. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is in a sense a product of our architecture....
LeCorbusier itemized, in his Five Points Towards a New Architecture, his basic planning principals on how to approach design. The first four points address the structure, roof gardens, open plans, and horizontal windows, all...
The linear perspective represents infinity. In a one point perspective drawing, the vanishing point is infinity. When you think about the fact that infinity is represented on your paper with a pencil dot, it...
Studies done of peoples who are completely separate from the western media and mindset are illuminating. Joan and Louis Forsdale demonstrate that our understanding of the contents of a two dimensional picture plane seems...
I believe that LeCorbusier was very dependent upon pictures and photographs to make his architecture. His books are stuffed full of photographs of ships and machines. I pretty sure that when he was designing...
Architecture is art and it cannot help but be anything but. These are the thoughts of Gieselmann and Ungers in their writing published in 1963. In these pages, we have been debating whether architecture...
We live in curved spacetime. At least this is what the theory of relativity tells us. Space is curved by gravity. Therefore the space upon which we inhabit the earth is curved. It is...
During the 1620s, Francis Bacon, a Franciscan monk, composed the Opus Majus. This was intended to be a compendium of the knowledge of the world. As we may expect from a Franciscan monk, he...
Bernhard Hoetger was a sculptor who also designed buildings. In 1928, he wrote. “We want no inhibitions and checks by recipes, we want the free spirit to find its own laws. The creative moment...
I respectfully note the passing of Michael Graves, Architect, who died yesterday at the age of 80. The Postmodern Movement, which Graves championed, was gaining its’ full strength while I was in architecture school....
Stanislaw Ulam, speaking in Los Alamos in 1944. “I found out that the main ability to have was a visual, and also an almost tactile, way to imagine the physical situation, rather than a...
To operate successfully in science, you first advance a hypothesis. And then you have to make a judgement on this hypothesis based on direct empirical observation. In design, our we make empirical observations based...
Mathematics provides an interesting reflection on some of our favorite themes; knowledge, learning, abstraction, etc. Mathematics’ principal function is to problem solve. We use math if we need to know the area of a...
The square. The circle. The sphere. All are what we call elemental shapes, or elemental building blocks. Yet the primacy of these shapes and forms is merely our cultural construct. We are attracted to...
To this point, we have concerned ourselves with drawing in three dimensions. We have discussed some of the limitations of the linear renaissance perspective system. And believe it or not, another limitation of the...
Ideas require mental images. If you don’t have the former, you don’t have the latter. But what are these ideas in our mind? How exact are they? How real are they? They are best...
We have shown that thinking requires mental images. Images contain thought and visual facts. Therefore our drawings are hugely important. They are a testament to a logical and rigorous construction. If we consider that...
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