SHAPED BY NATURE Vault and drape shapes provide cover from and aperture to the surrounding natural environment, its geography and climate. (Riverside Main Library 2nd floor terrace, above, 3rd floor reading room, below).
Around the mid-20th century at the height of abstract movements in the arts (Kandinsky, Balanchine, Cage, all those guys), the architect Charles Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) published a graphic book called Le Poem de L’Angle Droit. Maddeningly abstract and metaphysically speculative, the words and images in the book are an apologia for the compositional principles underlying his life’s work and a meditation on the nature of human creativity. Its purpose seems to have been to reflect on what is most primal in the formation of any building or work of art guided not by tradition but by nature and an imaginary natural man unburdened by cultural baggage.
CONSTRUCTING NATURE These rooms hold in suspended animation non-rectilinear forms within a rectilinear framework. (Los Angeles Trade Technical College left, Beverly Hills Children’s library, right).
SHAPES CONFINED These free form shapes are bound by and in tension with the parallel-piped geometry of the buildings with which they interact. (LATTC South Campus, left, PMCA right).
SHAPES NOT FOUND IN NATURE Ornamental embellishment or the changing qualities of light can make mostly rectilinear buildings come to life. (British Parliament above, our Manhattan Beach Library below).
We hear first about the cardinal parameters of our environment: the rhythms of the sun, the phenomenon of the horizon and, importantly, the erect nature of our own bodies. The poem suggests that it is the straight horizontal line of the horizon in opposition to the straight vertical line of we vertebrates—the right angle—that is the foundation of not only composition but our consciousness, our ability to create anything. Our erectness (hands and minds) separate us from—and elevate us above—the rest of the animated world.
PARAMETERS OF COMPOSITION This graphic poem published by Charles Jeanneret in 1947 expounds upon the fundamental parameters of our natural environment of which the right angle is prime.
MATHEMATICS OF NATURE By the 18th century mathematicians began to deploy ever more complex arithmetic and geometric equations to describe ever more complex shapes found in nature.
CALCULATING NATURE By the 21st century the number crunching prowess of computers enabled the application of parametric equations built into algorithms in service to the graphic modeling and depiction of complex shapes, some mimicking those found in nature.
REAL NATURE Shape shifting natural environments are all around us and yet only rarely glimpsed in the absence of a horizon.
Yet there is no such thing as a line or a right angle in nature. All of nature and our own bodies (the most complex forms found in nature) are made of sometimes approximately flat, mostly curving planes and volumes in unfathomable relationships. The right angle is an abstraction, a mathematical construct and a tool. Modern mathematics (Descartes) established the abstract framework of right angles in 3-d (the x-y-and-z’s we all learn about in high school) and through increasingly sophisticated means (analytical geometry, trigonometry, the calculus) mathematicians have been able to describe with numbers, letters and symbols complex forms on earth and beyond.
ARTIFICE AND NATURE. Bodies are these artists’ subject and their art. (Clockwise from upper left: Bernini, O’Keefe, Mapplethorpe, Moore).
MICHELANGELO AND MAPPLETHORPE. These artists, one a sculptor, the other a photographer want us to focus on the shapes not the objects.
SIZE AND SHAPE By expanding scale we experience shape. (Statue of Liberty left, Gehry/Oldenburg “Binocular Building” right).
Most recently we employ parametric equations embedded within algorithmic equations to recruit the brute number crunching force of increasingly powerful electronic abacuses to draw complex forms that approximate forms found in nature. In the 21st century it has become relatively easy to draw so-called biomorphic shapes, design and build biomorphically shaped buildings. And why not? Why not cut loose entirely of the straight jacket that is rectilinear geometry?
BIOMORPHIC ARCHITECTURE (Clockwise from upper left: Hadid, Gehry, Saarinen).
BEFORE THERE WERE COMPUTERS Saarinen and team employed old school mathematics and traditional tools of geometry generations before the advent of computer-generated modeling to craft mock-ups and drawings as early as the 1960s to design the recently restored JFK TWA Terminal.
The geometrically pure right angle may not exist in nature, but the approximate one does. The three-dimensional rectilinear framework of our environment and our relationship to it is crucial for our sense of orientation and I suspect enjoyment of it. Less a straight-jacket than a frame of reference the 3-d grid enables meaningful perception of the environment (built or natural). But, crucially, while the frame of reference may be necessary it’s rarely sufficient.
FRAMEWORK OF NATURE The framework of the environment and our perception of it is built upon the relationship of the horizon, our vertically inclined spines and forward oriented eyes.
A built environment composed entirely of lines and planes perpendicular to one another is artificial and in the absence of articulating texture, qualities of light, or ornamental embellishment imperceptible. We lose our sense of place. Conversely, we rarely experience nature absent the framework of a horizon line, our uprightness relative to it and the straightness of our path within it. And when we do it’s usually not pleasant. Relentless shape shifting environments while momentarily exhilarating can over time be as disorienting and deadening to the human spirit as relentlessly rectilinear ones. Like our sense of smell, our sense of sight is desensitized by too much repetition and unrelenting fluidity.
OUR BODY’S UNLIMITED COMPLEXITY Michelangelo perhaps more than anyone in history captured on paper the unparalleled complexity of the human body.
GEOMETRY OF THE BODY Anyone who has ever engaged with life drawing knows that it cannot be done without a framework of both curved and straight lines. It’s what makes the body both comprehensible and endlessly compelling to behold.
In real life we toggle between horizontal and vertical, light and dark, calm and excited, happy and sad. We perceive and know qualities only by experiencing their opposites. Jeanneret in his poem goes on to suggest that it is the reconciliation of opposites, the “dialectics” of the philosophers, or at least opposites held in tension that renders perception and by extension composition possible and compelling. It is somewhere on the spectrum between complete freedom (all variability) and complete confinement (no variability) that environments come alive.
FREEDOM BOUND Michelangelo in both his architecture and his sculpture was a master at suspending in tension forms held in captivity while struggling to break free. (Laurentian library vestibule, left, unfinished slave sculpture, right).
STRUCTURED SPONTANEITY A workhorse of a building designed for renovation over time this community college building balances the strict geometry of rectilinear floor plates with the fluidity of their enclosure. (Los Angeles Trade Technical College Student Services and Administration Building).
Advances in technologies such as powerful computers processing parametric algorithms make new things possible and old things easier. Yet, they have changed neither our bodies nor the environment within which our bodies (and minds) have evolved. The success of our technologies will be judged by their efficacy in creating built environments that resonate with our human selves. It will be less their indiscriminate application than their artful and discerning employment in service to the composition of buildings that will render what we build worth living in and with over time.
ENCLOTHED Like loose skin or cloth this building’s enclosure masks the reality of super simple floor configurations necessitated by the long-term viability and utility of this civic building (West Hollywood Library).