Infinite Measure: Learning to Design in Geometric Harmony With Art, Architecture, and Nature

by Fletcher, Rachel; Williams, Kim

• ISBN13: 9781938086021
• ISBN10: 1938086023
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-03-30
• Publisher: Intl Pub Marketing

Summary

Taking pages from books of nature, art, and architecture, Rachel Fletcher provides visual designers of all disciplines and art forms with geometric methods and techniques for composing spaces and places harmoniously. Part I explores geometry's basic shapes and symbols. Part II offers guidance and exercises for how to compose space plans. Infinite Measureis both a creative workbook and a handy professional reference guide for teachers, practitioners, and students of all kinds of design, from architectural, interior, and landscape creations to painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts, from theater and stage design to crafts. Several books on this popular subject exist; this one adds greatly to the conversation by offering step-by-step elementary and advanced drawings for producing proportional schemes with a compass and rule. In addition, Fletcher offers techniques for design applications; commentaries on geometric symbols; useful theorems, definitions, and etymologies of relevant mathematical terms; and original studies that analyze proportions as they appear in great art, architecture, landscape design, and other compositions, including the South Rose Window at Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris, Andrea Palladio's Villa Emo and Teatro Olimpico, the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, a Stradivari violin, Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest, Beatrix Farrand's garden courtyard for the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, a Louis Sullivan stencil for the Chicago Stock Exchange, and Eero Saarinen's North Christian Church. The desire for harmony is universal among all cultures. In Infinite Measure, we rediscover a fundamental starting point for designers of all ages: the simple act of drawing with a compass and a rule, as Frank Lloyd Wright famously taught his architecture students, can sensitize the designer to the rich subtleties of spatial harmony, no matter how one ultimately chooses to express it.