Geometry
Isometry
A Website by Nick TrombleyLittle Blank Riding Hood
As a student at Chouinard, Larry Bell also started as a painter. His early canvases features simple shapes rendered in gestural strokes...From there he started eliminating the texture of the strokes, applying opaque color (thin Liquitex paint) to unprimed canvas, masking off shapes to create straight-edged parallelograms. An example of these works is Little Blank Riding Hood, whose top left and bottom right corners are clipped, suggesting an isometric projection of a three-dimensional form.
A rhombic geometry
The logo consists of a rhombic geometry which was inspired by Morioka’s drawing which he brought to the first meeting with Takram. During the process of design development, the team explored many different shapes and motifs other than the rhombic, but in the end came back to the very origin. In fact, the rhombic shape embraces two meanings, “an open single book” and “a single small room”. The first message was the vision team shared through the design process, and the second message was later proposed by Takram in order to make the geometry more connected to the character of the space, which Morioka often emphasised unconsciously.
1/3 House
Rever & Drage Architects.
Pylons
Not all the towers along a transmission line are identical. Look closely at a tower where the line makes a sharp turn and you will likely find it is wider and beefier than other towers along the route. The added strength and weight are needed to resist the unbalanced pull of the conductors, which might overturn an ordinary tower. These special towers are called deviation or angle towers.
The transmission-line tower everybody knows is an Erector Set latticework of steel girders and diagonal braces. The techniques for designing and building these towers are the same ones used in constructing steel bridge trusses or crane booms. The individual pieces can be made cheaply from rolled steel and then bolted together on the site. This last point is more important than it might seem: transporting a fully assembled tower 100 feet tall is an awkward and expensive business.
Authentic architectural experiences
Authentic architectural experiences consist of approaching or confronting a building, rather than the formal apprehension of a facade; of the act of entering, and not simply the visual design of the door; of looking in or out through a window, rather than the window itself as a material object; or of occupying the sphere of warmth, rather than the fireplace as an object of visual design.
Architectural space is lived space rather than physical space, and lived space always transcends geometry and measurability.
A World Where Things Only Almost Meet
Recall that great line from Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose
How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.
Only, here, it’s some lonely postal worker—or a geography Ph.D. driven mad by student debt—out mapping the frayed edges of the world, wearily noting every new dead-end and cul-de-sac in a gridded notebook, diagramming loops, sketching labyrinths and mazes, driving empty streets all day on a quest for something undefinable, some answer to why the world’s patterns have gone so wrong. A self-diverging world, where things only almost meet.
Rearranged
Put together with odd bits of the useless Clarice, a survivors’ Clarice was taking shape, all huts and hovels, festering sewers, rabbit cages. And yet, almost nothing was lost of Clarice’s former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order, no less appropriate to the inhabitants’ needs than it had been before.
Simple variations of the parts
Symmetry, indeed, has been grossly overemphasized in both art and science: its main value is in giving meaning to its absence, dissymmetry, without which there could be no hierarchy.
The eye is repulsed by complexity if no order is detected, but it can be delighted by repetition, translation, rotation, reflection, magnification, and other simple variations of the parts.
The Topography of Tears
A Book by Rose-Lynn FisherThe Topography of Tears is a visual investigation of tears photographed through an optical, standard light microscope, a vintage Zeiss from the late 1970's, mounted with a digital microscopy camera.
Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as a rite of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Wordless and spontaneous, they release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis, intractable resistance short-circuited. Shedding tears, shedding old skin. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.
Plus Equals #4
An Article by Rob WeychertOne of the seeds for Plus Equals was planted a few years ago with Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited, my extension of a Sol LeWitt work. I learned a lot about isometric projection from that project, but my affection for the concept didn’t begin there. Whether I’m looking at a Chris Ware illustration or an exploded-view technical drawing of a complex machine, an isometric rendering always stirs something in me.
The joy of the humble brick
An Article by Tim HarfordThe brick is one of those old technologies, like the wheel or paper, that seem to be basically unimprovable. ‘The shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made,’ writes Edward Dobson in the fourteenth edition of his Rudimentary Treatise on the Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles. There’s a simple reason for the size: it has to fit in a human hand. As for the shape, building is much more straightforward if the width is half the length.
Subtilitas
A BlogSUBTĪLITĀS (latin; noun f., 3rd):
fineness of texture, logic, detail; slenderness, exactness, acuteness; sharpness : precisionnarrowdesign.com
A Website by Nick JonesDesign
Prototype
CodeRafael Araujo's Golden Ratio
A GalleryBlue Morpho Double Helix & Icosahedron
Cityspace series
A Gallery by Emily GarfieldPrimary series for imaginary map drawings, spanning 2008-present and using various materials and techniques.
bees & bombs
A Blog
Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
It begins with craft
Something strange is happening in the world of software: It’s slowly getting worse. Not all software, but a lot of it. It’s becoming more sluggish, less responsive, and subtly less reliable than it was a few years ago.
In some ways this is hyperbole. Objectively, we’ve never been able to do so much, so easily with our smartphones and laptops and tablets. We’ve never pushed more data between more places more readily. But while the insidious “worseness” I mention falls only in part on the engineering side of things, it falls harder on the more subjective, craft side of things, making it all the more worrisome.
Why should we care about this? Because the majority of our waking hours take place within the confines of applications. A truth recently amplified by the covid pandemic.
And I believe software used by millions (if not billions) has a moral duty to elevate the emotional and intellectual qualities of its users. That elevation begins with craft.
Penn Station
In the same way that physical architecture can affect a mind, so too can software. Slower, less reliable software is like Penn Station: Sure, you can catch a transfer from one train to another but the dreary lowness of the place, the lack of sunlight or sensible wayfinding will make you feel like a rat, truculent and worthless, and worse: You’ll acclimate to that feeling and accept it as a norm.
Edges
Hardware has literal and metaphorical edges — it must be fully complete and largely bug free to ship. Software? It’s far more amorphous, like mist. Patches can be endlessly pushed. It never ends. Faulty hardware can destroy a company. Faulty software can be patched. The butterfly keyboard debacle may never be lived down. Even as I type on this improved Magic Keyboard, I can’t help but wonder: Did they really test this thing? I had three butterfly keyboards die on me, twice in the field. Not fun. Hardware failures live long in the mind.
The business case for craft
macOS software that adheres to craft — Things or Carbon Copy Cloner or BBEdit or Sublime Text (which, despite not being “native native” feels so solid and so responsive you’re willing to overlook its quirks) or Bear or Alfred or iA Writer or Keynote (arguably one of the best pieces of macOS software of all time) or anything by Panic, heck, even Terminal or Quicken (which, against all rational expectations is just a joy to use)5 — exists in troves, the existence of such proves to the Slacks or Twitters or Adobes of the world that it’s not impossible nor rare to produce craft-oriented software in service to user fluency, and still make a profit.
In fact, there’s a business case to be made for being craft- and fluency-focused. We’ve seen entire companies with business models that could be summarized as “Bloat-Free X” emerge in recent years. Affinity is bloat-free Adobe. Install Adobe Creative Cloud on your laptop and marvel at the no fewer than a dozen processes whirling around in the background for unknown purposes. It’s no surprise Affinity Photo and Publisher and Designer have taken off. Sketch’s main feature for many years was simply: Not Adobe.
And the web! When you care — when you really give a shit — the web is awe inspiring. I still can’t believe Figma is web-native (also born from the Not Adobe camp). That an application can feel so powerful, so fast, so well-crafted and be fully web-based should be a kind of lighthouse-archetype for all other sites lost in a sea of complexity and muck and unnecessary frameworks.