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2010 | Book

Geometries of Rhetoric: An Introduction Read chapter Read first chapter

Geometries of Rhetoric

Editor: Robert Kirkbride

Publisher: Birkhäuser Basel

Book Series : Nexus Network Journal

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

We grasp and transform the world through interplays of quantification and qualification. The cross pollination of geometric and literary figures is deeply embedded in our cognitive habits, instruments of inquiry and the constructed environment. Through time, thought has reflected on the visible processes and products of material craft to explain and train the invisible workings of the mind. Recursively, material craft embodies a tradition of splitting ideas into categorical parts and compositional units for reassembly. Although the mathematical and verbal arts are often placed in contrast, human inventions manifest a weave of alphanumerics. Mythic parables, geometric proofs, memory arts, poems, algorithms, buildings and cities emerge from the intercourse of measure and explication. This special issue of the Nexus Network Journal considers architectonic examples of past, present and potential geometries of rhetoric.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

Letter from the Guest Editor

Geometries of Rhetoric: An Introduction
Abstract
Guest editor Robert Kirkbride introduces Nexus Network Journal vol. 12 no. 3 devoted to “Geometries of Rhetoric”.
Robert Kirkbride

Geometries of Rhetoric

“A Strange Catalogue of Things”
Abstract
The universe has evolved humans who in their turn act as natural-cultural agents to intensify the acceleration of evolutionary processes. The human sciences, whose growth severely trailed that of the physical sciences, failed to theorize the objects that we invent and make. Professions such as architecture that exist in both the realm of naturally occurring substances and human activities have suffered without the intellectual resources for adequate reflection on the world we have made, and about whose consequences we remain all too unaware. Naturally occurring substances and humans must be framed together within a single idea. Further, “the strange catalogue” of contemporary production and billions of individual consumer products must be understood as having relationships within human society. As an integrating discipline that composes with physical materials and cultural life, architecture benefits from a theoretical unification too long neglected by the human sciences.
Dan Rose
Chiasmus, Artificial Memory, and the Arts of Arrangement
Abstract
Few figures of classical rhetoric can claim more spatial relevance than “chiasmus,” the figure of symmetrical convergence used by poets, novelists, rhetoricians, mnemonicists and others. Is chiasmus a tool of literati who appropriate spatial forms to pull their plots to closure, or is there an independent architectural tradition of chiasmus? If one pulls together the clues about metonymy, the logic of arrangement, one can discover an intriguing link to Jacques Lacan’s similar design of the human psyche and his topological investigations. The Vitruvian sequence of venustas, utilitas and firmatas may suggest to some nothing more than an arbitrary division of architectural interests. Ritually, however, the relation of firmitas not just to material stability but to the traditional rituals required to secure buildings from both collapse and curse, even if figurative, offers connections to the chiastic design of foundation rites, where sacrifice secures the life and security of structure.
Donald Kunze
Geometries of Reading, Light of Learning: Louis I. Kahn’s Library at Phillips Exeter
Abstract
In Louis I. Kahn’s library at Phillips Exeter Academy geometries of architecture and media function as parallel rhetorical systems, sometimes complementing, sometimes contradicting one another. This present paper examines how the geometric forms of the library shape patrons’ relationships to media in the collection, and how Kahn’s elementary geometries have accommodated new media characterized by non-geometric, non-linear forms.
Shannon Mattern
Encountering the Geometry and Rhetoric of Lamb’s House, Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland
Abstract
This paper considers geometry and rhetoric through an examination of the empirical and the narratological, comparing the architectural experience of dimensionality (geometry, scale, proportion, material, weight and measure) and the order of telling tales. Of interest here is the experience of stories through material constructions, and there are two aspects to such architectural narratological experience that concern the designer. First, the experience of geometry and narrative in the built artefact; second, the experience of geometry and narrative in the course of the design process, as narrative becomes construction, architecture and building. The second part of the paper discusses an architectural project for a restructuring of Lamb’s House in Leith, Edinburgh. The discussion and project draw associations and sparks the communicative potential between the lines of construction, which are by nature geometric, and the lines of narrative, which conventionally are textual but in architecture are represented through its construction.
Dorian Wiszniewski
From Circle to Ellipse: Footnotes to a Photographic Essay
Abstract
In linguistics, ellipsis (from the Greek: élleipsis, “omission”) or elliptical construction refers to the omission from a clause of one or more words that would otherwise be required by the remaining elements. Photography encapsulates a wide range of experiential possibilities with the rhetoric of visualization and discursivity. The medium constantly reminds us of the basic geometric principles of perspective: perceived rather than measured, brought into consciousness through basic knowledge without need to name the phenomenon. It is the image that fills the gap, pronouncing elliptically what we feel, see and conclude, while the subject recounts the story.
Angela Grauerholz
Friendly and Beautiful: Environmental Aesthetics in Twenty-First-Century Architecture
Abstract
Until recently, environmental control systems have been more often suppressed than expressed, hidden from casual observers and building users, rarely featured as architectural design elements, or considered aesthetically. While the impact of the overall form of a building on its thermal environmental performance may not always be apparent, the mutual influences of shape, form and orientation should be evident to — if not a basic activity of — a wellinformed professional. A primary aim of this paper is to encourage a new aesthetic sensibility for the 21st century; one that conceives architectural form with respect to environmental context and ecological efficiency. Toward this end, I propose a method of comparative analysis, using several recently completed and speculative architectural projects.
Sherine Mohy El Dine Wahba
Infinite Sequences in the Constructive Geometry Of Tenth-Century Hindu Temple Superstructures
Abstract
From its early origins to the tenth century, the Hindu temple embodied a progressive elaboration of a simple formal schema based on a cuboidal sanctum and a solid form of distinctive curvature. The architectural form of the temple was the subject of wide experimentation, based on canonical sacred texts, within the regional schools of temple building in the Indian subcontinent. This paper investigates the practice of this knowledge in the constructive geometry of temple superstructures, with attention focused on the canonical rules for deriving the planar profile of a temple using a mandala (proportional grid) and the curvature of the sikhara (superstructure) using a rekha sutra (curve measure). This paper develops a mathematical formulation of the superstructure form and a detailed three-dimensional reconstruction of a tenth-century superstructure, based upon computational reconstructions of canonical descriptions. Through these reconstructions, the paper provides a more complete explanation of the architectural thinking underlying superstructure form and temple ornamentation.
Sambit Datta
Computational Organicism: Examining Evolutionary Design Strategies in Architecture
Abstract
The diverse forms of nature, in particular and biological forms, have long been a preoccupation of the architect. As a special category of natural form, biological organisms exhibit extraordinary levels of design adaptability across multiple generations based upon the inherent ‘intelligence’ of the evolutionary mechanism. Evolutionary design theory in architecture seeks to harness this generative intelligence as the foundation for a new architectural design process. This paper investigates the lineage of evolutionary thought in architectural design, paying particular attention to the current trend towards experimentation with generative algorithmic procedures and the theorization of an evolutionary architecture.
Brian Holland
Topology Catastrophe: Catastrophe Narrativization of Urban Morphologies
Abstract
This paper applies Rene Thom’s catastrophe theory morphologies to the historical narrativization of urban environments. The confluence of narrative and topology could yield a qualitative yet stable spatial representation of the dynamic development of the human environment. Catastrophe Theory seeks such a qualitative and stable representation of discontinuous or chaotic behavior. Here the descriptions of catastrophe theory are applied to urban forms as a series of “narrative spatial operators” that affectively change the narrative space of urban histories or narratives of urban formation. Each operator is understood to be a combinatorial set of several of Rene Thom’s elemental catastrophe morphologies, elemental relations found in communicative materials and used as building blocks of meaning. What is sought is the application of these elemental blocks to the city as an evolving environment. Such an application could possibly be developed into a method for explaining archetypal moments in the development of human settlements, an ontology and epistemology of development that is dynamic like the city itself, yet simple and easily accessed. This topological narrativization is briefly deployed to examine certain aspects in the development of the city of Chandigarh, India.
Matt Demers
Geometry and Rhetoric: Thinking about Thinking in Pictures
Abstract
Thinking about thinking is tricky business. Pitfalls include a tendency to confuse our metaphors with the act itself, difficulties attendant to discredited notions of introspection as a source of evidence and the twin unreasonablenesses of reductive scientists and mystical humanists. Engaging geometry and rhetoric in a common frame presents the opportunity, especially in the context of architecture, to consider discourse and image in ways that are mutually reinforcing.
J. M. Rees

Book Reviews

Geometrische Grundlagen der Architekturdarstellung
Cornelie Leopold
Der geometrische Entwurf der Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Bilder einer Ausstellung
Volker Hoffmann
Metadata
Title
Geometries of Rhetoric
Editor
Robert Kirkbride
Copyright Year
2010
Publisher
Birkhäuser Basel
Electronic ISBN
978-3-0346-0522-9
Print ISBN
978-3-0346-0521-2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0346-0522-9

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