Aesthetic Considerations

Radical Picturesque

Spuybroek, Lars

Variation has the most potential as a digital design tool in Architecture:

All variation requires a rigor in systemacy from which to categorize and organize itself.

The handling of variation is directly related to aesthetics and premodern discussions of the picturesque.

Figures tend to configure through variation

Intent to categorize the initial tools of variation: CURVES

-Curvilinear ornament stresses the figure

-Geometric ornament emphasizes the pattern and configuration more

Capacity of curvilinear form to deploy variation:

• S Curve; open and serpentine

• J Curve, Art Nouveau Curve; fixed end and open end

• Gothic hooks, loops and spikes; fixed ends with variability in the middle.

Hogarths Serpentine Curve:

Curved line articulates variety and is the tool of variety

The sublime is variation without limit or termination

Picturesque is the station between beauty and sublime

Uvedale Price - the picturesque manages the forces of variability but still results in form by configuration and patterning

Hair in a crowd:

“Naturally intermingling locks, ravish the eye with the pleasure of pursuit”

Pushing the beautiful toward the sublime without arriving

In a modern sense, finding order on the edge of chaos.

Between being torn apart and created there is an idea of proliferation.

Art Nouveau Curve:

This curve is like whiplash. It begins as straight and results in multiple curves. It is like seaweed flowing in water or grass in the wind. It is dangerous because it is the aesthetic of the dreamy. There is a passivity and movement in art nouveau that reflects forms that are mostly female.

To deploy variation there must be many parts

Proliferation can only occur with some similarity , the art of multiplication

Life and geometry and life and construction are constantly intertwining

Iron railings; in the art nouveau they move and undulate under the influence of forces but find one another again to become structural

Gothic Curvature: Two Fixed Ends

These curves share tangents because the ends are always straight. They have the ability to take over one another's movements (loads and forces) at any time.

These curves never leave the line behind.

-Thickness, bundles weave into surfaces, curves into volumes, the only rule is never to leave the line behind

Lines are expressive of some kind of movement, action or force

They are about growth and expansion

Wominger;’s position on Gothic Structure as sensuous, evoking and empathetic

Ruskin’s position is one in which ornament is viewed as material and therefore potentially structural.

Gaudi, Morris and Ruskin would hate the idea of their work revived as digital benchmarks. However, their ideas are easily immersed in the present without the emphasis on laborious handiwork.

All life as aesthetics and all aesthetics as configurational and constructive.