Category Archives: Architecture

Architecture

Doing Things The Hard Way

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Graham Shawcross

Andre Cassagnes the inventor of Etch A Sketch died at the weekend. Etch A Sketch is an ingenious analogue  device, that paradoxically makes sketching more difficult  yet has sold over 100 million copies since 1960. Some of its charm must … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Graphics Technology | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Long and the Short

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Graham Shawcross

A year-out student Tom Kirby emailed an office of 200 people asking what the convention was for beyond and behind dotted line styles.  No one knew. On-line searches didn’t prove very helpful so in one of those mad delightful collective … Continue reading →

Posted in Aperiodic Tiling, Architecture, Frozen Music, Rhythm | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

A Continuous Semantic Space……

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Graham Shawcross

I came across a report of this recently in the New Scientist and thought it might be important as it seems to suggest that the brain locations of names of objects and actions have some commonality across the brains of … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Brain Physiology, Classification | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Enjoying Randomness

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Graham Shawcross

This came about after visiting Loch Maddy in North Uist and trying to think of ways to emulate the  strange way that the land and sea merge into each other there and realising that the technique had wider uses as well. … Continue reading →

Posted in Aesthetics, Architecture, Randomness | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Visual Thinking

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Graham Shawcross

I have recently become interested in visual thinking, probably because I like making arguments visually but also as a result of having encountered problems in producing simple easy to understand diagrams. Diagrammatic Illustrations The minimal (graphics only) version above contains … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Geometry, Logic | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Oscar Niemeyer

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Graham Shawcross

The death of Oscar Niemeyer reminded me of an enjoyable September 2010 visit to Paris with the Twentieth Century Society. Among other wonderful buildings including Pierre Chareau’s  Maison de Verre we visited Oscar Niemeyer’s Paris Communist Party Headquarters which later became … Continue reading →

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Design Methods

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Graham Shawcross

Design Methods are now so out of fashion that some of its most important documents have recently been thrown out of the Minto House library, including The Design Method (Gregory S. A. 1966) I was trained, 1963-1968, at Sheffield School … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Design, Design Methods | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Aesthetics of Aperiodic Tilings

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Graham Shawcross

Wang tilings seem to me to be visually more interesting than their plain or decorated aperiodic tiling generators. The various versions of the same Penrose P2 tiling below all look very uniform, with their randomness hardly registering, whilst the randomness … Continue reading →

Posted in Aesthetics, Aperiodic Tiling, Architecture, Tiling | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Find Your Own Space

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Graham Shawcross

A randomly distributed sets of points can be considered as the lowest state of architectural order; the placing of the simplest object, a point, with the least degree of structure, being randomly placed. Well distributed point sets are important in … Continue reading →

Posted in Aesthetics, Aperiodic Tiling, Architecture, Geometry, Tiling | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Wang Tiles and Turing Machines

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Graham Shawcross

Wang pointed out that it is possible to find sets of Wang tiles that mimic the behaviour of any Turing Machine (Wang 1975). A Turing machine can compute all recursive functions, that is functions whose values can be calculated in … Continue reading →

Posted in Aperiodic Tiling, Architecture, Geometry, Tiling, Turing | Tagged , , , , | 22 Comments