Geometry of Meaning: the Sphere

Have you ever stared down at a spreadsheet of numbers, or up at a canopy of distinct leaves, and had a fleeting realization that a pattern had fallen into place, assuredly and satisfying like a German car door closing? Math aligns with geometry which aligns with your particular, individual point of view on this bubbling universe, and an organized pattern that apparently has no center or origin quickly reveals itself.

A certain recurring pattern has been winking and blinking at me from the periphery. It’s art and math and experiential and doesn’t look like it should work as a real construction.

I first noticed it in a set piece on a streaming show called Devs on FX/Hulu: our plucky, confused heroine encounters the walls of a building-sized AI computer, a computer that runs such sublime simulations as to force all the characters to question their free will. See her against the gold, scalloped walls:

Scene from inside the AI: Devs on FX/Hulu

Six-sided spherical scoops. Regularly irregular; rationally irrational. A form that represents unknown maths and terrifying, deterministic futures. The show is written and directed by Alex Garland, who made another sublime movie about computational consciousness in Ex Machina.

Scene from Devs, on FX/Hulu

I see the pattern again days later in a work by Olafur Eliasson, one of my favorite environmental artists slash designers. It is a wall called “Atmospheric wave wall” and it uses similar five-sided spherical shapes to re-produce the experience of looking at the windy surface of a lake. Perhaps it shows us the surface at all scales: our experiential one, and all cascadingly smaller nano scales, down to the vibrating thing that is only energy or will, below and within the pieces of all the named particles.

“Atmospheric wave wall,” Olafur Eliasson, Chicago 2021. Image from Colossal

Detail of “Atmospheric wave wall.” Image from Colossal.

The artist has this amazing quote about the piece:

“What we see depends on our point of view: understanding this is an important step toward realizing that we can change reality.”

The geometry originates in something called Penrose tiling, and is based on pentagons. Image from Wikipedia

As tiling squares produce an infinite and democratic grid of space, tiling a five sided shape makes unique evolutions. You can sense the mathy Islamic geometries in there. Spying the hem of God or Allah in the numbers. I love waking up to the idea that these blooming patterns compose the entire world, constantly dawning. A new aubade shaping us every morning.

Beyond tiling as a mathematical generator of spherical patterns, architecture has taken inspiration from pieces of spheres from the earliest domes to the fractured pieces of the present.

The Pantheon in Rome; a half dome containing a full sphere.

The shells of the Sydney Opera House could be described as wedges mined from an imaginary sphere.

Fuller’s tessellated dome in Montreal. Diaphanous presence of space.

Epcot Center in Disneyworld, Orlando. The sphere as a mysterious volume containing the future.

Amazon HQ in Seattle: The new workplace biosphere.

Richard Serra: Between the Torus and the Sphere, 2001. Geometry in the rough hands of a sculptor, assisted only by gravity.

Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church, Rome, 2003. Delaminated slices of spheres, peeled apart to let the light in.

Daniel Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum, Manchester. Shards of spheres useful perhaps only for their brokenness.

God may have been a part of the equation of the sphere back when: The Point at the center, where all extents of the reach are within His grasp. The sublime creeps over our thoughts like a thunderhead: the dome of the night sky and its scaffold of stars. But I think the sculptors, Eliasson and Serra, are using the equations differently, and find a different sublime. Their works include us, wherever we happen to encounter them spatially. Sure, there is math and structure and all the confidence displayed in that. But there is also variability, uncertainty, questioning, and a renewed wonder of it all.

Circle of Days

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FOR MY

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COME ON BABY GIVE ME SOME SUGAR

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So, Thought Construct?

The name’s a bit thinky, sure. I want to use this blog as a garden where I can plant little thought-seeds Johnny Appleseed-style, and move on through my digital landscape knowing they’ll sit there dormant or sprout away. A thought construct to me is any idea of the mind that can be explored, built-upon, pruned, re-built, renovated, and maybe someday become real. Then what does it become, when it jumps into our reality?

What happens when we build an idea?

Everything about Architecture is a thought construct until it is built: every drawing or model or image of a space. Every line or color or perceived shadow. When we stand inside a built work, small as a room or vast as an Olmsted park, it may confirm your thought construct, or it may feel like something else entirely. Did you catch my use of the word “feel” in this thinky intro?

Fiction is a thought construct: storytelling is a way of weaving all of us into a connected narrative through places and times with truths and untruths, a structure made of words that when assembled can reveal who we are: think of the characters’ psychology welling up in a novel, or the thought-reconstruction of histories and biographies. Poetry is the spoken, irreducible condensate of a thought construct.

Painting is any thought-construct applied to a two dimensional surface.

Music is a thought construct pulled from noise.

Photography: a thought construct framing a stolen or captured image.

Film might combine all of these thought constructs into a dream-viewer or dream-displayer.

“Culture is everything we don’t have to do.”

Brian Eno said that (In his book A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary, which i just finished). The statement draws a blurry line around civilization’s needs, and puts art and sport and culture outside of it. There are form vs. function arguments coiled up in that statement too. Design probably inhabits that blurry zone (‘We need shelter: What does it look like? We need clothes, a fork, a wheel, a phone..’). But our eyes see color, therefore we have art. We are animals that move: let’s dance. Our brain remembers: retell it in a story. It’s all survival. In the end we have to do it all. I don’t want to draw a circle around Architecture and exclude anything.

Eno’s book is a diary but more so, collecting passing thoughts and deeper ones that grow into major themes and moments in his work in later years. It connects beyond his own work into teaching, music production (he was working with Bowie, U2, and James at the time), and family time. Seeking, not always finding. The book is buoyed by essays and thoughtful pieces that are unafraid and honest and unabashedly smart.

I am not a renowned avant-garde artist. I will never daydream with Bono about the next U2 song. I will never hatch an artistic movement like ambient music. But I am someone who thinks and feels and looks for ways to incorporate what I find into art or my work. Eno’s book was very revealing about life: He was roughly my age when he wrote it, and the honesty in sharing the desperate thoughts, scary thoughts like: Is this work any good? Am I repeating myself? Is the idea-well dry? I can relate: I often go through periods where I am squeezing a full sponge of creativity, but then that sponge needs to sit and do nothing. Absorb. Inevitably, the quiet message comes back through out loud: I’m just getting going! Will I have time to do it all! I think of photos of myself taken at half my current age: I want to shout to that kid, “You were right! Don’t stop now!”