Geometry of Architecture and the Buildings Art

Happy Saturday everyone! 

As some of you know I am working on my masters in Interior Architecture in Middlesex University *mashallah* and my dissertation topic is Geometry and Islamic patterns in interior design. It was really hard to decide and I am still in the research phase. As part of my research I attended a short course about Geometry of Architecture and the Buildings Art in the Princess School of Traditional Arts. The class was taught by Jon Allen and Jonathan Horning. 

Jonathan telling us about shapes. 

Before the course, I expected it to be a general course with some information and mostly drawings, but I was blown away by the amount of information I received. It surly exceeded my expectations. 

Jon kicked things off with a very insightful lecture

The course started with a lecture defining geometry, space and numbers. The lecture focused on the circle and the sphere. Philosophically, the sphere has special importance not only to geometry, but it is the point that starts life. The human creation starts as a sphere. The human existence is located in a sphere known as Earth, which is part of a collection of spheres known as the solar system. The sphere is the symbol of heavens. The wonders of a sphere are endless. It is the purest archetype forms because it does not acquire more space when it turns around itself that is why “The power of life moves in a circle” (Allen, 2014). 

Earth on the left and YOU -how humans look like before they become anything else-
interesting right?

The course moved to a practical element and the results were very surprising. I was taught to make three-dimensional shapes from sticks to recreate the five platonic solids. Doing that exercise helped me really see geometry because the geometric solids are still not the exact accuracy as they appear on pictures. 

Five platonic solids

All we used was sticks and glue!

Class effort

class effort

The dome was really impressive! That was so much fun

Moving forward in the course, there was drawing that made sense of the mathematics and the most common geometry rules I studied in secondary school such as the Pythagoras rule: a^2 + b^2 = c^2. We drew the triangles that translate to square root 2, square root 3 and square root 5. It was good to see the actual meaning of those math rules in real life.  

From just math to beautiful patterns

I really enjoyed the course and I would surly recommend it. It was a really good starting point for me. Now, I have to continue researching and writing. Wish me luck! :)