Actually "classic" window sizing usually makes the windows of the main floor larger (usually longer) that windows of subservient floors. This identifies the "important" areas and pleases the eye. The dimensional change need not be large, just enough to percieve. Often the difference between a beloved building and an awkward building lies in very subtle relationships between elements and how the eye is pleased or not pleased by them. Remember that "God is in the details" and "If architects built buildings without engineers they would fall down, but if engineers built buildings without architects they would be torn down."
"EDS" wrote in news:5_udnae_ZZxNNdPVnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com:
True. I think that's part of what I was calling (in quotes as it wasn't/isn't, AFAIK, a technical term) "balanced assymetry". It's somehting you see mose of the time in nature - looking at feathers, scales, and leaves, tehre is a variation in size between teh individual things, usually related to their position on the creature/plant, also usually gfalling within a certain overall range. IOW, the architectural elements, similarly to the natural elements, vary in an ordered manner, not just "willy-nilly".
I was thinking about 1.618 and 1.414, .75, and a few others that seem to recur in human-made items, and why they do recur, and they seem to echo common natural ratios.
I don't think it's only a matter of "visual habit" for lack of a more technical term; starting at the atomic level, moving through the reflection of of atomic and molecular shapes in crystals large enough to be visible to the human eye, and on to the structures of plants and animals, there is a perceivable order to the structure of things, and it's been theorized that this order is sensed at a fundamental level by the brain, even primitive brains, and was carried through to the human brain. The brain seeks to impose order even upon random disorder, which psychologists theorize is the reason that children "see a bunny in that cloud", and why other shapes/images seem to occur in random patterns.
I don't say that visual habits don't exist, but that there is some sort of fundamental (and subconscious) preference for order, and that ratios such as 1.414 were (and are) part of the human visual vocabulary because they do coincide with the organization of natural structures.
And I think it's usually subconscious. I don't know whether any study has ever been done that takes pictures of things which are considered beautiful, and very subtly alters the proportions/composition/etc., then asks people to judge which version is the "most beautiful" - I'd be interested toknow whetehr one has been done, and if one hasn't, I think it'd be interesting to do such a study.
Anyhoo, I discoverd what you mentioned when I'd started modeling builidngs in 3D. As you said, the difference (between, for ex., upper storey windows and main-storey windows) is pretty small, but i's true that, when I first modeled something and (erroneously) made all teh windows identical, it was definitely less pleasing as a model than it was when I fixed the error (after measuring the windows).
True, and in so many things ;)
I never hear that quote, but it's a good one to remember ;)
The "Queen Ann" style of late Victorian and the later "shingle" style which often were / are deliberately asymmetric, but balanced, are examples of non-symmetrical houses that still are pleasing to the eye. I worked during the 70's for a FLLW follower who always did unsymmetrical, but beautifully balanced (and detailed) houses. His larger commercial structures were largely forgettable, however. EDS
I'm inclined to put my aesthetic money on "fractal or chaotic symmetry". For example, I can like some women who have one eye higher than the other. Another young woman in high school I thought especially cute had one lazy eyelid. (Hi Tina ;) And of course we all know that many have one breast bigger than the other, right? And what about those flatfish-- the ones that apparently evolved from the unflat? Cool-looking-- like some kind of software intermorphapolation that God creatively halted just before the end. ...Then again, I dislike those puffy Chinese "tri-caudal-finned" goldfish. So, as for the original topic, I'd say that, for me, pure symmetry may be less-than-satisfying.
(I wonder what kind of symmetry the exchange between you and Kris had. ;)
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