Structure And Form In Design: Critical ideas for creative practice

Description

This book provides a critical examination of structure and form in design, covering a range of topics of great value to students and practitioners engaged in any of the specialist decorative arts and design disciplines. The complexities of two-dimensional phenomena are explained and illustrated in detail, while various three-dimensional forms are also discussed. In the context of the decorative arts and design, structure is the under lying framework, and form the resultant, visible, two- or three-dimensional outcome of the creative process. Whether hidden or visually detectable in the final design, structure invariably determines whether or not a design is successful in terms of both its aesthetics and its practical performance. Hann successfully identifies various geometric concepts, and presents and discusses a number of simple guidelines to assist the creative endeavours of both accomplished and student practitioners, teachers and researchers. Cover Contents Acknowledgements List of illustrations 1 Introduction 2 The fundamentals and their role in design Introduction Point—a sound of silence Line and what follows Planes, shapes and forms Various polygons Grids and guidelines Use to the creative practitioner Summary 3 Underneath it all Introduction Various useful constructions Static and dynamic rectangles Root rectangles The Brunes Star Compositional rectangles Grids from dynamic rectangles Summary 4 Tiling the plane without gap or overlap Introduction Regular and semi-regular tilings Demi-regular tilings Aperiodic tilings Lslamic tilings and their construction Tiling on a curved surface Developing original tiling designs Summary 5 Symmetry, patterns and fractals Introduction Symmetry operations Motifs, figures or repeating units Friezes, strips or borders Lattices and all-over patterns Counter-change designs Fractals and self-similarity—another type of symmetry Summary 6 The stepping stones of Fibonacci and the harmony of a line divided Introduction The Fibonacci series The golden section The golden rectangle The golden spiral Uses in art, design and architecture—a summary of the debate The potential for the creative practitioner Summary 7 Polyhedra, spheres and domes Introduction Spheres Platonic solids Archimedean solids Radiolarians, soccer balls and super molecules Polyhedra in art and design Domes Summary 8 Structure and form in three dimensions Introduction Elements of three-dimensional form Representations of three-dimensional form Cubes, prisms and cylinders Cones and pyramids Three-dimensional lattices Transformations Summary 9 Variations on a theme: modularity, closest packing and partitioning Introduction The nature of modularity Modularity in the fine and decorative arts Modularity in design and architecture Closest packing Efficient partitioning Towards a theory of emergence in the decorative arts and design Summary 10 Structural analysis in the decorative arts, design and architecture Introduction Symmetry analysis—steps towards a consistent method Geometric analysis in the decorative arts, design and architecture Frequently used constructions and measures Questions relating to method and data collection Steps towards a systematic analytical framework Questions of accuracy Summary 11 A designer’s framework Appendices References Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W