There’s something provocative in Tadao Ando’s remark that “architecture is in dialogue with geometry” – an emphatic seconding of his constant interest in maintaining a dialogue with architecture’s past. But while maintaining a dialogue with architecture’s past sounds like a straightforward objective you learned in your professional training by studying architectural history, there’s something rather abstract in “maintaining a dialogue with geometry.” Have you discussed design issues with a right-angle lately while your colleagues chatted about erratic cash flow? This initially sounds like Louis Kahn’s mystical, poetically lyrical way of suggesting that architects dialogue with an arch and the bricks composing it. Meaning: impractical. And in the era of computerized design, isn’t the very notion of directly conversing with geometry quaint if not bizarre?

 

In 1967 the French poet known as Guillevic (Eugene Guillevic – but he eliminated his first name in manuscripts) published Euclidiennes, an invented word that might be translated into “Euclidianisms.” It was translated into English by Teo Savory and then published in a tiny press run by the translator herself in 1975. It has been absurdly hard to find a copy in 30 years. So now Ugly Duckling Presse, a small press in New York with robust national distribution, has issued a sparkling new translation of Guillevic’s masterpiece by Richard Sieburth under the title of Geometries. And it should be required reading for every architect in the business, and those entering the profession.

 

Suppose you could experience 50 geometric figures, each having its own distinctive identity and presence, as you interacted with them throughout your design process? Each of Guillevic’s poems begins with the poet’s geometric drawing at the top of the page and a poem following. So a simply sketched ellipse is followed by:

 

                        Listen, I know how hard it is

                        To achieve this kind of balance,

 

With everything pressing in

                        On each of your outer points.

 

                        An unshapely condition,

 

                        Lacking a place to lean on

                        Within yourself &hellip

 

Meditating on a square, Guillevic quips:

 

                        What are its preferences?

                        The sides that touch

Or the sides that face?

 

Some geometric figures speak themselves into a nearly-human form. A plane asks: “What would happen if I threw myself open?” A scalene triangle complains: “I know no rest, / Torn as I am / Between sides and angles.” There’s humor and serious substance, as the geometry you know on a purely technical level becomes de-familiarized into a plaything elasticizing your imagination. As AutoCAD and BIM regularize and tame geometries (Euclidian and non-Euclidian) into predictably conventional forms to work with, these poems do the exact opposite, introducing an element of unpredictably imaginative risk as designs materialize.

 

Additionally, if you can contact geometric forms in your constructions as living, breathing, witty, and querulous presences interacting with you throughout your design process, it likely will introduce novel slants into your dialogues with clients. As Guillevic cleverly says on behalf of a circle: “Friend, we are meant / For each other... Let’s cohabit, / Mindful of all we share.”

 

 

Norman Weinstein writes about architecture and design for Architectural Record, and is the author of “Words That Build” – an exclusive 21-part series published by ArchNewsNow.com – that focuses on the overlooked foundations of architecture: oral and written communication. He consults with architects and engineers interested in communicating more profitably; his webinars are available from ExecSense. He can be reached at nweinstein@q.com.

 

More by Weinstein:

 

A Meditation on the Beauty of Zaha Hadid's Door Handle

Hadid's design issues a challenge: define beauty by lyrically playing with illusion.

 

Why "Greatest Hits" Lists by Architecture's Stars Should Be Mocked
Transferring the musical or cinematic "greatest hits" list mind-set to architecture is deleterious, and here's why.

 

Celebratory Meditations on SANAA Winning the Pritzker Prize

 

Op-Ed: Life After Ada: Reassessing the Utility of Architectural Criticism 
Ada Louise Huxtable deserves mucho thanks and praise - but other questions moving us to a new flavor of criticism have to be asked.

 

Book Review: "Immaterial World: Transparency in Architecture": Marc Kristal crystallizes increasingly complex notions of transparency with a light touch.
Although most of the 25 projects discussed are well-known, they take on additional meaning in this sensitively curated selection. 

 

Book Review: "Visual Planning and the Picuresque" by Nikolaus Pevsner. Edited by Mathew Aitchison
A rediscovered manuscript unveils a portrait of the famed architectural historian as neglected urban designer. His commitment to the picturesque aesthetic for buildings and towns is as urgently needed as ever.

 

Book Review: How New Urbanism's Case Triumphs Best Through "The Language of Towns & Cities: A Visual Dictionary" by Dhiru A. Thadani
Thadani's oversized reference charms, infuriates, and enlightens.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2010
Ten books pointing the way to larger professional horizons

 

Book Review: "Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship": Yael Reisner exuberantly interviews architects about beauty
Any of you architects seen Mr. Keats Lately?

 

Book Review: Shedding Light on Concrete: Tadao Ando: Complete Works 1975-2010 by Philip Jodidio
Photographic presentation of a poet of light and concrete triumphs over lackluster commentary.

 

Book Review: Sage Architectural Reflections from Architecture's "Athena": Denise Scott Brown's "Having Words" distills a lifetime of theorizing and practice into practical and succinct guidance for thriving through difficult times
Brown's occasional papers trace a trenchant trajectory of learning from Las Vegas to learning from everything.

 

Book Review: Keeping the Architectural Profession Professional: "Architecture from the Outside In: Selected Essays by Robert Gutman" celebrates Gutman's legacy as invaluable outsider
Selected essays by a penetrating sociologist of architecture pose the kinds of tough-minded questions needed now to keep architectural professional on-track.

 

Book Review: "Design through Dialogue: A Guide for Clients and Architects," by Karen A. Franck and Teresa von Sommaruga Howard
A helpful communications primer offers case studies of winning collaborations between clients and architects, but as useful as this book proves, it leaves some uncomfortable questions about communication unaddressed.

 

Twilight Visions: Vintage Surrealist Photography Sheds New Light on Architecture 
An exhibition and book of photographs of Paris between the wars might just be the necessary correctives to the virtual sterility of digital imagery

 

Best Architecture Books of 2009 
10 crucial volumes from the classic to the iconoclastic

 

Book Review: "Gunnar Birkerts: Metaphoric Modernist" by Sven Birkerts and Martin Schwartz

A major architect in the history of Modernism finally receives recognition – and sundry asides about why Modernism never exited.

 

Book Review: "Urban Design for an Urban Century: Placemaking for People," by Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon, and Oliver Gillham 
To the credit of the erudite authors, their sketch of urban design brings levels of political, sociological, and architectural analysis together in a readable synthesis.

 

Book Review: "Everything Must Move: 15 Years at Rice School of Architecture 1994-2009" 
There’s a Texas flood of architectural ideas that gives ample evidence of an architecture school that unsettles pat assumptions. Who could ask for anything more?

 

Book Review: A Subversive Book Every Architect Needs: "Architect's Essentials of Negotiation" by Ava J. Abramowitz 
Supposedly architects don't need negotiating skills along with other communication skills because great design "sells itself." How lovely that an AIA legal counsel created this definitive book to shatter that thin myth.

 

Book Review: A Perspective from One Elevation: "Conversations With Frank Gehry" by Barbara Isenberg

Gehry's conversations offer portraits of an astute listener as well as talker, an architect as aware of his flaws and limitations as of his virtues.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2008 
10 tomes from the superior to the indispensable

 

Book Review: You've Got to Draw the Line Somewhere

A review of Drafting Culture: a Social History of Architectural Graphic Standards by George Barnett Johnston

 

Book Review: "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith," edited by Franklin Sirmans

Sharpen your pencils - and get ready to do a NeoHooDoo shimmy.