Building #2. Phase One.

One of the charms of American Plastic Bricks is that the buildings described in the instruction books are so reminiscent of their time. The earlier instruction book showed buildings that were typical in America during the 1940's and 1950's.  The later instruction book (two pages are shown below) had buildings with a 1960's look.

But both children and architects want to move beyond the examples in the instruction books, and American Plastic Bricks made that very easy to do.  The pieces simulate red bricks and white concrete lintels (beams). You can do almost anything with this building toy that you might choose to do with real bricks and beams.

In building #2, which I started in the summer of 2008, I decided I wanted to build something with a courtyard.  A sort of cloister, where the central open court is surrounded by a roofed arcade which in turn is surrounded by a repeating set of small buildings.  I made the whole composition bilaterally symmetrical; the left matching the right but the front and back different.  I imagined some sort of entry gate at the front and taller towers at the back. I was building on a glass topped table so these first pictures might be a bit confusing. Here it is before it was finished, viewed from the front:

     

And here it is viewed from the back:

As the towers grew in height it started to look pretty good.  The repetition of elements created nice patterns.  There were going to be two broad based towers in the back, four narrow towers with one at each corner of the arcade, seven stepped buildings with peaked roofs around the outside of the arcade, etc.  

All life has evolved around the need for recognizing pattern but the human mind is particularly adept at it.  It loves finding and recognizing pattern, even when it's not conscious of the source of its pleasure.

In my previous entry in this blog I mentioned that I would be talking about evolution and accretion as architectural concepts.  A moment of evolution occurred next, a sort of random mutation. I realized that the bilateral symmetry that I was creating along the long axis of this building could occur just as easily along the short axis, and that I could try out this whole new version of symmetry by simply removing one broad based tower and sliding it to its opposite corner:

I tried it and it looked much better.  The random mutation was 'selected':

  

It was clear that the last minute shift from symmetry along the long axis to symmetry along the short access made the building look better, but why.  What does better mean in this case when only form and space are the issue and there is no problem for the building to solve? 

In both versions repetitive elements were placed symmetrically, but in the earlier version they were simply lined up in pairs; two of these, then two of these, then two of these.  In the later version the symmetrical pairs are far apart.  Other symmetrical pairings happen in between them.  The pattern making has become more complex and I think the human mind enjoys recognizing more complex patterns. 

This evolution towards more complex pattern making is even apparent in the history of architecture.  If you look at the ancient Temple of Luxor in Egypt it has the same kind of long axis with a series of symmetrical pairs that appeared in my first version of Building #2:

While much later, Blenheim Palace in Britain is all about short axis symmetry and the separation of symmetrical pairs with lots of other symmetrical events in between: