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I was flipping through Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament a couple months ago, and my eye was caught by this handsome pattern I had not noticed before. This is Jones’s Plate XLII, in the chapter on designs from the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. He calls it, “Part of the ceiling of the Portico of the … Continue reading Constructing the Pattern on the Sala de la Barca Ceiling →
(This is the math geek part about the Sala de la Barca ceiling. For instructions on constructing the pattern with compass and straightedge, go over to Part 1.) In the process of figuring out how to draw this pattern, I ran into a lot of questions, and had to do more than a little math … Continue reading The Mathematics of the Pattern on the Sala de la Barca Ceiling →
Nord de Guerre Here’s a survey plat made in 1919 by a US Army unit in France. In the aftermath of WW1, teams of American military surveyors produced these as they went around France mapping the grave sites of fallen soldiers. On this plat we can see a number of bearings and distances from the … Continue reading Transforming French WW1 Lambert Coordinates to WGS84 →
This story begins one day when I was assembling a map of the city of Edmonton, Alberta from OpenStreetMap data. It was going to be a big map, a 42″ (106 cm) wide poster for a wall. The data was good, but the standard OSM colours were not. They would work fine for a street … Continue reading Cartographic palettes and colour harmonies →
More in architecture
A new book on the Dutch monk-architect tries to explain it all.
This year, AI will assert itself on both the designer and the client sides of the construction industry.
In 2008, a billion gallons of toxic sludge spewed across 300 acres of Tennessee in the middle of the night. It was just before Christmas. At the time, Jared Sullivan was in high school and remembers the disaster. For over fifty years a power company called the Tennessee Valley Authority – or the TVA –
In the closing chapter of Archinect In-Depth: Visualization, we return to one Renaissance painting referenced in an earlier article from the series. What does this painting, and our wider series, teach us about the relationship between technology and visualization? What do they tell us about the potential for visualization to open new worlds not beholden to the natural laws of space and time?
