Lo Shu, Window to the World of the Wondrous: Bragdon, Lissitzky, Malevich
Lo Shu, Window to the World of the Wondrous: Bragdon, Lissitzky, Malevich Eugenia Victoria Ellis Architect and doctoral student, Virginia Tech Introduction The architectural imagination is a transcendental space of four-dimensions. When lost in thought, when vision is turned inward and becomes blind to the world outside, one's entire body—intellect, soul, and sexuality—transcends the rational and approaches a meditative state where intellectuality, emotionality, and sexuality are merged into an inseparable unity. When architects design, they conceptualize: a type of spatial visualization that takes ideas as three-dimensional constructs, and continuously combines and recombines them in a non-linear, non-rational thought process where time is suspended in the inner landscape of the mind's eye. The mental movement or rotation of objects is a dreamlike, analogical process—a Tantric dimension of inward contemplation—that provides visual-spatial insights for the architectural imagination, opening a window to the world of the wondrous. To follow will be an investigation into the relationship between the fourth dimension and the architectural imagination: the mechanism behind an architect's ability to imagine the spatial relationships possible through the mental rotation and spatial transformation of two-dimensional objects, such as the transformation of plan, section and elevation to occupiable architectural space, and then to imagine walking through the resultant three-dimensionality. The Magic of the Square [Magic squares] are conspicuous instances of the intrinsic harmony of number, and as such serve as an interpreter to man of that cosmic order which permeates all existence. Claude Bragdon, The New Image, “Man: the Magic Square” 1 At the turn of the century there was a surprising interest in the occult and eastern spirituality that oftentimes was expressed in mathematical terms in order to make it scientific, and therefore rational, and in so doing to make it palatable to those less inclined to venture into the unknown.
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