I visited this and several other Gaudi buildings about 15 years ago in Barcelona, and many of them are truly breathtaking, or at least dramatically original and unique. I went to the Gaudi museum as well and found it fascinating that the architect himself was not a professional mathematician - he did not use hyperbolic cosine to calculate the dimensions of the catenary curves, he traced the outline of hanging chains. Really interesting to hear about how he also heavily used ratios and symmetry. I love how artistic taste can be partially derived from math (but the math itself isn't sufficient to develop artistic taste)
"Gothic cathedrals and Doric temples are mathematics in stone. Doubtless Pythagoras was the first in the Classical Culture to conceive number scientifically as the principle of a world-order of comprehensible things—as standard and as magnitude—but even before him it had found expression, as a noble arraying of sensuous-material units, in the strict canon of the statue and the Doric order of columns. The great arts are, one and all, modes of interpretation by means of limits based on number (consider, for example, the problem of space-representation in oil painting). A high mathematical endowment may, without any mathematical science whatsoever, come to fruition and full self-knowledge in technical spheres." ~ Spengler, Decline of the West
I had to put this one through Claude, but it boils down to:
> A culture's felt sense of proportion, ratio, and spatial order manifest directly through the hands of masons and sculptors, without necessarily needing the mathematical formalism of proofs, axioms, and treatises.
Not sure how I feel about this, as the Familia was absolutely built in a context of formalised mathematical sciences.
> A culture's felt sense of proportion, ratio, and spatial order manifest directly through the hands of masons and sculptors, without necessarily needing the mathematical formalism of proofs, axioms, and treatises.
Not sure how I feel about this, as the Familia was absolutely built in a context of formalised mathematical sciences.