Time : the diagram for Hudson River House as a hieroglyphic  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Distance : Digital Water Pavilion facade incorporates a musical score  

Form : Pratt Pavillion: a deformed cube floated above a glass entry

hanrahan Meyers architects (hMa) is a cutting-edge contemporary architectural office known for their mathematically pure and sophisticated building designs.  The illustrations above show details from the design of a house in New York;  a new facade for Battery Park City, in Lower Manhattan, where a precisely calibrated facade marks the distance a person travels along an arcing wall leading from a series of parks in Battery Park City, to the World Trade Center site;  and the finished steel and glass facade of a new academic building for the Pratt Institute Campus.  All three of these projects share a precise crafting of form and space based on ideas from mathematics.

In early modernist architectural thought the clearest thesis that connected the modernist idea of spatial design to geometry was Le Corbusier’s ‘Modulor’ – a small booklet published by Le Corbusier in 1948, describing his method of laying out architecture using the golden section rectangle.  More recently, in 1995, Robin Evans' The Projective Cast  , a collection of essays, traced mathematical thought as it informs architecture from the Renaissance through modernism. 

 

covers of Le Corbusier's 'Modulor'

Any great architecture stands in recognition of mathematical ideas.  Mathematical principles applied to space brings us in contact with:

time : the Cartesian grid;  distance : space;  and form : geometry.

Through the application of mathematical forms, we are put in touch with great mathematical minds:

Pythagoras, Decartes, Newton, Fibonacci, Euler, And Nash –  for example.

It is in this vast reconnection through space and time that architecture can produce a profound revelation for each of us:  connecting back through time for thousands of years; and, vice-versa -  connecting us to the open-ended future state of human exploration and endeavor.

 

 Projection and its analogues: The Arrested Image, Robin Evans (from The Projective Cast, MIT, 1995)