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Parent Category: Projects from Journal Back Copies

Category: Projects 1998

The following report is a very condensed version of Roger Conlon's talk at our 1998 Conference.

We all have a lot of cultural ideas about how to divide surfaces. In an environment not well populated with buildings and pictures, the way in which we made a design would be influenced by nature, skylines, geology and the human body.

One thing from Egypt that has affected us all is a way of measuring. After a Nile flood they had to redefine the fields - an idea of measurement, interval and proportion - nothing to do with mathematics. They could take a rope and say "here's one and here's a half and divide it into three", but they had a rope which was divided into twelve. It can make a right-angled triangle - a 3-4-5 triangle - if you turn it over you can get more and more complex shapes, so this right-angled triangle was a way of dividing - a very natural way.

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