What are we?

Geometry, Number and Pattern

When I was studying architecture a long long time ago :) I was so obsessed about finding out and reading as much as I could about what makes great buildings. I was very keen to create buildings which would serve their intended purpose but also help people who used them feel happy and wonderful.

Of course all this immersion in text and writings was fine and lots of fun but they never really gave me the tools to truly create what I wanted: most of these were theories and there was nothing in them which really described in practical terms how to design a beautiful and life-enhancing building.

However, I was always interested in geometry and patterns, my first project had a triangular plan, it was a small pavillion and would have three people working in it, with three main means of approach (triangles were my favourite then).

My second project was circular with a sculpted roof which lots of my fellow students said looked like it would fly off at any moment!

It was harder when the project briefs became more complicated and sites in cities also varied in shape: it became much more challenging to play with pure geometry with these and practical needs created interesting twists to the shape and play of spaces.

I did not fit in with my first school of architecture's design philosophy, I was working with the need for ritual and the designs for my forms and placement of buildings within a landscape just did not cut it with most of the tutors!

My final project looked like a spaceship, which was not intended, it just came to be. So I just scraped through my first part!!

For the second part, I was in better company and was encouraged to explore ritual and buildings much more and for my final project I designed a city, but one for the dead. And received top grades for my dissertation, so I left this uni in complete contrast to the first one.

Geometry and pattern and number have been a big factor in my work but geometry and number are not taught in these institutions. It is not taught anywhere, certainly not as part of primary or secondary education or even in A level math. It is encouraged as part of the Steiner system to gently introduce number to children on a sensorial physical level, through touch, taste, sight, rythm and smell and it is part of this education. But not part of mine when I was studying in Malaysia.

But how can we avoid the classical buildings, the pyramids and ancient temple complexes which were designed on this basis. And I believe that even the most successful and what we would call beautiful modern buildings have the Golden Ratio built intrinsically within their design, even if the designer did not set out to use them as a tool: their proportions just work.

For me the Platonic and Archimedean solids (and more being created, beautiful forms from fractals too) just excite me. On an energetic level, I really believe this is what we are: a symphony of geometries, symbols and sound waves interacting with each dimension which creates a unique shape which still manages to interlock with a universal and cosmic grid made of equally intricate geometric shapes but with the capacity to receive and hold myriad shapes, no matter how different they may be.

The Golden Proportion is within our physical bodies and also expressed in the spiral of sunflowers and the number and shape of the flowers: sixes/hexagons for irises, fives/pentagons for the cherry blossom. Quartz crystals have six faces naturally. Flurite crystals naturally occur as octahedrons and pyrites as cubes.

And what keeps this all in harmony, the constant regenerative life giving nature of our planet constantly creating and re-creating plant life which express geometry so purely and simply, in water molecules and crystals, but the beat of life.

The beat of the heart of Gaia, the beat of all our hearts together, the beat of the Solar heart, the beat of the Galactic heart, the beat of the Universal heart, the beat of the Cosmos: the love of Source.