Drawings of the Fourth Dimension (1913-1915) – SOCKS
American architect Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866-1946) was additionally an artist, author and stage designer. He was primarily based in Rochester, NY the place he constructed his masterpiece, the New York Central Railroad Station in 1909. His design work and philosophy had been influenced primarily by theosophy, a type of esoterism that preached the soul’s non secular emancipation. Bragdon wrote architectural concept texts influenced by his non secular beliefs and technological discoveries just like the x-ray imaginative and prescient.
A particularly expert draftsman, Bragdon related his texts with advanced illustrations in pen and ink impressed by Japanese drawings with an emphasis on a balanced composition and on the relevance of strains. His texts fostered a imaginative and prescient of projective and fourth-dimension geometry as instruments in a position to attain past the bounds of the three-dimensional world and out of doors the psychological constraints of human notion.
We are able to by no means see, for example four-dimensional photos with our bodily eyes, however we will with our psychological and interior eye.
In A primer of higher space (1913) he tried to supply a visible illustration of the fourth dimension by way of two-dimensional projective drawings. In 1915, he revealed Projective Ornament, an essay specializing in decoration as a capital topic for the event of recent structure, following Louis Sullivan’s analysis. Bragdon proposed an decoration derived from the two-dimensional projections of the fourth-dimensional area. A sequence of ornamental patterns seem from folded-down axonometric representations of four-dimensional figures.
Following is a choice of illustrations from these two books.
Take a look at the analysis work by Jonathan Massey, writer of Crystal and Arabesque, Claude Bragdon, Ornament, and Modern Architecture (College of Pittsburgh Press, 2009) and of a series of articles on the architect.