jrosenk at mit.edu
4.207
Formal Design
Knowledge and
Programmed Constructs
Assignment 04
A shape grammar derived from Malevich's Architectons
| Malevich and his Architectons | ||||||||
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Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) was a Soviet artist associated with the Constructivist movement.
He is principally known (at least to me) as the founder of an art style known as Suprematism.
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Suprematism was meant to refer to the idea of a "supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts."
Suprematism although short lived was a fascinating and ultimately patently influencial style. For the first time
it formed a systematic kind of abstract art. Typified by paintings like his Black Square on White, these paintings
were non-objective. They rejected any idea about representation by not only rejecting typictal styles of representation
but also by rejecting the idea that a painting should be of anything. The Black Square is not a painting of a black square
it IS a black square. Suprematism was a supremacy of forms.
Within his suprematist work, Malevich developed a clear vocabulary of rectangles, triangles and circles. Often in bright and shocking colors these forms would hover against a white background.
From 1923 to 1928, Malevich produced a series of plaster sculptures that he referred to as Architectons. These sculptures are compositions of white ceramic blocks and represent imaginary buildings. The architectons always feature a large rectangular block to which other smaller blocks or surfaces connect. In some ways these works can be seen as a three-dimensional application of suprematism.
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| Project Description and Grammar Rules | ||||||||
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One of the most striking of Malevich's Architectons is one titled "Gota1" which features a clearly recursive kind of logic in the ordering of the pieces. For my project I have chosen to write a shape grammar that produces towers in this fashion.
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| Improvements | ||||||||
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Possible improvements:
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