Concept: Relations
Keywords:
Markings
Decorations
Drawings
When you browse the book, the general structure soon becomes evident. Most spreads consist of a left hand page covered in text and a right hand page composed of illustrations. A key factor in the interplay between those two archetypes is that the author uses letters to mark certain points in his drawings, which he then refers to on the text pages, establishing a relation between drawing and text. Text and illustrations are only rarely ever mixed.
To further intensify this relationship, depictions of flowers, vegetables and other greenery are used in both the text pages, as well as the illustrated pages. These decorations are seen throughout the whole book but become more infrequent towards the end when the general structure is being broken up and fewer illustrations are seen. In general the decorations are arranged around the illustrations, creating a frame. On the text pages, the decorations appear wherever there are blank spaces and around the first letter of each chapter. Sometimes, this layout can seem unmotivated because the decorations don’t merge with the text as seamlessly as they do with the drawings.
Not only the pages, but also the spreads are deliberately set up to interplay with one another. The first chapters of the book recreate simple geometrical concepts such as linearity, dimensions and angles. Later on, the author uses these concepts to express more complex ones. In that sense, the book is systematically organized in a didactical way expecting the reader to work his way through the book from the beginning to the end.
When looking at the illustrations themselves, it is striking how they relate to reality. Especially towards the end of the book, more and more illustrations depict not only abstract geometrical concepts but architectural spaces that could theoretically exist in the real world. But, as with all illustrations in the book, even they strictly serve the purpose of displaying geometrical principles. This ambiguity can leave the viewer wondering if the drawing derives from a depiction of reality or a demonstration of geometry.
It’s interesting to follow the interaction of those two elements as they are often overlapping and not clearly separable in every picture. In some occasions, for example, the author introduces human figures in the drawings. Particularly in these cases, one is confronted with the proportion of the spaces depicted, since the human figure works as a point of reference for the reader.