• context
  • image
  • journal
  • about
  • contact
Menu

Andreas Meulenbroek

  • context
  • image
  • journal
  • about
  • contact

Urban Geometry - no math involved

March 29, 2016

When roaming the cities with your camera, the triangular and rectangular shapes, diagonals, planes and facades fill your viewfinder. How to choose, what to incorporate in your image?

“Geometric: resembling or using the simple rectilinear or curvilinear lines used in geometry.”    -- the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa)/ New York --

For getting a good composition to work or take pictures in cramped spaces like historic city centres or interiors, it takes some geometric spatial awareness.

“A painter hoping to represent the choppy ocean surface can hardly settle for a regular array of scalloped brush strokes, but somehow must suggest waves on a multiplicity of scales. A scientist puts aside an unconscious bias toward smooth Euclidean shapes and linear calculations. An urban planner or architect learns that the best cities grow dynamically, not neatly, into complex, jagged, interwoven networks, with different kinds of housing and different kinds of economic uses all jumbled together.”

As an architect or urban planner, you don’t always have the time to allow organic growth, interventions have to be made and then understanding urban geometry is key. For instance, as streets covers around a quarter of urban areas, designing streets is a key issue in a global approach for an environmental urban design. The geometry of streets, buildings and orientation directly influence the airflow and solar access in those streets and therefore thermal comfort at pedestrian level.

Geometry, for some it was the most pointless form of math ever devised. It involves shapes, planes and lines and lots of proofs where you have to visualize and draw all of them in three dimensions, in a cube. For most it has no real use, although teachers like to say it does.

But if you want to make good architecture or even a good photograph in (old) city centres, urban geometry has to be your daily bread and butter.

← For old times' sake - can you hear the difference?Permeable space, so beautiful →

this journal

The photograph may not only be intended to tell a story or to show its beauty, but it can also trigger the imagination, it is food for thought. So showing a photograph is one way for creative expression, to accompany a photograph, to bind it, with an essay, an analogy or just an anecdote is another. It puts a different perspective for the viewer to the observation of the photograph, it may even form an opinion. It is my added value to the photograph and I hand it to you. 

The posts to this journal will be frequent, but may not be regular. I will post one when I feel it is appropriate

 

latest posts

Featured
For old times' sake - can you hear the difference?
Jun 7, 2016
Comment
For old times' sake - can you hear the difference?
Jun 7, 2016
Comment
Jun 7, 2016
Comment
Urban Geometry - no math involved
Mar 29, 2016
Comment
Urban Geometry - no math involved
Mar 29, 2016
Comment
Mar 29, 2016
Comment
Permeable space, so beautiful
Mar 11, 2016
Comment
Permeable space, so beautiful
Mar 11, 2016
Comment
Mar 11, 2016
Comment
Associations - Johannes Vermeer
Feb 22, 2016
Comment
Associations - Johannes Vermeer
Feb 22, 2016
Comment
Feb 22, 2016
Comment
Could Should Would...
Feb 1, 2016
Comment
Could Should Would...
Feb 1, 2016
Comment
Feb 1, 2016
Comment
Steps - how to use them
Jan 17, 2016
Comment
Steps - how to use them
Jan 17, 2016
Comment
Jan 17, 2016
Comment
Jan 11, 2016
Comment
Lisbon - I prefer crayons
Jan 11, 2016
Comment
Jan 11, 2016
Comment

©2022 andreas meulenbroek, all rights reserved - copyright notice