Module Proportion Symmetry, Rhythm

In many divergent scientific fields, in architecture, industry, and the creative arts, the concept of modu- larity has gained increasing significance in our time. This volume explores the role of the basic unit and its combinatory relationships in contemporary think- ing and creative work.

The first four essays reveal "the prodigality of the world" as a "prodigality of combination," the result of the interacting multiplicity of nature's myriad basic building blocks. In the opening essay a physicist reviews the underlying significance of the "brick-like modularity which is the natural order," and illustrates how our modern scientific grasp of this truth has revealed knowledge itself to be modu- lar at base. The following contributions by a gene. ticist, a crystallographer, and a mathematician underscore the orderliness and deep simplicity in the rich variety of our physical world.

The second part of the book is devoted to modu- lar concepts in architecture, the plastic arts, and music. Architects review the role of the module in historical building styles, discuss the contemporary reassertion of modular design, and present a case study in the key problem of modular coordination in mass-produced building products. The following essays deal with the role of the basic unit in the plastic arts. In a discussion of their own work, two artists reveal the rich possibilities for structural solu- tions obtainable from the fundamental elements of line, shape, tone, and their rhythmical interplay. The importance of modular concepts in music is discussed by a musicologist who studies Béla Bartók's obedience to the laws of the golden section and by a contemporary musician who makes a personal state- ment on the creative power and use of the module, rhythm, and proportion.

The volume is concluded with two essays which treat the crosscurrents of modular concepts in a broad context: in a paper by an aesthetician, the philosophical problem of the total-partial relation- ship is explored as an aesthetic problem in the plastic arts; while the final contribution, by a psychologist of art, treats the modular concept of proportion as a perceptual phenomenon.