Proportion and Organisation

PROPORTION & ORGANISATION

Spatial geometry, proportion and organisation have been central discourse in architecture for centuries, but their hierarchical relationships among them have varied. What is organisation? To determine the separation or connection between similar or dissimilar uses, helps to clarify aspects of use and establishes similarity or contrast between spaces. And what is proportion? Proportion is the relationship between parts or things. In particular harmonious, proper or desirable relationship and the balance of symmetry.

“To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.” – Le Corbusier

Based on Le Corbusier’s designs on a lifestyle stand point, the creation of the modern house for modern living, function based. He highlighted in his planning of houses, the idea of circulation within the house. He thought that “Proportion provokes sensation.” Discusses how one feels proportion, not a set of mathematical rules and guidelines. One must be in the space to be able to judge proportion.

Organisation architecture is “a theory of the firm, or multiple firms, which integrates the human activities and capital resource utilisation within a structure of task allocation and coordination to achieve desired outcomes and performance for both the short run and the strategic long run”. Today’s complex, dynamic and highly interconnected global economy has made the ability to design and redesign organisation critically important. Despite the increasing important and relevance of organisational design, organisational theories have tended to focus on descriptive and explanatory organisation theories rather than theories of design and change which predict and prescribe. By not focusing sufficiently on prediction and prescription, the field of organisation theory and behaviour has failed to deliver insights that can inform practice and guide change for desired outcomes and performance.

Organisational theory is important for the design knowledge base, but it is incomplete in content and largely silent on the process of design and change. Organisational architecture, on the other hand, is "based on the premise that new theoretical and empirical knowledge can be used to improve organisation functioning and performance".

Mr Webster defines proportion as “the relationship of one thing to another or one thing to the whole.” In architecture today, the use of proportion as a design tool is all too scarce. It was not once so. Even as recently as the late 20th century, proportion still meant something in architecture, where the relationship of seemingly disparate element was relected in every building element and form. columns, windows and doors all held together by an invisible bond, and the massing and scale of building forms tended to rely upon one another.

But where is the scholarship today? Where did this millennia-old approach to design go off track?

As an educated and trained modernist, my building follows a completely different aesthetic, but the basic tenets of how a building’s many parts relate to its whole is critical to my thinking.

Frank Lloyd Wright certainly exhibited this same approach, which he largely credited to his observations of nature. No argument there.

Eero Saarinen, Mies Van Der Rohe, and countless other modernists perfected the use of proportion in their work.

To find the touchstone of all things proportional, one must go back to the Greeks and the celebration of the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean is a mathematical concept which expresses the relationship of two parts of a whole to each other and to the whole, the Parthenon being the most famous example.

This concept continued to guide the creative spirit of painters, sculptors and architects throughout the Renaissance. It has been passed down to us today, but where is it? Certainly not in the many swooping roofed McMansions in the fields of Sagaponack, which collectively look like an advertisement for window manufacturers. Nor is it found in the troubling genre of recent buildings, which look as if they are collapsing in on themselves.

Haven’t we seen enough of that for one lifetime?

The selection of the right column, the right window or the right door should not be made as an independent endeavor, but one where they are selected in concert with one another to enjoin a composition of wholeness. The Japanese have obsessed over this concept for centuries, and their homes, temples, palaces and gardens are living examples of proportion as a guiding light.

It is through experience that one gains this insight, either through visiting great buildings, watching ferns unfold, carefully considering a seashell’s structure, or marveling at the spiraling arms of a faraway galaxy. At some point the underlying principles of proportion become innate to one’s thinking, but first one must begin by looking.

That’s what Wright, Leonardo and Michelangelo did. They looked and learned.

Next time, “The Road Less Taken.”