Elliptical thoughts on OCD and Design
I was listening to some talk by Grant Sanderson on Ellipses. He makes wonderful videos on mathematics and geometry. You should try his YouTube channel “3Blue1Brown” There is a lot of rich material there.
That brought back old memories — when I was an associate at Architect Hafeez Contractor. There was this curious case of ellipses in one of the projects I had taken over after someone had left his office. I used to trundle up to Bharath Petroleum Staff colony at Chembur to supervise the project which had just started erupting from the ground. There was already a swimming pool in place; and along the length of it was this badminton court that was buried into a semi-basement.
The basement work had already been done; and the columns were all eager to spring out.
Those days I could not afford a camera and nor was it the age of mobile phones. This is around 1985 just a bit after I had graduated. I was all of 24 years old.
I therefore searched for the photos and got this one! I was quite alarmed when I saw that. For a moment my heart skipped a beat because that is not the one I had worked on. If you look closely at the ellipses; yes those arches where the pigeons are roosting, maybe the OCD in you may get triggered. For each of the arches are rising to a different height. It makes the whole thing quite garish.
Then I heaved a sigh of relief — this photo is also of a club by Bharath Petroleum; but not the same one as the one I had worked on.
You would see that sports club (not the one in this photo); with the badminton court building alongside; in several of the old Hindi movies where Ajit and other such characters spout their dialogues.
That badminton court also had a set of arches — quite a few more than the ones you see in this photo. Because that building was along the longer side of the swimming pool; unlike this one which is on the shorter side. (If anyone has a photo of that badminton court building, I would be obliged if you can share it)
Now here was the issue: The columns were already emerging from that semi-basement. I could not shift it now. The elevation of the building from the pool was also ready. But to my horror, I realized that the elevation will not turn out the way Hafeez or the earlier associate had envisaged it. The reason being; for some fancy reason the spacing between the columns were not equal. They were off by a foot to two in several places.
Now if I were to construct a regular semi-circular arch, then the tops of the arches would not match! That would be quite an ugly sight — especially since it was on the longer side of the pool; there would be people going along the side and noticing the tops going up and down… and that would not be a pleasant sight — even if you are not an OCD based architect
I thought over it and gave quite a neat solution. I want to pat my 24 year old self I was on my back.
Note that these arch bays were not uneven in spacing by very large amounts — but yet I was quite sure that the top alignments of the arches (i.e. the line drawn tangentially across touching all the tops of the arches) would be noticed.
There is an effect described by Gestalt theorists called the “pragnanz” principle which I knew would come into play and make the experience unpleasant.
This principle states that the human perception is not uniform when assessing stimulus: For e.g. If one were to draw a circle and people can put a finger on the centre of the circle with reasonable accuracy.
But if you ask anyone to point out any point which is say 1/3rd the distance from the centre to the perimeter that would be way more harder. Similarly, the human mind is conditioned to recognize the right angle and the perfectly horizontal (say a table top) But it is tough to determine exactly the angle between 0 and 90 … in short we are sensitized to certain stimuli but not to others — that is why the leaning tower of Pisa catches our attention. I bet nobody can work out what angle it is leaning by just looking at it. But the fact that its off 90 degrees is disconcertingly noticeable.
(Architects are known to even be sensitized to 45 degrees and 30 degrees; but not non-architects . Guess the reason why?)
So, it would be the pragnanz principle which would distort the enjoyment of that facade of that badminton court. So what to do now? If I used semi-circular arches everywhere, the tops would dance up and down (as seen in this photo)
I realized that I need to make the geometry of each of the arches as ellipses. Each one had to be detailed out separately; as each bay had a different dimension; albeit the differences were not much.
The contractor was bemused. He was ready with his shuttering and all that; and here comes this cocky associate who insisted on making each arch separately; and not with his earlier arch framework. But I could convince him and thankfully he cooperated.
I remember teaching his staff how to work out the ellipses using a thread (Look that up sometime, it is quite interesting and simple)
Now when you see that building; sometimes portrayed as the “villains palace” in old Hindi movies, with Ajit delivering his classic dialogues wearing white boots you would see this row of seemingly semi-circular arches all neatly aligned together!
You can thank me later on for not triggering your OCD
This was way before TAD — around 1985. When I left Hafeez I was carrying all these experiences. That is one of the reason why I was convinced that small errors in the initial stages of modelling would bloom into huge problems later on. In this case; it was possibly just to do with OCD. But in many cases it can really bloom into huge issues in actual construction and even beyond — during usage.
I often tell my students that architects should get a commission from both Orthopedic doctors and psychiatrists because the built environment is a rich context to give patients especially to these specialists!
In short; TAD was born due to experiences and insights like this. When I started reading on Chaos Theory and their dictum of “Sensitive Dependence on Initial conditions” (aka; the “butterfly effect” — they were talking of modelling of problems) I could directly relate to the way we model architecture.
It is really strange that as a community, we architects do not seem to regard the issues of representation during modelling is a super critical one. Our subject is possibly one of the only specialized subjects that are still using very archaic methods and techniques discovered long time back; with absolutely no change!
Anyway; this is yet another attempt from my side to get people to participate in my design software project; TAD. The world of architecture needs to debate and discuss all this.
Go to www.teamtad.com and enroll in the teamTAD community https://tiny.cc/ttad
If you are an architect, you can prevent this kind of OCD mishaps at the very least!
(There is another story in that project of an old tree that I rescued — in the same project — but let me not start on that now)
