Dear o’listers, I came across something quite wonderful in my PhD research today.
I picked up a book on Frank Lloyd Wright, an American architect with a considerable global reputation, at the University library, therein I discovered that he was inspired for a series of window-frame designs, and I suspect for the use of proportion in his career, by the seventh gift of Froebel as his insight into proportion. It’s a set of 5 tiles, square, equilateral triangle, isosceles triangle, and scalar triangle, I made an illustration you can see for a short time here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/36p4hixaiqmwu8y/froebel-seventh-gift.png?dl=0 Its a magical set of tiles that each fit onto each other, similar to Tangram, but my favourite idea here is the √1 √2 √3 √4 √5 ascendence. As soon as I saw them, I thought, ahah! they are origami ratios, and sure enough the following page states the same: http://www.froebelweb.org/gifts/seventh.html I did not know that was one of primary reasonings behind Froebel’s love of origami, the beautiful ratios, and their relationships. It all reminds me of talking to Jun Maekawa in Tokyo, he said he loves these ratios in origami, and now, finally, some 10 years later, I get it. I guess that’s why we study, to actually learn things through our questions… asking what is the relationship between art and concepts, led me to architecture theory, back to geometry, to kindergarten education, and then to origami. Curious if anyone knows anything more about this topic? best, Matthew
