The
mystery of beauty, we had read, is closely bound up with
the history of an irrational number whose mysterious power
man had been attempting to interpret since Vitruvius (first
century B.C.). We learnt about multifarious endeavours
by leading minds to visualise this mystery-enshrouded
number, we read about proportioned sketches by Leonardo
da Vinci and the series of numbers discovered by Leonardo
of
Pisa (1170 to 1220), read about flying squares and less
flightworthy rectangles.
We
discovered that this 'ineffable number' (Johannes Kepler,
1571 to 1630) is a symbol for the dynamics of the life
process that is generally regarded as being beautiful
if it adheres to the principle of self-similitude. One
merely needs to observe the natural growth spiral of a
sea-shell, a daisy or a sunflower’s infructescence.
Fascinated
by these mathematical interpretations of beauty in nature,
we immediately harnessed the dynamics of the Golden Section
for our own purposes and came up with a pleasing door-handle
style.
In
our Design Engineering dept. we generated a radial grid
system in our CAD system, entered the technical specifications
for a door handle and, with the aid of right angles and
Fibonacci’s numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ...),
constructed a line through swirling rectagles.
Before
our eyes, the aesthetic soul of a handle form gently reclining
towards the
door materialised – an irrational measure so compelling
we were a little dumbfounded.
The
rest was plain sailing. Drawing on our ergonomic know-how,
we arrived at three handle cross-sections, one traditionally
circular, one ergonomically
triangular, and one elegantly square.
We,
the 650-strong FSB workforce, are proud of our new co-operatively
produced lever-handle collection. The market had been
getting on at us for years to provide an alternative to
the classic lever-handle style rooted in the Pythagorean
laws and incapable of more than 'harmonia et symmetria'.
It
was not until we shot a glance at Nature and familiarised
ourselves with the laws of the Golden Section and the
mystery of the irrational proportional number that we
hit upon the innovative alternative the market was anticipating
by way of the dynamic golden growth curve.
|
