The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture

A language of patterns seems to operate throughout the creative processes of both nature and humanity, from the geometry of a snowflake to the sonnets of Shakespeare to the architecture of the Japanese teahouse. The author’s discovery, vividly illustrated here, is that certain proportions occur over and over again in all these forms. Patterns are also repeated in how things grow and are made - by the dynamic union of opposites - as demonstrated by the spirals that move in opposite directions in the growth of a plant. The award winning architect Gy rgy Doczi translates the language of patterns and shows how we, as humans, are included in the universal harmony of form, and suggests that the union of complementary opposites may be a way to extend that harmony to the psychological and social realms as well.