Shape

361 Seeing Won’t Do—Design Needs Words
k ¼ 2. As rooms are formed in the Villa Foscari
three descriptions change in this way
from step 13 14 15 16
N 15 13 11 9
My descriptions for grids of walls and room layouts fit together with almost classical
precision to explain what my rules are doing as I apply them to shapes. In fact,
there’s a common parameter k in different description rules that’s a kind of underlying
module—the unity is undeniable. It’s uncanny, but everything has got to be right once
it’s so clearly understood. That’s why words and numbers work for a lot of design—to
make it understood. Nonetheless, there are many aspects of design that seem exclusively
visual—for example, mannerist details and more experimental devices are sometimes
like this. Then, words and numbers—descriptions of all sorts, for that matter—
may actually intrude. Words can bias the eye and obscure what there is to see and do.
Luckily, there’s plenty of opportunity to use rules and descriptions promiscuously in
the kind of open-ended process I’m talking about. Even so, unbounded freedom may
be burdensome when I have set responsibilities to meet and there are important goals
to achieve. Goals and such are also descriptions, and they can be used to circumscribe
the options I have as I calculate with shapes and rules—but this story is better told a
little later on to add to my picture of design. Meanwhile, descriptions do something
else in design that’s worth a closer look. They help me organize what I’m doing in a
variety of useful ways.
Descriptions determine relations to classify designs and to order them. In fact,
I’ve already used descriptions to classify Palladian villa plans according to the values
of m and n in the coordinate pair ðm; nÞ that gives the number of rectangles in a row
and a column in a grid of walls. In this sense, all of the entries in my catalogue of
three-by-three room layouts are alike—they’re the same ‘‘size.’’ In particular, the plans
for Palladio’s Villa Angarano and Villa Barbaro