Shape

364 III Using It to Design
and in fact, more rooms than any other plan in the catalogue except the complete
grid of walls. If I want to move beyond the grid and get something that’s a little
more expressive, and the number of rooms in a plan is the only additional thing I’m
considering—the number should be high—then the Villa Angarano is the best I can
do. But numbers may measure other properties, perhaps to optimize physical performance
or social interactions. I might even try and apply George Birkhoff’s aesthetic
measure
M ¼ O C
to get something of delight from the plans in my catalogue, or use the corresponding
measure of my own—E Z —that I described along with Birkhoff’s in the introduction. I
wasn’t keen on any of this then, and in practice I’m still not. Nonetheless, E Z makes an
instructive example without my having to rehearse any technical details. The results
are enough. In terms of E Z , the Villa Barbaro is better than the Villa Angarano, but it’s
only the second best among the plans with five rooms, after this one
And notice that the three remaining plans with only rectangular rooms
are the same. In fact in many ways, they look it—each with twin three-by-one or oneby-three
spaces. But really, the main thing to get from all of this is that equivalence
and value both depend on how descriptions are defined as I calculate with shapes.
And there’s plenty of room for descriptions to vary—they can be given in lots and
lots of ways, and the ones to use are up for grabs. The perfect description now needn’t
be right the next time I look, and it’s easy to forget as I go on. Things change whenever
I try a rule. I’m always free to design some more.
I’ve kept shapes and descriptions together in the way I have so that when I apply
rules to shapes, descriptions are automatically defined in parallel. But it’s time to flip
this around in an inverse way to show something else that’s important in design.
Descriptions can be defined independently to provide design specifications and