Shape

47 Background
always more when you design, and I don’t want to miss any of it just because I’m
calculating.
The lines from Plato at the beginning of this book are in the Jowett translation of
The Republic:
Inasmuch as philosophers only are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and those who
wander in the region of the many and variable are not philosophers, I must ask you which of the
two classes should be the rulers of our State? 2
Wandering in the region of the many and variable may lack clarity, but any path that’s
traced can be perfectly coherent in retrospect. It’s the right place for designers, with the
chance to see and do as you like to make something new to talk about. This explains
the personal style I use in which verbal and visual expression combine. It’s a good way
to show in words what it means to wander around freely seeing and doing with shapes.
Only what does this say about the ‘‘eternal and unchangeable’’ when I calculate with
shapes? This is ‘‘metaphysical ground.’’ If shapes are eternal and unchangeable with
permanent parts, then there’s no calculating by seeing. It’s easy to use the philosopher’s
voice and talk impersonally and objectively when everything is definite. But
design is lost once analysis is complete. Design isn’t philosophy—what remains to be
created that’s more than a combination of things already there? Luckily, there’s another
way to look at it. I can have set rules—call them eternal and unchangeable, or
simply memorable—without implying anything definite about shapes. Their parts depend
on how I calculate, and they can change erratically as I go on. Embedding makes
this possible—it allows for what analysis overlooks with its constitutive results. Calculating
with shapes is open-ended. Everything in this process varies freely. Opportunities
abound for creative design. 3 With shapes and rules, I can answer Plato’s question
in the way he finds self-evidently wrong. And I like to think that this is as sensible in
politics as it is in design. There’s a kind of gestalt switch, and more. Calculating gives
Plato’s answer sure enough—then, presto, mine. In fact, there’s equivalence in verbal
and visual expression, in the relationships between counting and seeing that I describe.
(The prospect of fixed rules without fixed results is neat. Yet it may be pointless.
There’s no guarantee I can say what these rules finally are. Looking at myself or anyone
else seems scarcely different from looking at a shape. I can calculate in another way as I
‘‘wander in the region of the many and variable.’’)
I started playing around with shapes and shape grammars when I finished my
undergraduate studies, but it was a hobby. I was an economist at the time, developing
models of urban growth. I learned that I could make them do whatever I wanted. I became
a full-time shape grammarist—not a grammarian; I’ve never been an authority
on the proper use of shapes—when my first research paper was published, with James
Gips. 4 This was the official beginning of the subject. Gips and I were doctoral students
at Stanford and UCLA, respectively, interested in how you could calculate with shapes.
We worked out the idea for shape grammars together, with surprises in mind. That’s
what we called ambiguity. But this was a problem when it came to putting shape grammars
on a computer. Gips developed a couple of neat programs, but neither of them