Symmetries (photos from the B-Cube series)

 

Author: N. Ïlïe

„The B-Cube photo series began as a test of a tablet app. The result was beyond expectations. It was extraordinary how architectural symmetry can be visually complemented with elements of optical symmetry to include within it (or extend it with) natural elements and primordial principles – such as sky and earth. The need for symmetry is or is not an aesthetic value. (More precisely, there are architectural aesthetics that rightly – and with spectacular results – deny the desire for symmetry). However, as a value or just a derivative of some aesthetic values, symmetry is, for us humans, a cosmic force.”

Arta grafica

In the many writings devoted to symmetry before it went out of fashion, it was considered, following Plato, an ingredient of beauty and harmony. Perhaps this was the mistake for which, after modernism, symmetry was considered boring and was gradually abandoned. In reality, it is not an ingredient of anything. Symmetry (like asymmetry and antisymmetry) are structural forms of the cosmos – from which beauty or harmony comes.

(There were also technical considerations. The technical capacity to execute symmetry to perfection, its accessibility and ease brought by the iron and reinforced concrete structure, made it banal and exhausted its possibilities of expression. Also, the new mathematics that imposed itself since the beginning of the 20th century transformed it into a child's game - children here meaning math students. But, beyond all this, which must have also played a role, we are trained from childhood to value our particularity, our individuality, as being functionally opposed to a rigid geometrization. As being composed of accidents and spontaneous starts. In such a climate, symmetry seems to us to be coercive, mechanical, abusive.)

However, great projects - skyscrapers and all other massive projects - cannot survive without the balance and order that only symmetry (and its correlates) can bring. Even though it has lost its magic, even though it has exhausted its capacity for expression, symmetry survives through functionality. From here it will be revived in the arts – or not.