The Importance of the Curve, written by Matteo Mauro in 2015, is available online to Read on ‘Academia’ and ‘Research Gate’.
The paper is not about a critique of the absence or presence of curvatures in architecture but rather aims to understand the change of the particular character of different curvatures in last 100 years of ornamentation history. Tracking how curvature is connected to mathematics and science in a continuously evolving society. A wonderful example of how mathematics, art, architecture, gesture and fabrication techniques overlap. This paper offers an opportunity to carry a study on curves using an interdisciplinary approach on the basis of the theories of the master historians of ornamentation.
This story begins in Paris during the first decades of 20th century. It will be studied the historical shift from to 20th Art Nouveau whiplash curve to the modernists’ straight line and the invention of the “French Curves”, to the advent of modern computing curve functions. Hector Guimard and his curves, will be taken as case studies… in contrast to Le Corbusier’s rejection of decoration as a form of purification. The research takes in to account, the new means of curvatures and in particular the computational curves used nowadays to express them.
Links to the Article: