Artist M.C. Escher died 45 years ago on March 27, 1972. Escher’s gravity defying lithographs and woodcuts offer illusory visual acrobatics that play with viewers’ perceptions of figure/ground relationships, creating a kind of graphic magical realism that celebrates the mathematics that informs all visual design. Here are some words from the Wiki…

His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Although Escher believed he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with the mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose, Harold Coxeter and crystallographer Friedrich Haag, and conducted his own research into tessellation.

Early in his career, he drew inspiration from nature, making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants such as lichens, all of which he used as details in his artworks. He traveled in Italy and Spain, sketching buildings, townscapes, architecture and the tilings of the Alhambra and the Mezquita of Cordoba, and became steadily more interested in their mathematical structure.

Escher’s art became well known among scientists and mathematicians, and in popular culture, especially after it was featured by Martin Gardner in his April 1966 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Apart from being used in a variety of technical papers, his work has appeared on the covers of many books and albums. He was one of the major inspirations of Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Here’s a great doc about the master and the way-out worlds he created…

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Buckminster Fuller is one of my heroes and I wanted to add this post to celebrate the the 65th anniversary of his greatest project in 1949. Here’s some of the Wiki about the great architect/inventor/philosopher’s Geodesic Dome…

Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the summers of 1948 and 1949,[17] serving as its Summer Institute director in 1949. There, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began reinventing a project that would make him famous: the geodesic dome. Although the geodesic dome had been created some 30 years earlier by Dr. Walther Bauersfeld, Fuller was awarded United States patents. He is credited for popularizing this type of structure.

One of his early models was first constructed in 1945 at Bennington College in Vermont, where he frequently lectured. In 1949, he erected his first geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. It was 4.3 meters (14 feet) in diameter and constructed of aluminum aircraft tubing and a vinyl-plastic skin, in the form of an icosahedron. To prove his design, and to awe non-believers, Fuller suspended from the structure’s framework several students who had helped him build it. The U.S. government recognized the importance of his work, and employed his firm Geodesics, Inc. in Raleigh, North Carolina to make small domes for the Marines. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the world.

As far as I’m concerned all buildings everywhere should embrace Fuller’s efficient design principles, and every high-rise rectangle is a monument to ignorance, arrogance, and the capitalist status quo of waste, greed and lack of vision. In honor of the great man’s life and ideas, here’s a full-length documentary illuminating a great mind and a great heart…

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