MS: Geometric grids abound in Nobson. Features follow angular paths. In Welcome to Nobson geometric decorations from The Dome of the Rock are picked out by stones on the ground. Regular tiled patterns occur too, squared paving, or the like, in The Mall and Welcome to Nobson. There are egg-carton forms, cages and contained forms, in Ye Olde Ruin these are next to a cadastrated cemetery, while a great gridded structure dominates the upper half of the vista.
Prisonob is rigorously gridded, with its rows and columns. Welcome to Nobson features a crossroads and labyrinth — enclosed, squared off. There are enclosures everywhere. Unified Nobson looks to be organized in square sections or city blocks. There’s no tangle of streets here, no narrow winding lanes. Nobson sometimes seems to have been built under an aesthetic of cleanliness — that the clear passage of air will blow away stagnant humors.
There is more generally a deep sense of order to Nobson, in the drawings, because everything is marked out on the coordinates of a three-dimensional grid — x,y,z, lines and points. This offers articulating structure — like an invisible skeleton.
The walls in Nobson often have a regular grid structure that can form the basis for sculpture and imagery, like storyboarding, and as also in the great Egg.
Then there’s the corollary — Cathedral is a pile of stones, and the great bound sculpted forms in Villa Joe Rear View conspicuously refuse to conform and instead seem to explode the boundaries of containment.
See category
PN: This is a detail from Welcome to Nobson. It shows a geometric detail from the decorations within The Dome of the Rock (Geometric Concepts in Islamic Art), this is extruded in oblique projection and drawn out\described in stones. The shadow from the left comes from the upright rock form that is amalgam of Icon paintings of Christ from Preveli Monastery, Crete and the coverings of figures from the paintings of the Master of St Barthlomews altarpiece.
PN: Above the stone pattern from the Dome of the Rock and rthe rock of Christ's out-garment is a different grid with two slides. This is grid that connects to grounded patterns of Carl Andre. See also the drawing a2 + b2 = c2.
PN: This is a detail from Ye Olde Ruin, an egg carton grid - see also the embroidered screen documented in the whitechapel catalogue. This shows the progressive desription of the egg carton as an architects model - see also 'egg carton technique card'. See Le Corbusier, designs for modular living. See Egg, Peter Singer, Animal Liberation. The Grid and how do we fit?
PN: Egg + details
