City Lines

There are no straight lines in nature. Humans created them when they invented math, and they can only be seen where people have been. And what better place to find them than a city? A modern city with architecture saturated with calculations and geometry. A city like New York.

Cities haven’t always looked like that, though. European civilization glorified nature: they tried to copy it in everything they created, their buildings included. The columns of Ancient Greek temples have the perfect ratio of 1:7, the proportions of the ideal human body; Roman capitals were always decorated with leaves; and rosettes were an essential part of every glorious triumphal arch. But behind the Old World’s mask of “nature”, there was math; and our desire to recreate the world through our knowledge.

In the New World, however, this math is brought forward. Straight lines, perfect circles and equations, all calculated with utter precision, are visible to us. Perhaps this is a reflection of our separation from nature. Perhaps we stopped hoping to recreate the eternal beauty that we came from, and embraced our ability to understand the mechanisms behind it instead. By accepting that imitation only brings weight to what is meant to be light and graceful, we opened our minds and created something unique – a product of our extraordinary minds; light, unnatural and beautiful.