The Golden Mean
article by Mike Kelly
Form took on an entirely new meaning one day roughly a year ago, while I was sitting in Hank’s Modernism & Design History class at the crack of dawn. I believe it was the session that followed our initial presentations of the design movements that would ultimately provide direction for our chair concepts—If memory serves, I believe one of Hank’s comments on our first show-and-tell session was that we needed to gain a greater perspective on the roots of each movement's approach to form and how that expertise led to dynamic function in each case.
As we would learn over the weeks to come, comments like this from Hank would invariably lead to impromptu, and randomly selected, assignments to take our research further and bring something back to the next meeting that would inform everyone else on a particular topic…and all this done in the essence of “great theatre.”
“Theatre Kinsey. Theatre Nate. Theatre (insert classmate’s name here). It’s HUGE. What would Anthony Hopkins do with that line you just read?”
So, week two of Modernism, we’re talking form, and I was still a bit off kilter from the hours I’d been keeping. Caffeine no longer had much effect.
“FORM. FORM. PROPORTION. PROPORTION...it’s HUGE. (Hank turned to Amanda, sitting next to me) FORM, Amanda. (Then to me) PROPORTION, Mike.”
“It’s huge?” Amanda and I responded in subdued harmony.
“RIGHT ON!”
Amanda and I were certain we were about to be assigned some theatre.
“You know a fabulous background on form and proportion that everyone in here needs to be up to speed on?” Hank continued, “The Golden Mean. Ah yes, the Golden f'n Mean. It’s huge...How many of ya’ll can give me a succinct explanation of the Golden Mean--what it is, where it came from, the various attitudes and contextual references in which it’s applied? Nobody???” He rolled his eyes.
“Mike, do you believe this? Amanda, how do we reconcile this? I’ve got a wonderful idea. For next week, Amanda, you and Mike get yourselves over to Fulton County library and get up to speed on this subject and teach the rest of us. Make it good. I want to understand. No bullshit. Theatre. Theatre. It’s. Absolutely. Huge."
The words rang through our heads like giant bells. Our classmates smiled sadistically in our direction, knowing full well our mountain of work had just risen above the tree line. “What will ya’ll do, now that this opportunity has fallen at your footsteps? Theatre. Theatre. Huge. Huge.”
No pressure. Amanda and I exchanged numbers after class, and after some necessary zzz’s we met up the next day to discuss an approach to demonstrating this lesson in proportion in a memorable way. Any way we did it, we’d have to make it absurd and foolish...yet informative. We came up with the idea to personify the notion of the golden ratio as a “mean-faced” deep sea fish, relentlessly pursued by a demented sea captain--in the space of a one-act play.
Quiet, dainty Amanda played the dysfunctional captain, which we thought would be especially funny, and I narrated. At the climax of the story, the captain engages in a battle to reel in the mean but is pulled overboard. She washes ashore with the captured fish hooked at the end of her line. Ironically, the fish that yanks her off her vessel is tiny and happy looking...not very “mean.”
Captain Amanda, who'd risked her life to finally captured the “white whale” had come up with a guppy. BUT WAIT. Let’s take a look at those proportions, the narrator interjected—who just happened to have a clearly marked measuring device on his person— Gill to tail appeared to be precisely 1.618” compared with a head measurement of 1”. Eureka! She had met her destiny, albeit not what she'd expected.
Often we look, but we just don’t see,” concluded the narrator, playing to the class, who had heard the Hank-ism more than once. The captain’s preconception of what she was in search of was transformed, and she and the narrator headed out for a hot date...all being right with the world and their new appreciation for the value of sound proportions.
“Pretty cool,” Hank commented after the skit. “How ‘bout some supplemental info for the class, Cowboy--a pdf, perhaps, of all this info, laid out in a pragmatic conversation.”
After the skit, something about the whole idea of this proportion had gotten me jazzed about why it works, to the point that I was somewhat (I wouldn’t say totally) less concerned about another new assignment, and I began to browse Kimberly Elam’s “the Geometry of Design.” I saw a great representation of the mechanical construction of the golden ratio, based on a step-by-step shape deconstruction.
I thought the vellum overlays in the book that helped illustrate her point could really be brought to life in the form of a Flash animation that we could reference and play back. So this little video is how I interpreted her point, and it became the supplemental info for the in-class entertainment that Amanda and I concocted.
It’s HUGE, I tell you.
Click here for animation.
