{"id":5833,"date":"2013-07-14T17:05:48","date_gmt":"2013-07-14T23:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5833"},"modified":"2013-07-14T17:05:48","modified_gmt":"2013-07-14T23:05:48","slug":"circles-and-rectangles-does-your-house-shape-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5833","title":{"rendered":"Circles and Rectangles: Does Your House Shape You?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"My first year as an undergraduate, I lived a in four-person dormitory suit. One day I entered the (rectangular) room of my suite-mate Bill and found that he had placed his bed, desk, etc. at diagonal angles to the walls.<\/p>\n

“I got tired of everything being so rectilinear,” he said. It was funny how Bill’s new arrangement felt oddly disquieting.<\/p>\n

A circular room, however was not an option.<\/p>\n

People in some times and places have favored circular shapes and in other times rectangular shapes. Do these preferences say something about the societies?<\/p>\n

These kinds of idea have a long history. In the early 1930s, the Soviet city planner Mikhail Okhitovich claimed that the right angle in architecture originated in private land ownership: curvilinear structures, whether they be round buildings or chairs with curved backs, were therefore communist in principle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This quotation comes from a review essay in the Times Literary Supplement<\/em>: “Seeing Straight<\/a>,” discussing three books that examine questions of shape, perception, and society:<\/p>\n

Vision is a form of cognition: the kinds of things we see shape the ways we think. That is why it is so hard to imagine the visual experience of our prehistoric ancestors, or, for that matter, the girls of nineteenth-century Malawi, who lived in a world without right angles. Inhabitants of, say, late Neolithic Orkney would only have seen a handful of perpendicular lines a day: tools, shaped stones, perhaps some simple geometric decoration on a pot. For the most part, their world was curved: circular buildings, round tombs, stone circles, rounded clay vessels . . . . What does a round building mean? Does it mean anything, or is the choice of one shape of house over another simply a matter of practicalities?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think that I want to read at least one of the books reviewed, How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Vision, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

As for my roommate Bill, he eventually put his furniture back in line with the walls, as the non-rectilinear arrangement made it too hard to move around his dorm room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first year as an undergraduate, I lived a in four-person dormitory suit. One day I entered the (rectangular) room of my suite-mate Bill and found that he had placed his bed, desk, etc. at diagonal angles to the walls. “I got tired of everything being so rectilinear,” he said. It was funny how Bill’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,26,131],"class_list":["post-5833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archaeology","tag-culture","tag-europe"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1w5","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":204,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=204","url_meta":{"origin":5833,"position":0},"title":"Another candidate for Atlantis A\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 6, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Another candidate for Atlantis A German archaeologist thinks that he has found the site of lost Atlantis, the BBC reports. Satellite photos of a salt marsh region known as Marisma de Hinojos near the city of Cadiz show two rectangular structures in the mud and parts of concentric rings that\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":921,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=921","url_meta":{"origin":5833,"position":1},"title":"Purging books","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 15, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"M. and I in the middle of some home remodeling, just painting and staining after the contractor has finished, and otherwise putting things back together.In the past, when we moved into a new house or apartment, we claimed our territory by first doing a fire-bowl purification, followed by building brick-and-board\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"blogging\"","block_context":{"text":"blogging","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":66,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=66","url_meta":{"origin":5833,"position":2},"title":"Watching the news . .\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 16, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Watching the news . . . Not surprisingly, The Drudge Report was first with this story, in tandem with Religion New Blog. It's right up both their alleys. I found it ironic that the woman herself, obviously not playing with a full deck (\"I had cut myself. I do that\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3367,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3367","url_meta":{"origin":5833,"position":3},"title":"Wiccan Green Burials Make Headlines","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 31, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"The Chicago Tribune's Pagans-at-Halloween story focuses on formaldehyde-free \"green burials\" at Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin. \"The thought of getting filled up with formaldehyde and being placed in a sealed, laminated casket and put into a cement box in the ground is not in keeping with preserving Mother Earth,\" said [Ana]\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":930,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=930","url_meta":{"origin":5833,"position":4},"title":"The Right Architecture for Reading","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 18, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"M. and I played hooky and went to Taos last weekend. I spent part of two mornings reading In Search of Zarathrustra (interview with author Paul Kriwaczek here).The book is both an exploration of how Zorastrian ideas influenced Western monotheisms and an travel book about Iran, Afghanistan, and other regions\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"New Mexico\"","block_context":{"text":"New Mexico","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=new-mexico"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":449,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=449","url_meta":{"origin":5833,"position":5},"title":"Ojo de dios","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 6, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"The new issue, no. 65, of Shaman's Drum reprints a portion of Visions of a Huichol Shaman by the anthropologist Peter Furst.Furst has spent much time among the Huicholes, who live in Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental and who are sometimes considered one of the least-Christianized tribes. Their religious use of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"New Mexico\"","block_context":{"text":"New Mexico","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=new-mexico"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5833"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5835,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5833\/revisions\/5835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}