4 Making a colored, ornamented, floor

How does ornament unfold from the situation where it occurs?

In the end, it was obvious that if we did use these three colors, in these proportions, then the floor would have a freshness, and a beauty, which would delight our eyes every single day — not just be nice or well designed, but a constant source of inspiration, something to draw life from every single time you looked at it.

My experience showed that once one had discovered something like this combination, it hinged on absolutely correct proportion; even minor changes would destroy the feeling.

Conventional checkerboard patterns don’t have three colors in these proportions. Indeed there was no ready-made pattern that we could use. Instead, we had to invent one. More exactly, it could be said that we had to let the color proportions generate a suitable pattern.
This again may be understood as a structure-preserving transformation. We had a bit of global information; the proportions needed to be 57:40:3. Now we had to find a way of obtaining, from that structure, the structure of a repeating diagonal pattern which could extend and enhance that global statistic among the colors.

In this example, the color and geometry are inseparable. The rough geometry first inspired the color. Then, exact study of the color showed us a set of crucial proportions which had to be maintained for inner light, and these proportions directly generated the pattern.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/18 Ornament as part of all unfolding#