Geometry's Purity And Architecture's Complexity--A Research On Ellipse

Geometry and architecture have close connection, traced back to their origin. However, the pure character and limitation of geometry enlarged difference between architectural design and realistic world, and this difference is always ignored by architects in some degree. With the dramatic development of architectural technology and changes of contemporary aesthetic senses, architecture in geometry more and more trends to either extremely basic geometry or Gehry's complete abandon of linear system and tradition forms. What I try to explore in this thesis is, behind these changes, the changes and development of geometry's purity and architecture's complexity and the new understanding of the relationship between geometry and architecture. Ellipse becomes a main research object. Through the exploration of the relationship between geometric character of ellipse and ellipse architecture's complexity, I am trying to reach the conclusion which can be analogized to the general geometry and architecture, and to realize the value of architecture in realistic life.The whole thesis consists of preface, main body, and conclusion. The main body of seven chapters includes two parts.The preface includes the purpose, content and the main methods of the research.The first part of the main body includes the first three chapters. The first chapter discusses the historic origin of geometry. The second chapter explores how geometry becomes a brand of science, how its objectivity, ideality and scientifity come into being, based on the Husserl's theory of geometry's origin. The third chapter is the analysis of the main object-ellipse, including its general geometric and aesthetic characters.The second part of the main body consists of the last four chapters. In the fourth chapter, I analyze and contrast many architectural cases in history and modern times which ellipse were applied to, and explore the ellipse's development in historic sense. The fifth chapter investigates the dynamic relationship between geometry and architecture based on ellipse's geometric character, and analyzes ellipse architecture's characters in symbolism, dualism, diversity and unity these four facets. In the sixthchapter, taking ellipse architecture as examples, I try to explore the relationship between the more general geometry's purity and architecture's complexity, and build the foundation for future exploration of geometry's purity. In the seventh chapter, using typology contrast methodology, I analyze two architects with quite different design theories-Tadao Ando and Koolhaas' adoption of ellipse, and taking position relationship as clue, combine ellipse and other geometric forms together to generalize the effect of geometry's purity to architecture's complexity in usual situations.In the conclusion I summarize this thesis's researches on ellipse and ellipse architecture, reevaluate the realistic value of geometry's purity to architecture, question the rationally formality design methods which is seeking geometry's purity as the only purpose, and bring out feasible proposals for the further resolutions.