ABSTRACT
Geometry in nature is a perception but, interpretively, a human reconstruction, a reductive abstract. As applied, plain three-dimensional shapes were the stuff of architecture since the invasion of formalism during antiquity. It is within Egyptian and classical Graeco-Roman forms of pyramid, pediment, and triangle; of sphere, cylinder, and circle; of parallelepiped and rectangle; of cube and square. Each established the aesthetics of a building with, in a search for order, a tendency to axial symmetry and therefor to formality. The neoclassic romanticists of eighteenth-century Europe, together with Thomas Jefferson, among other enlightened Americans, were aware of those abstractions. So were Goethe and Froebel: the stone sculpture of Froebel’s grave monument was a progression from sphere upon a cylinder upon a cube, each unadorned. It drew inspiration from Johann Goethe’s 1777 stone sculpture he titled Altar of Good Fortune, composed of a stone sphere on a stone cube and placed in his garden near Weimar.
