When walking through a city like New York, I’m not afraid to look up at the skyscrapers like a tourist, or slow down for a moment to admire an architectural detail. It’s easy to become hard, cynical and always in a hurry when you live in a city, to see only your feet hitting the pavement and feel only frustration for all the ways in which things just don’t work the way they should. But there’s also so much inspiration to be found in these masses of people and their creations all gathered in one place. So while keeping one eye on the street, we must also remember to look up and find moments of peace, glimmers of beauty in the world around us.
The urban landscape provides many opportunities for such moments. Gaze out a window at just the right angle, and the top of the garden wall aligns with the facade of a brick building, framing the glass edifice of a skyscraper in the distance, a simple but pleasing arrangement of shapes and textures. Sunlight dances on a tower of glass, calling to mind a massive topaz, clear rock quartz, hazy moon quartz, or deep-colored garnet.
The contrast of black asphalt against yellow lane markings and traffic lights. The geometry of streets and signposts. The lines and angles of gilded entryways and wrought iron gates. The hexagonal patterns in the concrete barricades along a highway. The bold sophistication of modern architecture stands beside the mysterious embellishments of a hundred-year-old stone building.
Whether walking down the street or watching buildings pass from a car window, these momentary alignments provide endless inspiration for our Geometrix collection.
The beauty of the natural environment is in its patterned chaos: the layers of leaves, the unpredictable twists, and turns of branches and vines, and the hive hex formations. But underlying it all is a pattern, the laws of nature. The built world has its patterns and its chaos as well, but the landscape of the modern city is one of symmetry, edges, and geometry—and it is no less beautiful or inspiring than nature.
The shape that best demonstrates the unity of nature and engineering is the hexagon, which we feature frequently in the Geometrix collection. In natural structures like Devils Tower in Wyoming and the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, volcanic rock cooled to form hexagonal structures that look strangely manmade: a squat tower in the case of Devils Tower, and something like a cobblestone street in the Giant’s Causeway. Likewise, bees, nature’s engineers, recognize the efficiency and strength of the hexagon in the construction of their hives. Why are we so entranced by the shape? Why does it resonate with us in a way that a rectangle or pentagon does not? There’s a sort of cosmic perfection in the shape that appeals to us beyond logic or reason. We share with bees a knowledge we cannot put into words.
In nature, as in the city, there is both order and chaos, structure and spontaneity. The Geometrix collection seeks to embrace the harmony of both.