From parallel descriptions to parallel grammars: unravelling the complexity of Lutyen's country house folio

Based on an analysis of a corpus of forty of Sir Edwin Lutyens's country house designs (Rollo 1997) a procedure for developing Parallel Descriptions will be discussed. This procedure will attempt to facilitate an integrated approach to the analysis of complex architectural forms and will provide a framework for investigating the development of parallel grammars. This is an approach which acknowledges that design does not necessarily involve the importance of one aspect, but rather a number of coextensive issues with emphasis on the ordering and priority of these issues periodically shifting.

From play to poetics

An expedient approach towards organizing ideas and drafting at the sentence-level, play with phrase structures in the Vygotskyan tradition demonstrates the often unexploited possibilities afforded to composition students through creative experiential learning; circumvents prescriptive pedagogies; and makes explicit a student's tacit awareness of standard grammars and more valued rhetorical conventions.

Snapshots of complexity: using motion capture and principal component analysis to reconceptualise dance

This article brings together the disparate worlds of dance practice, motion capture and statistical analysis. Digital technologies such as motion capture offer dance artists new processes for recording and studying dance movement. Statistical analysis of these data can reveal hidden patterns in movement in ways that are semantically ‘blind’, and are hence able to challenge accepted culturo-physical ‘grammars’ of dance creation. The potential benefit to dance artists is to open up new ways of understanding choreographic movement. However, quantitative analysis does not allow for the uncertainty inherent in emergent, artistic practices such as dance. This article uses motion capture and principal component analysis (PCA), a common statistical technique in human movement recognition studies, to examine contemporary dance movement, and explores how this analysis might be interpreted in an artistic context to generate a new way of looking at the nature and role of movement patterning in dance creation.