Robert Kirkbride Parsons The New School for Design School of Constructed Environments 25 East 13th, Room 201 New York, NY 10003 USA kirkbrir@newschool.edu Keywords: geometry, rhetoric, cognition, memory, ornament Letter from the Guest Editor Geometries of Rhetoric: An Introduction Abstract. Guest editor Robert Kirkbride introduces Nexus Network Journal vol. 12 no. 3 devoted to “Geometries of Rhetoric”. We grasp and transform the world through interplays of quantification and qualification. Although these modes of analysis and expression are often placed in contrast, for example as the mathematical and verbal arts, human inventions manifest a weave of alphanumerics. Mythic parables, geometric proofs, memory arts, poems, algorithms, buildings and cities emerge from the intercourse of measure and explication. This special issue of the Nexus Network Journal considers architectonic examples of past, present and potential geometries of rhetoric. Several themes emerge across the collection that illuminate architecture’s multifaceted role in nourishing thought, memory and identity. The cross pollination of geometric and literary figures is deeply embedded in our cognitive habits, instruments of inquiry and the constructed environment. Through time, thought has reflected on the visible processes and products of material craft to explain and train the invisible workings of the mind. 2 Recursively, material craft embodies a tradition of splitting ideas into categorical parts and compositional units for reassembly. Buildings, mosaics, tapestries, and inlays are assembled from bits of information according to a larger composition, imbuing everyday experience with a deep- seated appreciation of the fragment within a larger whole. Conic sections, explored in ancient Greece by Menaechmus and Apollonius and re- examined in Renaissance Italy by Federico Commandino, among others, generated literary figures of speech that allude to their geometric principles; in addition to circular logic, the parabola invited the “comparative” allegory of parable, the hyperbola inspired the “exaggeration” of hyperbole, and the “omissions” of the ellipse characterized ellipsis. These tropes informed rhetorical structures in philosophy 1 and popular forms of literary and designed ornament, colored by such hybrid media as emblemata. Consequently, the mutual influence of splitting and joining in mental and material craft is engrained in language and our methods of investigation. 3 It is precisely for this reason that, according to Dan Rose, “nothing is docile,” and the human passion and prowess for manipulating the stuff of the world, including the peoples who produce and consume that stuff, demands reconsideration. In “A Strange Catalogue of Things,” Rose brings an anthropologist’s eye to “the expanse of consumer stuff that threatens to engulf us and causes severe environmental and social degradation.” Over the past three centuries, he argues, the human sciences have failed to generate theoretical ballast to the exuberant explosion of applied research in the natural sciences, with direct consequences for the design professions. Put simply, our technological Nexus Network Journal 12 (2010) 363–366 Nexus Network Journal – V ol.12, No. 3, 2010 363 DOI 10.1007/s00004-010-0049-x; published online 15 September 2010 © 2010 Kim Williams Books, Turin