Lonnie Royce Shelby | |
---|---|
Born | 1935 (age 82–83) Texas |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Southern Illinois University, Vanderbilt University |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Speech Communication |
Lonnie Royce (Lon. R.) Shelby (born 1935) is an American academic, and Professor Emeritus of Speech Communication and former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the Southern Illinois University. He is known for his work on Mediaeval architects and design, [1] [2] especially on the work of Lorenz Lechler, Mathes Roriczer, Hanns Schmuttermayer, Taccola and Villard de Honnecourt. He is also known for coined the term constructive geometry. [3] [4]
Southern Illinois University is a state university system based in Carbondale, Illinois, United States, in the southern region of the state, with multiple campuses. Randy Dunn was formerly president of SIU.
Lorenz Lechler was a late 15th-century German master mason who composed Instructions, a booklet on gothic design, and who contributed to the Heidelberg Church. As a master mason, Lechler's writing gives insight into Gothic architecture from the perspective of a builder as opposed to the more common contemporary perspectives written by clerics.
Mathes Roriczer, also Matthäus Roritzer, was a 15th-century German architect and author of several surviving booklets on medieval architectural design.
Born in Texas as son of Mr. and Mrs. C.L. Shelby, Shelby attended Irving High School, and obtained his BA in History, [5] his MA from Vanderbilt University, and his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1962 with the thesis, entitled "The technical supervision of masonry construction in medieval England."
Texas is the second largest state in the United States by both area and population. Geographically located in the South Central region of the country, Texas shares borders with the U.S. states of Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the west, and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the southwest, while the Gulf of Mexico is to the southeast.
Vanderbilt University is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of New York shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1-million endowment despite having never been to the South. Vanderbilt hoped that his gift and the greater work of the university would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the Civil War.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), also known as UNC-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, or simply Carolina is a public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It is the flagship of the 17 campuses of the University of North Carolina system. After being chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolling students in 1795, which also allows it to be one of three schools to claim the title of the oldest public university in the United States. Among the claimants, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the only one to have held classes and graduated students as a public university in the eighteenth century.
After graduation Shelby started his academic career at the Southern Illinois University, where he served his whole career. He started as lecturer in history, became assistant professor of history in 1963, associate professor in history in 1966, and associate dean of the Graduate School in 1968, and eventually Professor of Sociology.
Sociology is the scientific study of society, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture of everyday life. It is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order, acceptance, and change or social evolution. While some sociologists conduct research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes. Subject matter ranges from the micro-sociology level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems and the social structure.
After his retirement in the new millennium he was appointed Professor Emeritus of Speech Communication at the Southern Illinois University.
In the 1972 article "The geometrical knowledge of mediaeval master masons," Shelby reconstructed the knowledge of practical geometry in the realm of the mason. [6] About the motivation of this study Shelby (1972) explained that:
In his paper Shelby attempted to answer this particular question. After reconsidering the normal kind of education in those days with the trivium and quadrivium, Shelby suggested, that it appears, that medieval master masons didn't receive their geometrical knowledge from formal schooling but from oral tradition. [8] This tradition, however, disappeared at the close of the Gothic building in Europe in the 14th century with the dying of the oral tradition in general. Instead little books on the technical aspects of building emerged in the late Middle Ages. Also medieval scholars had an interest in practical geometry, and shared their thoughts on this topic in numerous treatises. [9]
The trivium is the lower division of the seven liberal arts and comprises grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
The quadrivium is the four subjects, or arts, taught after teaching the trivium. The word is Latin, meaning four ways, and its use for the four subjects has been attributed to Boethius or Cassiodorus in the 6th century. Together, the trivium and the quadrivium comprised the seven liberal arts, as distinguished from the practical arts.
Gothic architecture is a style that flourished in Europe during the High and Late Middle Ages. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture. Originating in 12th-century France, it was widely used, especially for cathedrals and churches, until the 16th century.
After comparison geometrical works and classical geometry of Euclid and Archimedes Shelby finds hardly any resemblance. According to Shelby (1972):
In the Arts of the Medieval Cathedrals Nolan and Sandron (2016) credited Shelby's translations and commentaries on early medieval works on construction, stating:
Villard de Honnecourt was a 13th-century artist from Picardy in northern France. He is known to history only through a surviving portfolio or "sketchbook" containing about 250 drawings and designs of a wide variety of subjects.
Sacred geometry ascribes symbolic and sacred meanings to certain geometric shapes and certain geometric proportions. It is associated with the belief that a god is the geometer of the world. The geometry used in the design and construction of religious structures such as churches, temples, mosques, religious monuments, altars, and tabernacles has sometimes been considered sacred. The concept applies also to sacred spaces such as temenoi, sacred groves, village greens, and holy wells, and the creation of religious art.
A medieval university is a corporation organized during the Middle Ages for the purposes of higher education. The first Western European institutions generally considered universities were established in the Kingdom of Italy, the Kingdom of England, the Kingdom of France, the Kingdom of Spain, and the Kingdom of Portugal between the 11th and 15th centuries for the study of the Arts and the higher disciplines of Theology, Law, and Medicine. During the 14th century there was an increase in growth of universities and colleges around Europe. These universities evolved from much older Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools, and it is difficult to define the exact date when they became true universities, though the lists of studia generalia for higher education in Europe held by the Vatican are a useful guide.
Mason Science College was a university college in Birmingham, England, and a predecessor college of Birmingham University. Founded in 1875 by industrialist and philanthropist Sir Josiah Mason, the college was incorporated into the University of Birmingham in 1900. Two students of the college, Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, later went on to become Prime Ministers of the UK.
The canons of page construction are historical reconstructions, based on careful measurement of extant books and what is known of the mathematics and engineering methods of the time, of manuscript-framework methods that may have been used in Medieval- or Renaissance-era book design to divide a page into pleasing proportions. Since their popularization in the 20th century, these canons have influenced modern-day book design in the ways that page proportions, margins and type areas of books are constructed.
Mariano di Jacopo, called Taccola, was an Italian polymath, administrator, artist and engineer of the early Renaissance. Taccola is known for his technological treatises De ingeneis and De machinis, which feature annotated drawings of a wide array of innovative machines and devices. Taccola's work was widely studied and copied by later Renaissance engineers and artists, among them Francesco di Giorgio, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Girih is a decorative Islamic geometric artform used in architecture and handicraft objects, consisting of angled lines that form an interlaced strapwork pattern.
Henry Pelham Holmes Bromwell was an American lawyer, politician from Illinois, and prominent Freemason. He was a lawyer and judge who served as a U.S. Representative from Illinois from 1865–1869 and continued to practice law when he moved to Colorado in 1870 where he was appointed to compile the state's statutes. Bromwell was initiated into freemasonry in 1854, and he became the Grand Master of Illinois in 1864. When he moved to Colorado he became that state's first Honorary Grand Master. He developed the Free, and Accepted Architects, a new rite for Freemasonry which sought to teach its initiates the lost work of the craft embodied in Bromwell's Geometrical system. After his death, the Grand Lodge of Colorado published his work on the esoteric nature of Sacred geometry in the book Restorations of Masonic Geometry and Symbolry.
Lucien Lagrange is an architect and a former partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who founded his own firm, named Lucien Lagrange Architects in 1985. The studio is a representative of New Urbanism and New Classical Architecture.
Geometry is a branch of mathematics concerned with questions of shape, size, relative position of figures, and the properties of space. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a geometer.
Islamic decoration, which tends to avoid using figurative images, makes frequent use of geometric patterns which have developed over the centuries.
Robert Edward Williams is an American designer, mathematician, and architect. He is noted for books on the geometry of natural structure, the discovery of a new space-filling polyhedron, the development of theoretical principles of Catenatic Geometry, and the invention of the Ars-Vivant Wild-life Protector System for repopulating the Western Mojave Desert in California, USA with desert tortoises.
The Cathedral of Notre Dame of Lausanne is a church located in the city of Lausanne, in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland. It belongs to the Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Vaud.
Carl Georg Brunius was a classical scholar, art historian, archaeologist and architect working in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden.
Irving Lavin was an art historian of Late Antique, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern painting, sculpture, and architecture. His wide-ranging contributions centered primarily on the correlation between form and meaning in the visual arts.
John Roger Haughton James OAM is a British-born Australian architect and historian.
Sariel Har-Peled is an Israeli–American computer scientist known for his research in computational geometry. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.