Look around you. Your door. Your window. Your phone or laptop screen reading this post right now. All rectangles! So why is that? Why are so many things around us in a rectangular shape? In fancy terms, rectangles are the best flowing configuration for images from plane to brain. So basically, they’re the fastest shape our brains can process. As humans we try and make things as easy as we can for ourselves. But this also links to our tiny mammal ancestors and survival. In a series on Netflix called, ‘explained’, an episode focussing on beauty goes into this topic into further detail. Millions of years ago when we were tiny baby shrew like mammals, we were on the floor, constantly scanning the environment to protect ourselves from predators. Big dinosaur feet were the worst thing for us to see so we constantly scanned horizontally to ensure they weren’t in our peripheral. Therefore, we were looking in a rectangular motion all the time, suggesting why today we opt for a rectangle instead of a triangle, because let’s be frank, if we looked in a triangular motion all the time, our necks would hurt after a while.
Philosophers have tried to explain beauty for thousands of years and once upon a time, we thought we’d come up with the explanation, but now it is proving to not be as correct as we once thought. The question in hand is why do we look at something and see it as beautiful? Surely there must be some sort of explanation. In the Renaissance, an Italian mathematician called Luca Pacioli named a number as ‘The Divine Proportion’. People became intrigued with this figure (1.61803398875…) and saw it kept coming up in geometry. This led a German psychologist in the 1800s to come to the conclusion that this number was the universal law of beauty. This is more commonly known today as the golden ratio. People claimed to find it in human masterpieces all over the world, but as time progresses, this is seen as something that could just be a coincidence. There is little evidence to prove people are particularly attracted to rectangles with this exact proportion. I can’t say I often look at a rectangle and think how beautiful it is, but hey, someone might.
Hope this blog post has made you aware of how many rectangles are actually around us. Since learning about this it’s almost become annoying noticing each rectangle. I suppose we could try using another shape just to mix things up. Why don’t we start having hexagonal phones or benches shaped like a pentagon? Actually, that bench doesn’t sound the comfiest...
Thanks rectangles and your lovely practical and easy nature.
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