Animating Guarini
The animations and images contained here are translations and extensions of the drawing instructions provided by the Italian architect and mathematician, Guarino Guarini, in his posthumous treatise Architettura Civile(1735). The instructions have been translated into the programming language of Python to generate animations in the open source software Processing. The animations use a single color expressed in values of red, green, and blue, which are scaled across different lines within the drawing until they approach the value corresponding to white. Line weight corresponds to the conventions of descriptive geometry, in which object lines are thicker and construction lines are thinner. All lines are solid. All animation titles begin with, “The Two-Dimensional Orthographic Projection of a Semicircle,” and end with a description of the operation on each page: “Onto an Interrupted Epicycle of….” All titles are descriptions, and all animations are two-dimensional orthographic projections. The work from this research was published in Animating Guarini: An Orthographic Project by Applied Researcha and Design in July of 2020.