99% Invisible - 106- The Fancy Shape

Episode Date: March 18, 2014

Quatrefoil is the name of the four-lobed cloverleaf shape. It’s everywhere: adorning Gothic cathedrals, more modern churches, Rhode Island mansions, mission-style roofs in California, and decorating victorian homes from coast to coast. It’s embroidered on bedding, plastered on wallpaper, and … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. You know when you notice something for the first time and suddenly it's everywhere. My friend Julie Shapiro has a thing for personified teeth on dentist signs where the cartoon tooth often has a smile and teeth of its own. I always notice these now. That and anthropomorphized pigs who are selling themselves as barbecue, that always gives me the creeps, and one day I noticed that sign stores, you know the ones that print homemade banners and posters for you, always without fail, have the ugliest collection of

signs with horrible fonts in their front windows. Now I can't pass one on the street without taking a picture to document the ironic tragedy. Lots of things are like this for all of us on staff, we can get obsessed with tiny little design flourishes. And this is what happened to producer Avery Trouffleman. It was just a shape. A basic little shape. It's rendered in concrete on a building by my house. It's patterned in an office doorway down the street.

Here's what it looks like. Imagine a simple, stylized, four-leaf clover, flattened with no stem. Very symmetrical. I took a walk and I found this shape in 10 different places. It was embroidered on bedding. It was plastered on wallpaper. It was patterned in a public garbage can.

You'll see it anywhere you see great Gothic revival building, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, the Washington Cathedral. You will also see it in domestic architecture in the great, as they're called, cottages down in Newport, Rhode Island. Here in California, it's a hallmark of mission-style homes. You know, it's like a sponge. It just sucks up meaning. However, you want it to be used. This is Christy Anderson. My name is Christy Anderson.

I'm an architectural historian and I teach at the University of Toronto. And she's talking about the quadrifoyle. This is for leave clover-like shape. There's nothing that I can think of like the quadrifoyle, which appears in so many different forms over such a long period of time. It could be endlessly reinterpreted and re-understood, I mean in some language, architectural and art historian, sometimes referred to,

as iconographical drift. It's constantly sort of shifting, depending on where it's used, who's using it, what purpose they're using it for. But no matter where it's used, it implies the same thing. Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness.

Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness.

Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness. Fanciness. the French way if you would like. Cats faye. Meaning four leaves. But the American pronunciation works too. It's hard to know for sure why the Quattrofoil is the global fancy shape. There aren't that many resources on the subject. There's nothing on it. You know, nobody's really worked on it. But Christy Anderson is a good person to connect the dots.

I rummaged around and I looked and I just started thinking about it. Now one of the questions is where does it come from? I mean because things don't just usually appear out of nowhere. Christy Anderson says that just by looking at the shape you can see it has roots in Islamic or Morish architecture. That kind of organic shape that comes out of a geometrical form, almost all of them have some kind of Islamic origins, partly because of the great mathematicians who were working on early Islamic architecture.

And the quadrupole made its way to Europe via the Silk Road. The small objects which could be transported with early carpets, velvets and silks that were brought into Europe as luxury objects. Once the quattrofoil made its way to Europe, it was incorporated into tracery, which is the stone framework for big stained glass windows. And quattrofoil shaped stone frames were considered beautiful because the quattrofoil was difficult to make. The fanciness of the shape is because it requires a certain amount of mathematical skill, but also craftsmanship.

They could have used much simpler forms. They could have used simple diamond forms. You're seeing something which really shouldn't be made out of stone. I mean, it's hard. It's a hard and difficult form to carve out of stone. So it only appeared in places that could afford them, like churches. And because it appeared in churches, this simple shape could take on Christian meaning. Just think of anything in the Christian tradition that comes in a set of four.

The four evangelists or a variation on a cross. There's a Greek cross with equal arms on all sides. I'm sure people who use the quadrifoyle now will not sit there and recount to you this long thing that I've recounted to you about Islam and metalwork and both all of this. If you google the image you'll find a lot of modern interior designers talking about the trendiness of the quadrifoyle. I was just amazed. I found like about seven interior designers who said, the Quattrofoil is the shape and I'm using it on my wallpaper and all these things. I thought, what do they think they're doing actually when they're doing this?

My name is Brooke Taylor and I am an interior designer at ArcSign Architecture. You work to desk away from me. I do. We work inside ArcSign an architecture firm in Oakland. Brooke is designing the interior of a big hotel in Palo Alto. I asked her about the quadriff oil when I saw a picture of a quadriff oil shaped table on her desk. I believe what you saw was an end table that we're using where it's the barbed catriff

oil and it's basically the shape of the tabletop. Brooke says catriff oil, which is also a correct pronunciation. And her design for the lobby has a lot of quadrophylls in it. Or catrophoils. Here's a rug that we're using in the lobby that is literally overlapping catrophoils. And Brooke actually didn't do this intentionally. I didn't even realize until, well, basically just now, that that catroph table is gonna be on the overlapping catcher foil rug. And close by, there's also a chair with quattrofoil fabric.

It just happened that way. The quattrofoil just has an appeal. It is at heart a very simple shape, but somehow there's just a formality to it. You can tell that there's a history behind it, even if you don't know what it is. You can tell that it's out of history somewhere. And so to then take that and reinterpret it

into a modern form, I think has appeal for people. But the way we see the quadrufoil in modern interior design is not referencing Gothic tracery directly. Surprise, surprise. The quadrufoil shape first came back in style in a big way in the 19th century during the Gothic revival period. This was when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing.

People were seeking style inspiration from the pre-industrial era and kind of harkening back to a simpler time. The Gothic revival movement was also around the time of the Egyptian mania craze, when new archaeological digs were popping up all around the world. It was all very new. It was like, oh my god, they just discovered these tombs in Egypt and uncovering Roman ruins and Greek ruins,

bringing all those influences in and also reviving some interest in Gothic architecture. Designers were looking to the past and around the globe for inspiration. They traveled, photographing, sketching, digging into archives and collecting patterns, motifs and shapes that they found inspiring. And they would publish these findings in so-called pattern books. In the second half of the 19th century, historian Kristi Anderson again. There was a kind of flourishing of architects and designers who created pattern books of designs which could be used by architects,

masons, craftsmen, really in any field. So it didn't matter whether you were doing painting or tile work. These were encyclopedias of design, of which the most famous one was the grammar of ornament, which was published by man named Owen Jones. Owen Jones was an architect who took a special interest in ornament and pattern. I mean, if you've never seen Owen Jones' books, they are so beautiful. It's a big book. His book, The Grammar of Ornament, has pages and pages of pure pattern.

And then, you know, some text intervening, but for the most part, it's just colorful squares of pattern. From buildings all over the world. I mean, you've got India, you've got Chinese, you have Morish, Celtic, Turkish. Like an Epcot tour of Wallpapers. Owen Jones' book transformed the whole way in which design was created, because now you had these patterns which were completely disconnected from their original function. They were just forms printed on the page. Many of the forms across many of the culture's

Jones documented were quadrufoils. It was particularly Owen Jones' work, the grammar of ornament, where the quadrufoil had a very important place, was part of a number of different pages on ornament, repeated over and over again, and certainly spurred on the interests in this form in the later 19th and early 20th century. And does Anders still use these pattern books

for inspiration? Number 18 on this page? I mean, that looks like something that somebody would have done in the 60s and... It's kind of matter, no. Yeah. But no, but Renaissance. And it would seem that Joan succeeded in his mission for his book. No matter, no. Yeah. But no, but Renaissance.

And it would seem that Joan succeeded in his mission for his book. He hoped the grammar of ornament would provide context and background for these patterns and that they would be a source of inspiration, which anyone and everyone could use. But today, part of the Quattrofoil's fancy symbolism comes from the modern luxury brands that have associated with it. Many of which are clamoring to own it. Louis Vuitton had a lawsuit over use of the Quattrofoil. Luxury Jewelry David Yeermann trademarked the word Quattrofoil.

Another Jewelry company, Van Cleff and Appelz, is fiercely litigious over its claim to the shape. There is a power about this simple form, which is everywhere, and yet it has no steady associations with any specific country or movement, and this is what separates it from other ornamental forms like the Flordalee or even the Swastika. I mean, middle ages, seriously, there are patterns from the middle ages in here, and you see the barbed cacti foil. How can you copyright that?

The best thing about the grammar of ornament are the pages and pages of beautiful pattern. But Jones' brief introduction is also really interesting. In it, Jones lists 37 propositions for the creation of good decorative design. General principles in the arrangement of form and color in architecture and the decorative arts which are advocated throughout this work.

I imagine most people just skip right over these and get to the pretty stuff. It's an interesting mix of statements in these propositions. Proposition four is almost philosophy, you know? Absolutely. True beauty results from that repose, which the mind feels when the eye, the intellect,

and the affections are satisfied from the absence of any want. That is extremely philosophical. And then you have something as basic as Proposition 26, colors on white grounds appear darker on black grounds lighter. But I think Proposition 13 unlocks the logic behind the inherent attractiveness of the quattrofoil. Flowers or other natural objects should not be used as ornaments,

but conventional representations founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the intended image to the mind without destroying the unity of the object they are employed to decorate. Or to translate. It's basically like don't just put a bird on it. Flurry designs don't necessarily look good. According to Jones, the best kinds of designs imply nature while keeping with proposition eight. All ornament should be based upon a geometrical construction. The quadrifoyle is both geometrical and natural,

but without being too flowery. And this just might be what attracts designers to it over and over again, and keeps it forever floating around us in iconographical drift. never floating around us and iconographical drift. My boys were born in a quadrufoil shape building in Chicago, the Princess Women's Hospital in Northwestern. The whole building is in the shape of a quadrufoil, as seen from above, it was cool looking, but

according to the people in Northwestern, it was a pretty impractical shape for a modern research hospital, so it's been demolished. A lot of people, including myself, were sad to see it go. A SAVE PRINCESS group tried to get the building landmark status, petitions were circulated, but the effort ultimately failed. But I think it's safe to say that no one would have cared at all if the building was not shaped like a quadruple. 99% invisible was produced This Week by Avery Truffleman with Katie Mangle, Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 Local Public Radio KALW in San Francisco and produce other offices

of Arxan, a brilliant architecture firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, all of us are on Twitter, Instagram, beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Radio Tapio.