An amusing sight nowadays is the "McMansion" (and its MiniMansion variants) strewn across the suburban landscape. An amusing site is "McMansion Hell", Kate Wagner's currently-popular scathing critique of ugly architecture. From her introductory tutorial "McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad", four big Design Principles of architectural composition:

• Masses and Voids
  • Secondary masses should never compete with the primary mass.
  • Don't have too many voids.
• Balance
  • Symmetric - two visually-equal halves
  • Asymmetric - equal visual weight on both sides of a line
• Proportion
  • Voids, primary masses, and secondary masses are in harmony
  • Obey the "Rule of Thirds"
• Rhythm
  • Proximity - objects close together complement one another
  • Similarity - nearby objects share common textures, colors, or features
  • Continuation - shapes guide the movement of the eye

... fine themes that, themselves, cry out for a better mathematical-logical structure of meta-conceptual parallelism and necessary-sufficient organization! (Category Theory for Architects, anyone?)

(cf. Conversations in Paint (2000-08-18), ...) - ^z - 2016-11-04