Power of Limits

Rating:
Summary: Elegant
Review: This beautifully illustrated and diagrammed book attempts to show the harmony that exists in nature and all good art and architecture. Not only that, Doczi attempts to weave into this picture, (with some success) Pythagorean concepts of harmony and it's relation to growth in nature.
The essential concept in this book is the 'power of limits.' Doczi shows that this limiting factor is the golden section. And he does it using almost no math! The golden section has the powerful quality that division or expansion by this proportion always leads to harmonious growth. No matter how small or large is the division, there is never anything "left over" to create disharmony. This limiting factor is of transcendental power, thus "The Power of Limits."
Unregulated growth could never achieve anything but randomness, which is not what we observe in nature.
Of course in nature and in life it is impossible to achieve perfection. Yet Doczi elegantly explains how nature compensates for this inability by using the Fibonnaci sequence instead. Profusely illustrated with many detailed, easy-to-understand diagrams, this book is a must for those who wish to understand more deeply how our world is constructed, without wading through a lot of math.

Rating:
Summary: Positive
Review: This book is magical and profound. It will appeal to layman and scientist alike.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, Helpful, Fuzzy
Review: While I agree with the other reviewers that this book is both well written & well illustrated, the Jungian cant of the author feels too new-agey to me. Proportion is indeed present in the world, but to assign proprtion to EVERYTHING is an over-generalization, and to ascribe a metaphysical meaning to it based on this over-generalization is a bit much. Useful for the illustrations of proportion, a thing every designer ought to know, but when it wanders off into the woods it looses me.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, Helpful, Fuzzy
Review: While I agree with the other reviewers that this book is both well written & well illustrated, the Jungian cant of the author feels too new-agey to me. Proportion is indeed present in the world, but to assign proprtion to EVERYTHING is an over-generalization, and to ascribe a metaphysical meaning to it based on this over-generalization is a bit much. Useful for the illustrations of proportion, a thing every designer ought to know, but when it wanders off into the woods it looses me.