Apr 29 2008
The Constructs of Squareness
The prevalence of the right angle in engineered structure is probably second only to the straight line in order of importance. Engineered structures in wood are often using plane geometry to help describe and document what they are and how to build them. Much of the way we think about civil engineering, architecture, woodworking, and even some metalworking, call it flat work if you like, is based on previously understood, maybe even taken for granted, notions about geometry.
Every line that goes in a given direction without variance to that direction is straight, all points that lie upon a line, line segment, or ray can be thought of as congruent. At any point on a line, another line, line segment or ray can intersect, begin sharing a common end point, and create an angle.
There are four ways we look at angles… The most basic angle is the right angle, the angle of 90 degrees, which when measured, corresponds to a quarter of the 360 degrees in a circle, or some thing other than a circle that circuitously begins and ends at the same point. The other ways we describe angles are of angles smaller than 90 degrees which are “acute” and angles larger than 90 yet smaller than 180 degrees, which we call obtuse. If the angle is greater than 180 and less than 360 degrees we call it a reflex angle. When working in terms of squareness, we are only concerned with the 90 degree, or right angle. Continue Reading »
