I love a little serendipity and so-called polymath or Renaissance individuals (like Zappa-accompanying jazz pianist, film producer, philosopher, MD, author and strategic advisor John Kao), so the following little adventure tickled me.
Via the rather splendid Tumblr account Scottish Georgian, I was inspired to discover that Scottish Georgian is, in fact, distinct from the Georgian architecture of England. While London’s grand Georgian terraces are often stucco-faced brick, even the humblest of Scottish Georgian is hewn from raw stone – you build with what you have.
I also realised that those beautiful proportions and stand-forever stone were very much a feature of my growing up – the Highlands and Moray Firth are rich in Georgian architecture as a consequence of the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46.
Courtesy of Mr or Ms Scottish Georgian, I also discovered the above Playfair Library at the University of Edinburgh built by “Scottish engineer and political economist” William Playfair.
According to Arthur Herman’s book The Scottish Enlightenment:
“More than any other architect, [William] Playfair gave Edinburgh the look to match its sobriquet of the ‘Athens of the North.’” (p256)
Playfair’s brothers included architect James and mathematician John. However, William is the splendidly named Playfair who wrote The Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) featuring “the first known time-series [chart] using economic data” and “the first known bar chart.”
“The remarkable William Playfair (1759 – 1823) developed or improved upon nearly all the fundamental graphical designs, seeking to replace conventional tables of numbers with the systematic visual representations of his ‘linear arithmetic.’”
So, we have William Playfair to thank for both beautiful architecture and beautiful data. I have spent several days learning Google’s Data Studio and have, so far, failed to produce data that looks beautiful. Today, I spent longer than intended trying to find my copies of Tufte and Herman which, of course, is why I need my own, large and properly organised library. On neither front am I a Playfair.
Header image: Archilovers.com
