I'm sitting here wondering...

[Toby Gymshorts]

#I'm a rectilinear girl,
In a rectilinear world.....#

[Reality Checkpoint]

Of course rectilinear doesn't have to be boring ...

[WOM]

Someone built 3 of those in Toronto in the '80s, but they were grossly overpriced and just weird for weird's sake. They're nowhere near as nice as those, above. They sit forlornly on a plot of land between a raised roadway and a patchy neighbourhood.

[Hot Pepsi]

True... very true. As always there are exceptions. Liquids and semi-solids — ceramics and glass are examples — lend themselves to roundness, as do cast metals. They are also three dimensional which makes them objects rather than images.

Based on what I've seen in antique shops and my parents' collection, 19th century picture frames were often oval shaped. Especially the ones for silhouettes, which were fashionable in the 19th century.

But photographs are almost always rectangular. I imagine photos on real film more-or-less have to be. It would be hard to handle film that didn't have straight edges. Perhaps that contributed to the decline of non square frames.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Based on what I've seen in antique shops and my parents' collection, 19th century picture frames were often oval shaped. Especially the ones for silhouettes, which were fashionable in the 19th century.

But photographs are almost always rectangular. I imagine photos on real film more-or-less have to be. It would be hard to handle film that didn't have straight edges. Perhaps that contributed to the decline of non square frames.

Images on camera obscuras and early cameras were round. Round is what is naturally produced when light is transmitted through a lens onto a surface. Silhouette portraits, and early glass plate photos, continued this. The oval frames and vignettes of the time were mass produced to display this entire image, it's why old portraits often have soft edges . The camera itself however was always a square box. Things began to change in its favour when photographic printing became more sophisticated, film got more sensitive and cameras more portable. Glass plates and later film were produced in rectangular form, as a format it was easier to spread emulsions on and to trim. The image meanwhile — still round — was now also "framed" in the camera's viewfinder as a rectangle, though it was actually still round. Still is for that matter.

[Hot Pepsi]

Thanks for that explanation. I was just thinking about how hard it would be to load a circular piece of film or plate into a camera. And if you want a roll of film, I don't see how that could be anything but rectangular. Even if the camera "box" is round.

But yeah, really the image is always actually a circle. Our own vision is really a circle. Or perhaps an oval.


Perhaps this was explained upthread, but it made me think about why wooden boxes - I'm assuming the earliest cameras were made of wood - were square because it was easier to find lumber that was flat and square.

But turning round trees into square boards is a relatively recent way of doing things, isn't it? Log cabins and timber-framed buildings kept the tree in its original shape, more or less.
On the other hand, wood has a grain, so it's fairly simple to it in a way to make a flat surface for a floor or a table or chair.

[lambers]

It's interesting (to me anyway) that, despite the prevalence of square/rectangular domiciles highlighted by this thread, conurbations still tend towards the circular (or semi-circular when on the coast/ next to some other natural barrier).

There is obviously an element of convenience for this, radially keeping as many homes as close to the centre as possible, although perhaps this is driven by some kind of 'natural order' rather than a human preference for circular settlements.