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World Architecture Day
"Tartan ... is a supreme example of the integration of shape and form."
~ Dom Hans Van Der Laans, "On a Scottish Tartan" (1969)
Hear! Hear! Many of us certainly agrees with the sentiment behind this declaration.
Mathematicians, architects, artists, and tartan aficionados may particularly appreciate the many ways in which tartan reconciles mathematics, science, technology, art, design, and other areas of invention and discovery. After all, a tartan sett is itself an exercise in proportion, repetition, symmetry, colour, number, and spatial relationships—all expressed through woven thread.
The Grey Douglas tartan makes a particularly intriguing example, although its history comes with one of tartan scholarship's great controversies. The Grey Douglas is the Douglas sett published by the Sobieski Stuart brothers in their Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842, where Douglas appeared among the Lowland Houses and Border Clans. The Vestiarium claimed considerably greater antiquity for its tartans, but those claims were challenged almost from the beginning and the supposed ancient manuscript upon which the book was based is no longer accepted as authentic. For those who reject the Vestiarium Scoticum as historical evidence—and there are very good reasons for doing so—that does not make the Grey Douglas disappear from tartan history. Rather, its securely documentable history begins in the nineteenth century. The Scottish Register of Tartans still records it specifically as “Douglas, Grey (Vestiarium Scoticum),” designed by the Sobieski Stewarts. Other Douglas setts have independent histories, including the Douglas Green associated with the great weaving firm Wilsons of Bannockburn. Thus one needn't accept the Vestiarium's claims of ancient provenance to appreciate the Grey Douglas as a genuine and influential part of the later history of tartan.
And it was this Grey Douglas that provided an extraordinary source of study for Dom Hans van der Laan, the Dutch architect, architectural theorist, and Benedictine monk. Van der Laan examined the tartan in terms of its proportions and the spatial relationships created by the interplay of its light grey and black bands. In his hands, something ordinarily considered textile design became a means of thinking about architectural space itself.
His architectural designs embody those ideas, taking tartan well beyond clothing, clan association, or decoration and into the realm of proportion and spatial theory. The resulting intellectual territory has aptly been described as lying somewhere between a traditional weaver's tartan thread counts, architectural draughtsmanship, and quasi-religious mathematical treatises.
Architecturally embodied tartan! 🖤 🤍 🖤 📐📏 ⚗️ ⚛️
Even before the recognition and articulation of the synergy between mathematics, art, architecture, and other areas, some, such as Dom Hans Van Der Laan, a Dutch architect, theorist, and Benedictine monk, had already integrated these concepts into their personal philosophy and their work and viewed the tartan as a special example of a vistual and artistic integration which could be used to inspire other forms.
From Networks of Design: Proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of Design History Society (UK), University College, Falmouth, regarding Van Der Laan's analysis:
"In his essay, he goes on to employ a detailed study of the Grey Douglas tartan to demonstrate how the spatial relationships between the light grey and black of the sett are indicative of, and can generate, a formula with which to consider how human relationships mirror architectural structures, and in turn how those same structures might relate to landscape. He executed detailed drawings of the proportionate width of the different coloured stripes, of the actual appearance of tartans and demonstrations of the changing relationship between figure and ground according to how the width of a stripe is varied."
It is ironic that the inspiration for Van Der Laan's musings settled on a tartan from a book much debated by scholars and historians.
This Grey Douglas tartan from the Vestiarium Scoticum (1842), is referred to by John Telfer Dunbar as "probably the most controversial costume book ever written". The authors, the Sobieski Stuart brothers, enjoyed a popular following among the Scottish gentry in the early Victorian era, and in the spirit of the times, added mystery, romance and some spurious historical documentation to the subject of tartan.
The book itself is purported to be a reproduction, with color illustrations, of a 15th-century manuscript on the clan tartans of Scottish families. Shortly after its publication it was denounced as a forgery, and the "Stuart" brothers who brought it forth were also denounced as impostors for claiming to be the grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie. It is generally accepted today that neither the brothers themselves nor the Vestiarium are what they were purported to be.
Nevertheless, the role of the book in the history of Scottish tartans is immense, with many of the designs and patterns contained therein passing into the realm of "official" clan tartans.
For more on Dom Han Van Der Laan's integrative philosophy and influence, click the photo of one of his designs, the St. Benedictusberg Abbey at Vaals.