Green Square Good!

You can spot a piece of man-made detritus in a forest from far away. For example if you see an old hubcap in a stream-bed, it is very out of place next to rocks and sand and old leaves and silt. The surface texture is uniform, and the shape is a composite of simple geometric forms. By contrast some rock that is in the stream will be irregular in every way.

Animals, insects, and flowers have more fixed geometric appearance. Birds are particularly colorful and marked. The visual systems of animals, including us, seem to be particularly tuned to regular geometric patterns. My dog, for example, will easily get freaked out by some out of place man-made object like an orange bucket that's out in the woods or an inflatable santa that's in front of somebody's house. Our ducks will freak out about a ball or a brightly colored plastic bag of food.

Faces have the most visual information around the eyes, nose and mouth. The image above fades away from the areas with the least visual information leaving those with the most behind.

Our visual system seems to use a similar scheme as our auditory and speech system. That is, it compresses and encodes information. The thing we see is a composite of simple shapes and outlines that's sort of lifted out of the background of more nuanced and muddled natural forms. Actually that's pretty interesting. It's pretty likely that we "see" those forms using these modes of understanding because DNA itself is encoding those shapes... somehow those codes that underlie our consciousness and understanding include their own recognition.

This aspect of our visual system seems to strongly influence behavior and preferences. Cities, for example, tend toward stark geometric forms of squares and rectangles. They emulate deserts by omitting trees and meadows. A lawn is a green square. The simple forms are also a side effect of the tools and techniques used to manufacture building materials like doors and windows.

The down side of simple geometric forms is they aren't inherently stable. They require lots of energy to fabricate, and are subject to corrosion and weathering back into incoherent forms. A lawn, for example, requires constant inputs of energy to maintain, or it quickly reverts to a meadow and a forest.