Concrete art generator

What makes it Concrete

These are the design choices this generator makes or lets you set, as the Stylogeny atlas names them. Each links to every style that makes the same choice.

How this generator works

• One module (a square, triangle, quarter circle, half-disc or bar) run through one rule (turned, grown, sheared, recoloured or permuted in even steps) across a grid or a line, so the rule itself is the picture.
• The page is a grid of module cells: the field takes a block of them and leaves the rest as white ground, and a word can be set on the same grid as a concrete poem.

What it never does:

• No reproduction of known concrete paintings or poems: the step, the direction, the colour rule and the placement come from the seed, and the poem is made only of your word.
• No illusion of depth, no distortion, no big primitives on a diagonal and no ornament: every module keeps its shape and size within its cell.
• Animation moves in calm, even steps: no point changes colour more than six times a loop, three times a second at the shortest loop.

Every picture is a recipe: the variation number and the settings, kept in the page's address. Copy the link and the same picture comes back, in any browser. Random (or R) draws a new variation; ← and → step through them; S shuffles the settings; C borrows another style's colours.

About Brazilian Concrete Design

Concrete art took hold in Brazil in the early 1950s, when painters, poets and the first design offices of São Paulo and Rio worked from a rule instead of a subject. A picture was a square, a bar or a circle repeated, turned or graded in even steps, with the white page as part of the work. Concrete poets treated words the same way: a word repeated, broken up and spaced across the page, so that where a letter stands carries the meaning.

This generator works by that method. You choose one module and one rule; the variation number sets the step, the direction, the colour rule and where the field sits on a grid of module cells. Your word is set on the same grid as a small concrete poem, moved on letter by letter, worn away or spread out. Black and at most two inks stay flat on the ground.

With animation on, the rule keeps going: modules turn, grow, slide or change colour in calm steps, and the loop ends exactly where it began.

Brazilian Concrete Design in Stylogeny: 1951–1975, its lineage, its palette, real works and the full set of choices that define it.

Use it from code

The recipe below draws the picture this page opens with. Copy recipe gives you the one on screen. Agents can render recipes to SVG or PNG through Morphogeny's MCP server (morphogeny_render); the same recipe always gives the same SVG.

{
  "tool": "concrete",
  "v": 1,
  "seed": 11,
  "format": "portrait",
  "params": {
    "module": "quarter",
    "rule": "grow",
    "count": 8,
    "inks": 1,
    "space": 0.45,
    "tension": 0.6,
    "poem": "permute",
    "word": ""
  },
  "palette": "brazilian-concrete"
}

Open this recipe: /concrete/#seed=11&v=1. A plain-text version of this page:/concrete.md.

Other generators

• Op Art generator: stripes, checks, rings and wedges that swell and turn
• Swiss grid poster generator: grid posters set in a neutral grotesque
• Bauhaus poster generator: circles, squares and triangles in tension on a diagonal, held by bars and dots
• De Stijl generator: planes of primary colour held by black bars
• Memphis pattern generator: scattered shapes dressed in squiggles, dots and zigzags
• Pixel pattern generator: dithered landscapes, 1-bit patterns, sprites and text screens on a coarse pixel grid
• Kinetic type generator: your words filling the frame, moving along their weight and width