ARCHITECTURAL BASICS OF JEWELRY DESIGN Building In The Necessary Support and Structure

Whenever you create a piece of jewelry, it’s important to try to anticipate how your choice of materials, techniques, and technologies might positively or negatively affect how the piece moves and feels (which is called Support) when worn and how its components maintain shape and integrity (called Structure). Toward this end, it’s important to redefine your techniques and materials in architectural terms. Every jewelry-making technique is an applied process (called Design System) with the end goal of trying to reach some type of equilibrium—that is, steps taken to balance off all the external and internal forces impacting the piece. Achieving this balance means that the piece of jewelry is at its point of least vulnerability. This is where all the materials, techniques, and technologies have been leveraged to optimize the four S’s: Strength, Suppleness, Stability, and Synergy. Most jewelry designers do not learn their techniques with architectural principles in mind. They arrange a set of materials into a composition, and assume its success is solely based on the visual grammar they applied.