I heart tesselations…
I have recently found myself very drawn to tilings and tessellations, like those found in Arabic patterns. Underlying these patterns are of course a lot of interesting geometry and even some unsolved mathematical questions - the ultimate tome on this is the excellent ‘Tilings and Patterns’ by Branko Grunbaum and G C Shepard (sadly out of print at the moment?). I have been working my way through this trying to get an handle on some of the maths and theory - however for the less seriously inclined the huge number of drawings are a feast for the eyes.
In three dimensional tessellations also have strong links with the world of crystallography - something I have long been fascinated with and spent much of my masters at RCA trying to manipulate the growth of copper sulphate crystals to my own ends.
Shape grammars lend themselves very nicely to tessellations - building them and then manipulating them to create forms and structures - something I plan to investigate further….
