Victorian patterns and William Morris, the intricacies of the Alhambra…
Tiling was the poetic of ornament.
It is perceived as ‘cover' of a plane. Fixed. Dimensionally static. Inert.
Tessellation is animate. A template of action. A system of organization manifest through the metaphor of pattern. It doesn't cover a plane. It becomes plane.
Tessellation is by its very nature informal as it is a system based on juxtaposition. We have two actions side by side, clashing and influencing each other to give a new entity by virtue of adjacency.
It starts with finding a unit of pattern and using it over and over again in different interlocking adjacencies. If we know the unit and interpret it mathematically, we understand the unit's behavior. Random pattern becomes serial organization.
Instead of repeating motifs we have movement. A charged unetwork of possibility. Animate Geometry.
COLOMBO
LONDON