Our first image for this post is a basket weave classic tessellation. This post features a collection of mostly classic tessellations and corrugations. There are a couple other types of tessellations and even combinations of them in the same model. You can see the entire surface of the paper and it doesn’t look that neat to put a light behind it. There’s always an odd number of layers since the paper needs to always be folded back on itself to continue the pattern.īecause different sections of the tessellations have different numbers of layers you can turn on a light behind the tessellation for some neat effects.Ĭorrugations are made with one layer and the tessellation pattern is formed with wrinkles and waves in the paper. The paper in these tessellations is folded into an odd number of layers to make the shapes and patterns. There are 2 major types of tessellations, the classic type and corrugations.Ĭlassic tessellations are usually based on either a square or hexagonal grid. Hunt using an irregular pentagon (shown on the right).Origami tessellations are essentially patterns, folded with origami, that repeat themselves as long as you want to continue folding. Another spiral tiling was published 1985 by Michael D. The first such pattern was discovered by Heinz Voderberg in 1936 and used a concave 11-sided polygon (shown on the left). Lu, a physicist at Harvard, metal quasicrystals have 'unusually high thermal and electrical resistivities due to the aperiodicity' of their atomic arrangements.Īnother set of interesting aperiodic tessellations is spirals. The geometries within five-fold symmetrical aperiodic tessellations have become important to the field of crystallography, which since the 1980s has given rise to the study of quasicrystals. According to ArchNet, an online architectural library, the exterior surfaces 'are covered entirely with a brick pattern of interlacing pentagons.' An early example is Gunbad-i Qabud, an 1197 tomb tower in Maragha, Iran. The patterns were used in works of art and architecture at least 500 years before they were discovered in the West. Medieval Islamic architecture is particularly rich in aperiodic tessellation. These tessellations do not have repeating patterns. Notice how each gecko is touching six others. The following 'gecko' tessellation, inspired by similar Escher designs, is based on a hexagonal grid. By their very nature, they are more interested in the way the gate is opened than in the garden that lies behind it.' In doing so, they have opened the gate leading to an extensive domain, but they have not entered this domain themselves. This further inspired Escher, who began exploring deeply intricate interlocking tessellations of animals, people and plants.Īccording to Escher, 'Crystallographers have … ascertained which and how many ways there are of dividing a plane in a regular manner. His brother directed him to a 1924 scientific paper by George Pólya that illustrated the 17 ways a pattern can be categorized by its various symmetries. According to James Case, a book reviewer for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), in 1937, Escher shared with his brother sketches from his fascination with 11 th- and 12 th-century Islamic artwork of the Iberian Peninsula.

The most famous practitioner of this is 20 th-century artist M.C.

Escher & modified monohedral tessellationsĪ unique art form is enabled by modifying monohedral tessellations. A dual of a regular tessellation is formed by taking the center of each shape as a vertex and joining the centers of adjacent shapes.

Sea turtle tessellation