Notes on pattern, construction & heritage.
Short, precise pieces on Islamic geometric ornament - what the terms mean, how the constructions actually work, and how to put them on a wall. Read top to bottom and they build: from what the patterns are and where they come from, through how they are made and how to use them, to the deepest constructions. Every figure on these pages is drawn live by the same engine that powers the studio. Nothing is a stock image.
What is girih?
The strapwork geometry of Islamic star patterns - the five tiles, the knot lines, and why a 15th-century shrine anticipated quasicrystals.
What is zellige?
Morocco's hand-cut glazed tile mosaic - how it is made, the Fès palette, and the colour rules the craft has followed for seven centuries.
Girih vs zellige
Line geometry or cut-tile mosaic? How the two great Islamic pattern traditions differ in method, region and use - and where they meet.
What is Iznik?
The Anatolian town that named the finest Ottoman ceramics: cobalt on white, then a four-glaze palette. Famous for flowers, and built on geometry.
The geometry of the Alhambra
The western high point of Islamic geometry: Nasrid cut-tile mosaic in Granada, the star-and-cross of the Comares Hall, and two curved patterns found almost nowhere else.
The zellige of Fez
The Marinid madrasas of Morocco: cut-tile mosaic, carved plaster and cedar, in the Fes tetrachord of white, saffron, copper-green and cobalt.
Islamic geometry in Cairo
Both ends of the tradition in one city: the ninth-century pierced screens of Ibn Tulun and the star-cut stone and inlaid minbars of the Mamluks.
The tilework of Isfahan
Safavid geometry two ways: the slow cut mosaic of mo'araq and the faster seven-colour haft-rangi, across the mosques of Shah Abbas.
Mughal jaali screens
A wall you can see through: pierced sandstone lattices at Fatehpur Sikri that filter light and air through the six-point star.
Mamluk metalwork
Brass inlaid with silver and gold: the basins, trays and lamps of Cairo and the Mosul school behind them. The star pattern with its palette inverted.
Andalusi woodwork
Lazo, artesonado, taracea, celosia: four ways the carpenters of al-Andalus and Mudejar Spain put the star into timber, and the set squares that carried the angles.
The illuminated page
Before the first word, a page of pure geometry: the carpet page, the shamsa and the gilded border of the great Qur'ans, in gold leaf and lapis on paper.
How the patterns are constructed
The compass-and-straightedge method, from underlying tessellation to finished strapwork - including the exact star depths the tradition favours.
Authentic vs AI-generated patterns
AI can imitate the look of an Islamic pattern but not construct one. Where diffusion tools break, and what to use when the pattern has to be correct.
The golden ratio in Islamic geometry
Why the pentagon and decagon carry phi by necessity - and how it fixes the canonical ten-fold star depth of 1/φ².
The seal that weaves itself
Over-and-under is the easiest thing in the tradition to fake and the hardest to prove. One rule of symmetry settles every crossing at once.
The Iznik palette
Cobalt, turquoise, a sage green and the raised sealing-wax red of 1560 - and how the studio lays them on by class, not by hand.
Ways to make a pattern
By hand, by AI, or by derivation: how each method works, what each is good for, and how to choose the right one for the job.
Islamic tiles in interiors
A working guide for designers: repeat sizes, placement, palette restraint, and how to brief a fabricator from a pattern file.
Seamless repeat tiles
How a pattern becomes wallpaper, fabric or SVG: what makes a tile actually tile, and how to export one at true physical scale.
Ottoman ceramic borders
A field of flowers is always framed, and the frame is geometry: running borders, band courses, and the composed panel where a frieze holds a field.
The mihrab and the arch
The niche that frames the pattern: the horseshoe of Cordoba and the two-centre point of Cairo, each drawn from a compass, and why an arch is not a repeat.
Patterns inside patterns
Compound zellige, the Fez manner: rosettes seated inside the cells of bigger rosettes, at a scale the geometry fixes and never lets you choose.
The bones of the Alhambra
Curved cut-tile work from the Alhambra with a genuine compass provenance: every arc scribed from a single setting, no straight edge, no asterisk.
The crescents of the Alhambra
The one pattern in the studio with no mirror at all: a chiral field of hook-shaped tiles where every bump is a neighbour's bite, and still exact compass work.
The number that keeps appearing
Nowhere is anything set to three. Yet across four separate constructions, the trisection keeps arriving as the answer - and no generator could do the same.
One formula, four numbers
1/√3, √2 − 1, (3 − √5)/2, 2 − √3: three of the four star depths are one formula, tan(π/n), and the fourth is the tradition choosing the pentagram.
Why there is no five-fold wallpaper
A repeating pattern can turn by a half, a third, a quarter or a sixth, never a fifth. The theorem in a paragraph, and the three ways the tradition built ten-fold patterns anyway.
The seventeen symmetries
Exactly seventeen ways a pattern can repeat. Where the classical constructions sit among them, why colour lowers the group, and why the Alhambra claim is still contested.
The tilings under the stars
Three regular tilings, eight semi-regular. Which nets the tradition grew its stars on - 6.6.6, 4.8.8, 3.12.12, the kagome - and why ten-fold had to leave the list.