PATTERN LANGUAGE: ISLAMIC TESSELLATIONS

Built projects and state of the art concepts have either the same simple patterns or none at all. This lack of a master pattern to follow, leads to problems when discussing further growth. This is applicable for research outposts all the way up to a sustainable moon village. To account for sustainable growth, we looked at existing patterns. To be precise: Islamic tessellations.

All those different and vibrant patterns throughout the Islamic world, can be traced down to the same three geometric tessellations. You have either the four-fold, the five-fold or the six-fold pattern. The four- and the sixfolds only need a single shape to successfully repeat itself. Since pentagons by themselves do not fill a surface neatly, the five-fold pattern needs added shapes. This flexibility of having three different sizes, while still being simple to continue sparked our interest.

We started to use the 5-fold grid and put two rules in place. First, we stay inside the boundaries of our shapes. Which means the possible habitats, airlocks and greenhouses have a certain size to distance ratio to each other. Second, we follow the axes (dotted rose line) between the shapes to place openings and connections. Other possibilities are following the shapes between the axes while looking at the boundaries (thick white lines) as the openings/connections, or a combination. We chose to follow the first example.