Patterns that repeat

This lesson asks you to identify and describe repeating and growing patterns, including patterns from real life. The museum offers one record on repeating geometric patterns in Islamic art; growing patterns, and the patterns of your own surroundings, are for your class to bring. ¹

Find the smallest group of shapes that, repeated again and again, makes the whole pattern. Say how many shapes it holds, and what changes from one repeat to the next, if anything.

Stucco is plaster mixed with cement or concrete ². At Samarra much of it was dug out of the ruined palaces ². Yeomans writes that Herzfeld and Creswell divided it into three styles ². The third is open-ended symmetrical repeat patterns over large surfaces, cast from baked clay moulds so that it could be assembled and installed very quickly ³.

The record says this stucco was cast in moulds so it could be put up fast. Why might a pattern that repeats be quicker to put up than one that never repeats, and how would you decide?

• Samarran stucco styles: the three styles, and where each one was found.
• The arabesque: the leaf pattern that Yeomans traces back to one of these styles.
• Girih: geometric patterns of stars and polygons.

Look at the record Girih. Draw one repeating unit of a pattern you like and describe it in a sentence.