Girih

Rooted in: Persia, Anatolia and Central Asia

Girih patterns look impossibly complicated and are built from five shapes. Craftsmen in Persia and Central Asia worked with a decagon, a pentagon, a hexagon, a bowtie and a rhombus, each carrying the same strapwork lines across its edges, so that when the tiles meet the straps continue without a seam. The pattern you see on the finished wall is the strapwork — the tiles themselves are invisible scaffolding. We draw both. Most of our girih designs show the strapwork alone, as the tilemakers intended, but the family also includes a few where the underlying tiling is left faintly in place, because seeing the scaffolding is the moment the pattern stops being decoration and becomes a system you could use yourself.