Tag Archives: design

Penrose tiling

26th Februaryarchitecture, design, penrose, symmetry, tiling

Sir Roger Penrose is a mathematical physicist best known for his work on theories of general relativity and cosmology. He won the Wolf Prize in 1988 with Stephen Hawking for his work on singularities and black holes; the Institute of Physics’s Paul Dirac Medal and Prize in 1989; and the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 2008 for “his beautiful and original insights into many areas of mathematics and mathematical physics.”

He is also the inventor of Penrose Tiling, a unique tiling pattern with five-fold symmetry, so I was delighted to discover this building as part of the Greenwich Peninsula complex outside the O₂ Millenium Dome.

Almost the entire surface of the Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication building is covered with a Penrose-inspired pattern. Penrose previously sued Kleenex for using his tiling pattern on their quilted toilet paper, but I imagine that Ravensbourne’s architects, Foreign Office, checked with him first.

Interesting design features of my hotel room

6th Januarydesign

There were a couple of clever design features in the hotel room I stayed in recently.

Every other “fold” in the shower curtain was split from ring-to-ring. If you bunched up the curtain you could easily remove it in one motion, making the curtain much easier to change.

The curtain rails were cleverly designed to keep light out. One rail runs behind the other so that when you pull the curtains together they avoid that annoying little slit of light that sometimes gets through. I honestly can’t think of a good reason why this isn’t standard in people’s houses – I guess maybe it’s because most people don’t have suitable rails, but rather a pole-and-ring system as in the curtain example above.