Date: Spring 2017
Category: Design-Build
Location: Tehran, Iran
Conducted by: Edouard Cabay and Rodrigo Aguirre

Delta Z

Architecture is a discipline that forces mathematics to escape the theoretical realm and confront the tangible. With Islamic patterns – as a singular example of the integration of mathematics in design – the application in the world of craft, as ceramic tiles, results in the complex non-hierarchical superficial motives that ornament so many spaces of the Islamic world.

The tile patterns contain a hidden system: a code – or an algorithm – or even a game of simple geometrical operations of symmetry and rotations, materially absent, yet strongly perceivable in its form because of its effect as an organisational system. The tiles are placed according to these rules, on either side of an imaginary axis, the axis is not physically constructed; it simply dictates an order as a network of hidden lines.
The research sets to challenge the superficiality of a geometric system by giving it depth, addressing its structure capacity and to deploy potentials of inhabitation. Rather than a canopy, a pavilion or a building, the experiment is simply an attempt to construct space, remote from any architectural typology; it can be defined as one of the many inhabitable material expressions resulting in the “three-dimensionalization” and parametrisation of a mathematical system of grids.