Giuseppe Gallo, creative director of Mirabilia, published a series of nine posters designed to reflect on use of patterns as a tool in architecture. Each of them is inspired by a Mecanoo architecture that he love as Pattern is used to connect people and places, they are:
•The Library of Birmingham – Birmingham, UK
•Kaap Skil, Maritime and Beachcombers Museum – Texel, The netherlands
•Rabat Agdal Train Station – Rabat, Morocco
•La Llotja Theatre and Conference Centre – Lleida, Spain
•Three Cultural centres & One Book Mall – Shenzhen, China
•Home Arts Centre – Manchester, UK
•Netherlands Open Air Museum – Arnhem, The netherlands
•Hilton Amsterdam – Schiphol, The netherlands
•Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building – Boston, Usa
The whole collection is FREE TO DOWNLOAD in “high res” or “.pdf” for print.
Why a serie of Poster about Pattern in Architecture?
Times are somehow ruled by communication, which came into our lives changing them in ways that we do not fully understand. This process has involved every design discipline, from product design to architecture.
Graphic Design and Architecture are similar disciplines, they share, even with different purpose, a lot of approaches and instruments, one of these, able to create a connection between architecture and people, is pattern. Pattern is defined as a graphic scheme characterized by a repetitive structure, where regularity of relationships created between individual objects is perceived as a whole.
Many objects in nature are defined by patterns, some are clear as felines skin, others are complex, such as fractal geometry of plants. In art as in architecture Pattern becomes a tool to communicate, create balance and generating aesthetic pleasure, this, according to studies of Gombrich, lies generally in an intermediate position between the extremes consist of chaos and redundancy.
Information theory defines redundancy such as the constant repetition of a series of messages always equal or perfectly predictable, chaos as a succession of unpredictable messages.
In the first case, once understood the communicative key, message becomes devoid of interest and receiver no longer poses attention to it, in the second one, when the sequence of messages has no recognizable rule, the receiver cannot locate any logical path and activates a psychological mechanism of denial, communication vanishes. Established the extremes, we must define a balanced situation: high amount of information in a clear and recognizable logical composition.
The reasons for which he choose Mecanoo are
The Architects like many artist exploit patterns to define environments, generate order and communicate information. In the current landscape one of the practices that does it best in his opinion is the Dutch office Mecanoo, founded in Delft in 1984. His love for their project is because are able to comunicate emotion, developing identity of places and social connection.
After releasing a first set of three posters, he came in contact with Mecanoo, which spotted them online. Then he decided to develop six more posters, for a total of nine, available for free. He want to say Thanks to Mecanoo Team, especially to Eliano Felicio, for their suggestions and precious advices. Images by GIuseppe Gallo souce courtesy of Mecanoo.