PATTERN DESIGN

Transformations

Two-Dimensional Space Groups

Tesselations

Tilings Encyclopedia

In rhombs, and wedges, and half-moons, and wings.

Arabic / Islamic Geometry

A background to two-dimensional design, geometry and pattern

Some old PDF books to browse or download:

Ornamental design, embracing The Anatomy of pattern 

by Lewis F. Day

Floriated ornament a series of thirty-one designs

Old English pattern books of the metal trades

Pattern Design A Book For Students Treating In A Practical Way Of The Anatomy Planning And Evolution Of Repeated Ornament (1933)

The Grammar of Ornament (1856)

Nature And Ornament : Nature The Raw Material Of Design (1909)

Symmetry, Crystals and Polyhedra

Soviet Textiles:  Designing the Modern Utopia

Published by MFA Publications, 2006

Essay by Pamela Jill Kachurin.   From the exhibition and catalog:

Between 1927 and 1933, as the new Soviet Union emerged and the Communist party struggled to transform an agrarian country into an industrialized state, a group of young artists pitched in by designing fabrics depicting tractors, smokestacks and symbols of collective modernity, cloth with which to mold its buyers into ideal Soviet citizens. Few of these designs ever saw mass production, and the experiment failed as propaganda--comrades clung to their traditional floral motifs--but it yielded bold and intriguing new designs. Soviet Textiles: Designing the Modern Utopia presents some 40 of them, and analyzes the political and artistic context in which they were made. Pamela Jill Kachurin identifies major themes and motifs, including industrialization, transportation, electrification, youth, agriculture and collectivization, and sports and hobbies, and analyzes the work both as propaganda and as graphic art, in this, the only English-language book to treat them from that perspective.

   

Factory Workers, 1928-32

 

Locomotives,1920-30, Sergei Burlylin

A Sublime Congestion: Colonizing Architecture

Abstract:

This paper asserts that ornament is a legitimate artistic framework for contemporary experience. Crafted ornament mediated traditional architectures by slender organizational layers producing heterogeneous spaces. The architecture of the current era has revived heterogeneity by reaching beyond tectonic expression and formal dispositions of space. Today, new meanings abound. The transformative power of ornament should be re-ignited to engage this project in newly imagined hybrid forms. I will illustrate this position with historic and contemporary prototypes of ornament, and situate them within an architectural framework. I have termed this approach 'ornamental fields' , which addresses and maintains the optimism of modernism's economy of structure and proposes a nomadic ornament for the conditional and highly contextualized nature of today's architecture. 

More of his work and process can be seen here:  http://www.data-clay.org/projects/Flake/index.html