INTEGRANTES: ROSA ANGELICA DOMINGUEZ ABELLO 1003239044

JORGE RICARDO ROJAS AMARIS 1003236108

MIIGUEL ANGEL ANAYA VARGAS 1005062244

Starry, Starry Tiles: Improvised Tiling from Pentagon

Dissections
Stephen Luecking
School of Computer Science and Digital Media
DePaul University
243 S. Wabash Ave, Chicago IL. 60604
Email: sluecking @cdm.depaul.edu

Abstract
An international chain of coffee houses recently mounted decals of decorative window trim featuring
quasiperiodic, pentagonal tiling. The tiling, unlike Penrose tiling, is not forced, but relies on intuitive placement
by the designer. Its tiles featured sub-divisions of the regular pentagon using an inscribed pentagram as a
template for dissection. The author decribes this method for creating such tiles and illustrates how this method
yields an extended set of polygons for artist and designers to intuitively improvise unique aperiodic patterns.
As background the author also reviews the history of tessellations incorporating quasi-periodic and aperiodic
patterning using tiles derived from the pentagon.

Introduction Pentagonal symmetry provides the best-

known source of aperiodic tiles, such as those developed by Roger Penrose. Penrose’s tile designs are
rigorously mathematical and force the aperiodic placement of
tiles. However, designers may discover in the regular pentagon a greater variety of shapes that will, by
means of artistic intuition, generate improvised patterns to fill that portion of the plane containing the design
with aperiodic and novel tiling. By subdividing the pentagon such that the resulting shapes exhibit edges
that are equal to the sides or diagonals of the pentagon and angles whose measure are multiples of 36°,
designers may keep on hand a panoply of polygons that mix and match to fill the portion of the plane
covered by their design with aperiodic patterns. Due to the intuitive and variable nature of this tiling, the
term improvisation, borrowed from the arts, seems apt for describing this tiling process.
Figure 1. A portion of a decorative frieze resembling that seen in Starbuck’s stores during April of 2011. Figure 2.
Pentagon dissections used in the frieze.
A case in point is the design of decals once affixed to the doors and display cases of Starbucks’ coffee
houses (Figure 1). The pattern’s designer derived the tile shapes from a pentagon inscribed with all of its
diagonals to form a standard five-pointed star, or pentagram (Figure 2). In the panel observed in a Chicago
store the designer incorporated eleven shapes – a modern set of girih tiles – created by connecting the
intersection and vertices of the pentagram inscribed on the pentagon. Using the pentagram as a template for
dividing the pentagon, a far greater number of candidate tiles than the eleven appearing in the Starbuck’s
design lie in wait for improvising into such tiled patterns.

Review of Tiling from the Pentagon

Of the first four regular polygons the odd man out – at least when it comes to tiling – is the pentagon. Its
intransigence to tiling is a consequence of the fact that it will not evenly surround a point on the plane
serving as the common vertex of a group of mating polygons. In order to surround the point without
gapping, the sum of the internal angles around the point must add up to an even 360 . In this regard, for
example, the equilateral triangle boasts internal angles of 60 , which when rotated six times add up to
360 . Similarly, the internal 90 angles of the square sum to 360 when rotated four times. Likewise the
120 angles of the hexagon yield 360 under three rotations. Meanwhile the pentagon’s 108 internal
angles will rotate three times to total 324 with a remaining gap of 36 .

Taming the troublesome pentagon proved an engaging challenge for Arab mathematicians and artisans of
the Middle Ages. They teamed up to solve this problem with two solutions. One was simply to change the
shape of the pentagon so that it might be tiled with four-fold or six-fold symmetries. This general category
bears the name “polycairos”, a reference to the pattern of irregular pentagonal bricks used to pave certain
streets in the city of Cairo. An early polycairo was the “home plate” pentagon (Figure 2),
whose internal angles, 135 and 90 , derive from the square and thus tiles easily.
.

Figure 3. Polycairo tile from an expanded square with sample tessellation.

 90
Like the home plate tile, the street-paving polycairo includes angles, with an added elegance: all of its
sides are equal (Figure 3). The search for polycairos continues. To date there are 14 known polycairos with
the last discovered in 1985 by Rolf Stein.

Figure 4. Cairo street tile, an equilateral irregular pentagon, with sample tessellation.

A second solution was to embed the regular pentagon or decagon within an orthogonal net with the
mediation of surrounding irregular polygons [8], many derived from subdivisions and re-combinations of
the pentagon. Late medieval tessellations by Timurid artisans feature this device, accomplished by the
recurring use of girih tiles. This set of five tiles derives from the pentagon and the dodecagon. In addition
to those two polygons are a rhomb, a hexagonal “bowtie”, whose concave angles match the interior angle
of the decagon, and a pointed hexagonal lozenge constructed from the same angles (Figure 5). Figure 5
demonstrates a tiling using the girih tiles as templates to mesh the pentagonal symmetry of the star
dodecagon with the canonical four-fold grid. This is a diagram of the tiling on the tympanum inside an arch
of the Darb-i-Imam shrine built in Isfahan in 1453 [14]. Figure 6 illustrates the relatively small segment of
this tessellation contained within the arch, thereby limiting perception of its periodicity.
 Figure 5. Girih tile set. Figure 6. Girih tiles in an orthogonal net.

Figure 7. Portion of net from Figure 5 visible on the tympanum of the Darb-i-Imam shrine. According to Makovick this
pattern was mis-identified as quasi-periodic by Lu and Steinhardt (14).

Prefiguring this Timurid masterpiece is an earlier and even more intriguing find [15] from 250 years earlier.
Gunbad-i-Kabud, aka the Blue Tomb, in the northwestern Iranian city of Maragha, is a Seljuk period tower
tomb with a decagonal floor plan and exterior brick panels that exhibit quasi-periodic patterns derived from
girih tiles (Figure8). The term quasi-periodic denotes aperiodic patterns that exhibit some form of
underlying order. Since periodic means that the pattern exhibits repetition under translation, a quasi-
periodic pattern has no translation symmetry, but may possess radial symmetry as in the five-fold cartwheels
generated by pentagonal forms. (See Cromwell [7] for a more mathematically compelling definition). In
the Blue Tomb panels, for example, crystallographer Makovick [16] uncovered an underlying template of
larger, unmarked polygons.
 Figure 8. Brickwork pattern from the Gunbad-i-Kabud

The presence of the pentagon in medieval canonical design of European churches was considerably more
covert, but nonetheless just as important as in medieval mosques. The pentagon’s properties played a
considerable role in the layout and proportioning of Gothic cathedrals, as can be seen in the layout of
window arches in the Reims (Figure 9) cathedral reflected in the geometric layout tools of the time. For
example a mason’s building square cited by French architect Paul Grillo [12] could have functioned as ably
at laying out pentagonal features as it would at laying out orthogonal elements. He proffers the construction
in Figure 9 that yields a right triangle whose other angles are 36 and 54 . (Note: Grillo does not give a
citation for this square and we have found no other corroboration that such a square was used.)

Figure 9. Five-pointed window design in Soissons Cathedral, left, and Reims Cathedral, right, after Bechmann [4]
 Construct the pentagon in a circle. Draw
the diameter AC from vertex A of the
pentagon. Draw line from vertex B of the
pentagon to endpoint C of the diameter.

Figure 10. Possible construction of a Medieval mason’s

square

Pentagonal symmetry inhabited medieval

European churches as symbols and as a source of
proportional layouts, rather than as tesselations.
The European Renaissance, though, brought two
important investigations of pentagonal tiling. In 1619 Johannes Kepler dedicated a portion of his book
Harmonices Mundi [6][13] to his study of Archimedean tiling, i.e., semi-regular tiling with combinations
of regular polygons, among which were tessellations combining the pentagon and the decagon (Figure 10).
Almost 100 years earlier Albrecht Dürer had included pentagonal tiling in his Unterweisung der Messung
first published in 1525 [10]. Dürer filled the gaps left by the pentagon with a 36°-144° rhomb and used
these to construct two sample tessellations, one orthogonal and one radial (the latter shown in Figure 11).

Figure 11. Johannes Kepler. After diagram from Harmonices Mundi. Figure 11. Albrecht Dürer. Pentagonal tiling from
Unterweisung der Messung
 Forced Aperiodic Tiling
The Kepler tilings inspired Penrose’s search for forced aperiodic tilings, those that, by virtue of their joining
rules, permit no translational patterns in covering the plane without gaps. Penrose reasoned that the larger
Kepler tiles, the decagons and the “monsters” fashioned from paired decagons [6][11], could be filled with
smaller tiles using segments of the pentagon, a process termed substitution. Consequently one of Penrose’s
first successful attempts at forced aperiodic tiling incorporated six such segments.

Figure 12. Penrose tiles drawn from the pentagon: kites and darts (left) and Golden rhombs (right)\

Eventually in 1974 he reduced the variety of tiles to only two. The most familiar of these two-tiled Penrose
tessellations are his dart and kite system, pictured in Figure 12 left, and his Golden rhombs system illustrated
in Figure 12 right. The kites and darts initially appeared in 5-fold tessellations from Islamic ornament (see
Figures 6, 7 and 8). The construction for these also appeared in a medieval Arabic text [7].

Figure 13. Forced aperiodic tessellations: from (left) kites and darts and (right) Golden rhombs

Penrose imposed his joining rules by inscribing the tiles with arcs that were required to continuously meet
from tile to tile (Figure 13). Setting aside these rules both tile pairings prove perfectly serviceable for
periodic tiling (Figure 14) when the tiles merge to form quadrilaterals or hexagons.
 Figure 14. Periodic tilings from (left) kites and darts and (right) Golden rhombs

The kites and darts and the pair of golden rhombs also allow for striking patterns of inflating five-fold
radiation (Figure 15).

Figure 15. Wheeled tessellations from Penrose shapes.

Improvisation …
Not only the Penrose shapes, but a variety of other shapes based on dissections of the pentagon along the
pentagram will tile in such radial patterns. As the radial pattern grows outward the spread of space on the
plane becomes greater and greater along with the number of tiles that must and can co-ordinate to fill that
broadening space. This is because, although the pentagon will not itself tile, a large number of subdivisions
of the pentagon exhibit remarkable flexibility for combining to cover the plane. This generates an extensive
variety of combinations and re-combinations of the individual tiles. Given the number of potential tiles
along with this combinatorial range, artists have the option of freely improvising tile patterns that, within
the bounds of their design, are aperiodic. Figure 16 demonstrates two such patterns using the Penrose pairs.
 Figure 16. Unforced, locally aperiodic arrangements of the Penrose pairs.

Improvisation in the arts is not at all an anything-goes affair. First of all, artists tend to improvise within
genres that provide a relatively discrete set of formal options. Thus, listeners to the music improvised in a
jam session of bluegrass musicians will hear musical patterns that remain distinctly bluegrass. Often the
improvisation becomes the source for later creating a more worked and permanent composition within the
genre.

What holds true for creativity by means of improvised performance holds true for creating objects of visual
art, but with a non-temporal bent. Visual artist adopt a state of mind in which play and experimentation
abound within a set of formal imperatives that may be set personally by the artist or by strictures of the
style. Usually it is a mixture of both: the artist may adjust the formal rules of a style by adding, eliminating
or modifying those rules.

A second aspect of improvisation is the heuristic distinction between formal and informal composing. The
former leans toward a systematic approach characterized by overtly observable symmetry and proportional
regularity. The latter seeks an intuitive approach governed by psychological or “felt”
balance, referred to as asymmetric balance. Improvisation includes the possibility of both, but favors the
latter. In reality the artist does not reject symmetry, but – borrowing the terminology of Stewart and
Golubitsky [18] – “breaks” the symmetry. Artists thereby increase the perceptual variety offered by the
artwork, while retaining vestiges of symmetrical order sufficient to carry the composition.

Tiling patterns are normally considered paragons of formal composition, highly repetitious and invariant
across the plane. The pentagon and its dissections, however, offer the artistic freedom to move the inherent
beauty of the tiled form into more varied, intuitive and informal arrangements. Since the space of an artist’s
design is by physical necessity limited to only a segment of the plane this can manifest as locally aperiodic
patterns.

…and Tessellation
Subdivisions of the pentagon, along lines defined by a pentagram, yield polygons whose interior angles are
all in multiples of 36 , 1/10 of 360 . This permits such informally aperiodic surface segments as those in
Figure 16 built from the Penrose tile pairs. The included angles of the golden rhombs, for example, vary
from 36 through 72 and 108 to 144 . This property along with sides that are all equal allows for a
considerable host of possible clusters around a point on the plane.

The possible clusters expand with added polygons dissected from the pentagon. This is especially evident
when the regular pentagram serves as the template for dissecting a large variety of tiling polygons. There
are at least 50 such polygons as generated by the author, given the provision that all shapes exhibit
reflection symmetry. Figure 17 offers a sampling of these shapes all constructed by connecting the
intersections on the pentagram.

At any one vertex in a tiling pattern the interior angles of the mating polygons must add up to 360°. The
interior angles of the polygons derived from the star division of the pentagon are 36°, 72°, 108°, 144°, 180°,
216°, 252°, 288° and 324°. This permits a large number of possibilities in which these interior angles might
add up to 360°, thereby multiplying the designer’s options throughout the tiling process (Figure 18).

Another characteristic of the pentagonal dissections that aids their possibilities for joining is the proportional
regularity of their sides. All of the edges are in Golden Ratio proportions, since the pentagram dissections
allow only edges of 1/ɸ, 1, ɸ and ɸ+1 where ɸ equals the side of the pentagon (Figure 19).

The joining potential of the dissections offer several options for pursuing quasi-periodic structure. The five-
fold “wheel” in Figure 20 forms a quasi-periodic structure, which is richly varied in detail. Another strategy
toward quasi-periodic effect illustrated in Figure 21 is an intuitive form of substitution. Inserted in place of
the large hexagon that emerged within the lattice created by the mirroring of pentagonal tiles is a set of
these dissections whose packing varies significantly from hexagon to hexagon. Since the hexagon is actually
the merging of two intersecting pentagons, the dissections can pack the hexagons in a great many
arrangements.
 Figure 17. Some bi-laterally symmetric pentagon dissections on the pentagram.

Figure 18. Meeting vertices of tiled pentagon dissections. Figure 19. Ratios between vertices and intersections of a
pentagram inscribed in a pentagon.
Figure 20. Wheeled tiling from pentagon dissections. Figure 21. Tiling of pentagonal dissections within an orthogonal net.
Note substitutions within hexagons. Substitution is especially extensive in Figure 22, where a large suite of
dissected pentagons lays in wait of tessellating. Figure 23 has these tiled according to Durer’s method of
tiling six pentagons around each
36°-144° rhomb (see Figures11 and 23). The result, despite the relative regularity of the tiling, betrays no
easily perceivable order. However, connecting the centers of each divided pentagon produces a hexagon
like that from the girih tile set (Figure 24). Delineating these hexagons reveals that they pack space to
form the underlying structure, i.e., the quasi-periodic nature, of the tessellation. This is similar to the
structure discovered by Makovick at Gunbad-i-Kabud [16].

Figure 22. Dissected pentagons to be tiled.

 Figure 23. A tiling of pentagons substituted with their dissections. The hexagonal arrangement of the tiles is highlighted.
Figure 24. The tiling in Figure 23 with its underlying structure of girih hexagons.

Pattern and Perception

One may distinguish between order through patterning and order through perception. While the
former ensures the latter, the latter may occur without the former, or at least with the former in a
much subdued presence. Both function in the visual arts and the distinctions between them relate
to that between formal and informal composition. Formal compositions feature strong regular patterns
with high degrees of symmetry (Figure 25a) that indicate pre-planned arrays of forms. Periodic tilings and
most quasi-periodic patterns fit the bill. Informal compositions (Figure 25c) feature greatly reduced
symmetries, supplanted with perceptual – sometimes called psychological – relationships that typically
emerge intuitively during the process of creation and dynamically during the process of viewing. Between
these lie compositions with varying degrees of formal and informal character (Figure 26b).

Figure 25. a) Transition from a symmetry-driven formal organization to a b) less formal broken symmetry to an c)
informal asymmetric arrangement. Along this line, Barrows [3] asserts that two key evolutionary developments
in humans have been essential to the emergence of art. These visual capabilities, which accompanied
humankind’s evolving reliance on vision over the other senses, are pattern recognition and mental imaging.
Though not necessarily lacking in other animals, the degree and sophistication of these in human perception
are remarkably greater. Both exhibit survival value. In the case of pattern perception, for example, the
human is better able than most other potential prey to spot a tiger lurking in tall grass, this despite the tiger’s
camouflaging stripes. Humans are more likely to detect subtle distinctions between the tiger’s stripes and
the strips of light and shadow created by tall grasses.

In the case of imaging, the human capacity to assemble forms into coherent images enables the human to
organize such distinctions into the image of a tiger. Moreover, imaging in humans includes the ability to
recall perceived images and apply these to imagined future situations as an ingredient in planning, problem
solving and visual communication. In this regard Alland [1] adds the evolved conceptual tool of reflexive
abstraction, wherein the upright animal can compare images and derive further ideas, i.e., the cat-like form
indicates powerful predators, so avoid lions and panthers as well as tigers. Further this tool permits
contemplating the idea of predation in general and the creation of cultural devices to combat it. Reflexive
abstraction ultimately leads to such fields of thought as philosophy, mathematics and art. Using Barrow’s
pair heuristically the art theorist might place art on a continuum between pattern and
image. On one end is art generated solely as pattern, such as most Islamic tiling or Kuba textiles; on the
other end is the optical naturalism of European perspective imaging. In between are the various stages of
abstraction and stylization in art. Patterns may continue indefinitely, whereas images are definite groupings
of forms that may be recognized and perceptibly isolated from the field of vision – in gestalt terms, figures
emerging from a ground, such as the tiger taking perceivable shape from the tall grass field. The
organization that creates the recognized groups or objects will rely somewhat on local symmetries to
enhance the grouping effect. Approximate reflection, for instance, abets recognizing human and animal
forms. Radial symmetry not only accompanies the appreciation of a rose, but also provides the mechanism
for perceptually extracting it from a backdrop of brambles.

Figure 26 illustrates the perceptual tendency to spot figures within a ground of similar shapes. Created by
the author without aforethought from his menu of pentagon dissections, the composition tends to sprawl
without developing a significant pattern. Nevertheless the viewer’ eye instinctively flits about various
centers of relative order dotted throughout the field and it has a tendency to continue to do so. The strongest
centers are those where the shapes tend to radiate about a point and followed closely by sites where chains
of repeated shapes create paths through the field. Conventional design pedagogy labels these effects as
focus and continuity, two of the principles of unity taught in design.

Arnheim [2] proffers heuristic structures tangentially similar to Barrows. The one he labels as organization
clustered around perceived “centers” and the other he cites as Cartesian, essentially periodic.
Conventional tiling falls into the latter category, while the improvised tiling posited here falls into the
former.

Informal Tiling
The field in Figure 26 may be cropped into the smaller compositions of Figures 27 and 28 that emphasize
others of these principles. The cropping in Figure 26 features a series of focal centers repeated across the
page. As they move from left to right the centers increase in radial symmetry culminating in a complete
radial unit The principle here is repetition with variation where a feature repeats throughout the composition
to impart regularity within the field, but varies to instill greater visual interest. Moles [17] refers to the
former as redundancy citing this as necessary to structure and the latter as information, i.e., the presentation
of novelty. In this instance the application of this principle of unity is termed gradation, since the sequence
of change proceeds in a stepped order of increasing radial symmetry.
 Figure 26. Improvised field of pentagonal dissections.

Figure 27. Use of gradated focal points: composition extracted from field in Figure 20.
 Figure 28. Use of approximate symmetry: composition extracted from field in Figure 20.

With coloration to emphasize the radial centers, Figure 27 seems of conscious design. However, the author
“discovered” it embedded in the larger field by keeping on the lookout for areas of expanded and
informal unity. Similarly, the cropping in Figure 28 resulted from finding an area exhibiting approximate
symmetry, another device for maintaining unity within change. Under this principle the composition
displays sufficient left-right similarity to convey the ordering effect of mirror symmetry, while adding visual
interest. The figures, isolated from the ground through continuity, repeat from left to right with variation.
At the top the figures repeat without reflection, at the bottom the figures reflect with a slight shift in position.

Conclusion

The artist Max Bill famously stated that all composition requires some application of geometry and thus all
art possesses, to some extent, mathematical content [5]. Nevertheless the vast majority of artists relay on
application of primarily perceptual dynamics. Sophisticated works of modern art, may consciously feature
considerably fragmented and contrasting symmetries that compel a highly attentive viewing in order to
acquire meanings and relationships. Examples abound in styles such as Cubism or Expressionism. The
systematic dissection of the pentagon by the pentagram offers a set of shapes that, by virtue of their angular
and linear proportions, abet tessellations that may yield compositions of comparable fragmentation and
contrasts.

These dissections favor a shift in space-filling design from the “Cartesian” beauty inhering in the symmetry
of tiled ornament to the perceptual dynamics of compositional fields favored by creative artists.
Mathematicians might view this shift as the move out of the interests of mathematical study; artists like the
author might view it as the creative interests of the artists served by the mathematical possibilities of five-
fold symmetry. The dissected shapes hold in their nature proportional and angular properties that balance
redundancy with novelty. As such they offer the artist both the means to generate informally ordered arrays
and the means to creatively interpret those structures.
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