Pixiq

I love looking at buildings to see how they’re constructed. And if, like me, you happen to live near a great architectural city like New York, you get to see some of the world’s most beautiful buildings on a regular basis. One of the things that you notice when you investigate buildings closely is that they contain some fascinating and intricate patterns. In fact, since the very construction of buildings relies on the repetition of shapes, angles, and beams—in other words, patterns—it’s almost impossible not to find them in both their design and their decoration.

You can find a lot of great patterns in the exterior ornamentation of buildings—in the intricate mosaics of a Muslim mosque, for example, or the fractured-mirror face of a modern skyscraper.  I’ve also found great patterns in the structural details of buildings—in the stairways, domes, doorways, façade carvings, etc. And sometimes the construction of the building itself is like one huge pattern. The Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York, shown here, is a great example of a building wearing its structural pattern on the outside, and I defy anyone with a camera to enter that building and not shoot some pictures. The building always looks to me as if someone has come along and stripped off the façade, revealing the structural skeleton underneath.

Architectural patterns work best when they are entirely isolated, which usually means shooting just sections of the building rather than the whole building. For the shot here I was lucky; there wasn’t much in the way (other than some banners hanging from the lower ceilings), so all that I had to do was point the camera up and shoot. Usually you can isolate a pattern just by zooming the lens in a bit and getting rid of clutter.

By the way, churches and temples, as well as important public buildings like state capitols, are very rich with ornamental patterns both inside and out, so those are other nice places to look. If you’re looking for likely subjects in your area, just do a Google Image or flickr.com search on your state or city capitol and you’ll see what other photographers have shot there.