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Always the Alhambra seems to evoke a sense of distance, of unreachability. Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh includes an extended reference to the palace in exile. Washington Irving (of Legend of Sleepy Hollow fame) spent a season dwelling within the Alhambra’s walls and produced an effusive volume about it. It has tongue-tied many storied authors and critics. It ranks right up there with Shangri-La and the Trocadero, beribboned names so evocative of glories, it’s hard to reconcile the versifying tales with an actual place you could easily visit. “Patterns 2” by Cameron Adams (Flickr): I have never visited the Alhambra, and I felt shy about approaching the topic at all.

He later gave Moorish pattern and the Alhambra pride-of-place in his Grammar of Ornament, one of pattern’s most cited works. It took off in its ascent from mere building to legend in the 11th century, when the Moorish king of Granada, Mohammed ben Al-Ahmar, renovated its ruins, a project continued and embellished upon by his successor Yusuf I, Sultan of Granada, in 1333.įlash forward several centuries, when British designer Owen Jones extolled the place in a now-seminal volume from 1836. A shambling series of interconnecting quadrangles, the Alhambra began its life as a small fortress in 899 in present-day Granada, Spain. To patterns enthusiasts, the Alhambra looms large in the imagination-“a pearl set in emeralds,” according to Moorish poets, alluding to its whitewashed clay buildings nestled in a dense wood of English elms. Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 1856 We can find no work so fitted to illustrate a Grammar of Ornament as that in which every ornament contains a grammar within itself.” “The Alhambra is at the very summit of perfection of Moorish art, as is the Parthenon of Greek art. Plate from The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones (1856)

Large pattern modern geometric wallpaper patterns