THE ORIGINS OF ALTAIR DESIGN

by Roger Burrows

Many years ago, 1969 I think it was, I was introduced to Dr.  Ensor Holiday.  Dr.  Holiday seemed ancient, as I was only 24 years old, but in retrospect he was probably only in his early seventies.  Ensor’s study was bulging with books of every kind, but also full of gadgets, models and odd mechanisms.  For me this was a little bit of an Aladdin’s cave, as I was a born tinkerer and was, and still am, very inquisitive.  The phone rang and Ensor disappeared for a while leaving me to explore his cluttered study.  Ensor’s life had followed a sort of meandering course.  On the one hand he had worked in the1940s on ways to mass-produce penicillin, and for a time he worked at Guy’s Hospital, in London.  Ensor was a psychologist, an amateur mathematician, and, most of all, he loved ideas.  For my part, I liked to invent things, was a mathematician, and equally loved ideas.  On Ensor’s bulging bookshelves there were books by P. D. Ouspensky (philosopher), Desmond Morris (animal behaviorist), David Bohm (theoretical physicist), Idries Shah (psychologist and human behaviourist) and hundreds more.  In many cases the books were written by people that Ensor either knew or had known—he had even met Albert Einstein!  On Ensor’s cluttered desk and shelves were all sorts of things: geometrical models, slide rules, log tables and an amazing electronic model that generated geometrical patterns.  There was even a tape recorder with tapes of conversations he had had with the psychologist Carl Jung!

Ensor returned.  He had learned about my interest in ancient geometrical systems and particularly about my interest in “close-packing” circles and spheres.  I had been fascinated by geometries of the past—Celtic, Greek, Islamic, Gothic, Tibetan and many more—and had been figuring out many of the systems and the cultural traditions that lay behind them.  For a number of years I had spent my summers in what was Moorish Spain, as well as in North Africa, studying patterns on walls and the geometry of domes, tents and designs used on everything from copper tables to prayer rugs.  I had even spent time working with tile-makers and coppersmiths in Morocco, exploring with craftsmen how to reconstruct the patterns of their cultural past. 

Ensor delved into a pile of books and fished out a very old and worn book, Moorish Remains in Spain by Albert Calvert, written in 1906.  Ensor had been in hospital recovering from an operation and someone had given him the book to pass away his time.  Within the pages there was one design that had particularly sparked his interest, the design numbered 151.  We later found out that Calvert had picked up this design and many others from an earlier book written by Jules Bourgoin, Precis de l’art Arabe, published in 1892. 

Design 151 was unusual in that it contained regular and almost regular rosettes with sides 5, 6, 7 and 8—plus the fact that these rosettes were neatly contained in a unique arrangement of close-packing circles.  Clearly Bourgoin had toured the Middle East and Moorish Spain, copying designs as he went and interpreting them.  We never found the original of design 151, and I wonder to this day where it might be.  The fact that design 151 also corresponded to a close-packing circle arrangement was an odd coincidence, but it provided a bridge between Ensor’s interests and mine. 

There are many geometrical systems that underlie designs classified as Arabic or Islamic.  Many designs are based on regular tessellations with square and hexagonal symmetries.  The rosette designs featured in the Calvert book were either straight derivations of regular or semi-regular tessellations, or constructed on square or hexagonal symmetries using what can be described as a “ray” system, where symmetrical rays of different numbers of lines are placed on or within lines of symmetry, and points of intersection determine the final positioning of rosettes.  Other systems use symmetrically repeated shapes, with polygons rotating around polygons, etc. 

During our first meeting, Ensor showed me many variations that he had drawn of design 151.  The drawings looked fascinating, and clearly the fact that design 151 could also be seen as a type of close-packing arrangement of circles meant that many other designs could be created with associated, but different, close-packing relationships.  Ensor and I soon started working together on design 151 and other close-packing circle designs.  I was now driven to continue the development of the dynamic geometry of circles and spheres that I had been working on from the very start.  Our interests dovetailed.  I even moved into the studio at the bottom of his garden in Holland Park, London. 

Developing design variations was not so easy in those days.  This was at a time before computers were easily accessible.  So, calculations were made with log tables and, given Ensor’s not so good eyesight, I drew the design variations by hand on drafting film.  Some of the designs were extraordinarily complex and time-consuming to complete.  One wrong move could ruin a design and days of work, but we were both so captivated and wanting to push the envelope, so to speak, that we didn’t mind about the challenges.  We made lots of prints of the designs, and eventually some of them found their way into the hands of children. 

The unique visual property of these designs is that, like cracks on a wall, they can conjure all sorts of images in the mind’s eye.  The fact that they are based on close-packing circles, repeating in square and hexagonal symmetries, means that any shape “found” can be found again and again—rotated, reflected and translated. 

We discovered that children and adults loved colouring these patterns and were amazed by the diversity of their imaginations.  The same design might be seen as a landscape by some, a flock of birds by others or as abstract patterns, faces, wild animals, flowers and many other things. 

Ensor’s good friend was Aubrey Wolton, and Aubrey realised that books of these symmetries would provide a wonderful way to stimulate the imagination.  They were eventually published under the name of Altair Designs by Longman’s Press in about 1973. 

At the time of publication The Times London newspaper ran a national competition using the patterns with wonderful results. 

Altair Design had arrived on the scene!