"In
September 1995 the Australian architectural practice Ashton Raggatt
McDougall (ARM) invited the eminent mathematician Roger Penrose
to open their soon-to-be-completed refurbishment of the historic
Storey Hall complex of buildings at the Royal Melbourne Institute
of Technology. Penrose, who admitted that the design seemed "extremely
exciting", regretfully declined on the grounds that he was
already overcommitted to many projects to visit Australia at the
required time. He concluded his response to the invitation with
an enigmatic postscript which records that he is currently working
on "the single tile problem" and recently "found
a tile set consisting of one tile together with complicated matching
rule that can be enforced with two small extra pieces". This
postscript contains the first clue to understanding the mysterious
connection between Penrose and Storey Hall, between a scientist
and a controversial, award-winning, building.
Storey Hall is significant for many reasons but only one prompted ARM to invite Penrose to open it. The newly completed Storey Hall is literally covered in a particular set of giant, aperiodic tiles that were discovered by Roger Penrose in the 1970's and have since become known as Penrose tiles. While architecture has, historically, always been closely associated with the crafts of tiling and patterning, Storey Hall represents a resurrection of that tradition.
But what is Penrose tiling and what does it have to do with architecture in general and Storey Hall in particular? This paper provides an overview of the special properties and characteristics of Penrose's tilings before describing the way in which they are used in ARM's Storey Hall. The purpose of this binary analysis is not to critique Storey Hall or its use of aperiodic tiling but to use ARM's design as a catalyst for taking the first few steps in a greater analysis of Penrose tiling in the context of architectural form generation."