A Carpet with a Past

Today, I took delivery of this carpet from Oakland architect Christopher Robin Andrews, a former student of Christopher Alexander at U.C. Berkeley (a collector of classical carpets and the famed author of the Pattern Language and Nature of Order series). Andrews became interested in the 17th-century Turkish carpets preserved in Saxon (German Protestant) churches in Romania, hung on the walls to provide decoration after the Catholic frescoes were whitewashed over. Working in Photoshop with high-definition photos of the originals, he painstakingly sets out the design in a manner that allows its faithful reproduction by a modern carpet weaver. He then orders them bespoke from Turkey. The carpet is beautiful - the blue is especially striking. Andrews has a website with this and other designs, many of them much bigger than this one. (Update: the website is down as of 5 February 2011.) Prospective buyers in the vicinity of North Oakland can see the carpets, but he tells me that he now has a national following via the web. Little wonder - this is admirable work!