Pattern, Glorious Pattern

I must admit I have a strong weakness for patterns. I think as someone who works with architecture I'm supposed to hate them (too much surface! no meaning!), but I just can't bring myself to. I even love Venturi Scott Brown's post-mod pattern phase, which is definitely not cool:



I know, I know, it's gauche and terrible. But I love it.

A few weeks ago, Brown University had one of its annual book sales, and true to form, I bought an insane number of books. That was par for the course. The real problem is the number of foreign language books I ended up with, all because of their seductive papers -- I can't read a lick of German, but ended up with all of these:



But really, can you blame me? Look at the patterns on the covers:











Several of these remind me of the work of the Wiener Werkstätte, but these last pieces especially. They look so much like the work of Dagobert Peche: