As models and paradigms, patterns have been helping to orient architects since the Middle Ages. But patterns are also the basis of the history of ornament, an aesthetic phenomenon that links all times and cultures at a fundamental level. Ornament - and hence pattern as well - was abolished by the avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century, but the notion of pattern has taken on new meaning and importance since the 1960s.

Complexity research has ultimately shown that even highly complex, dynamic patterns may be based on simple behavioral rules, and that has allowed the notions of pattern and pattern formation to take on new meanings, that are also central for architecture.

Today the use of generative computerized methods is opening up new ways of talking about an idea that is becoming increasingly abstract and dynamic. Pattern explores the question: what are the notions of pattern that must be discussed in the context of contemporary architecture?

Text in English and German. In autumn 1997 the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) moved into the production hall of a former munitions factory in Karlsruhe, built by Stuttgart architect Philipp Jakob Manz in 1914-18. Hamburg architects Schweger plus Partner were commissioned to convert this industrial structure, over 300 m long and with 10 atria, after Rem Koolhaas' project of a new building for the ZKM immediately adjacent to the main station in Karlsruhe had been rejected in favour of refurbishing and converting the imposing old building. There is no doubt that the thinking that led to the decision to retain an industrial monument dating from the turn of the century and to bring it back to life for different purposes, rather than putting up a new building, was essentially practical in nature. And yet the result is unique, as a dialogue of a quality that could scarcely be matched anywhere in the world was initiated between the four-storey hall with it's extensive atria and its new users, the ZKM institutes, the Staatliche Hochschule fur Gestaltung and several museums -- Medienmuseum, Museum fur Neue Kunst and Stadtische Galerie.The architects were experienced in handling large industrial and office buildings, but also ambitious museum projects -- among others they designed the Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum -, and they succeeded not only in showing the historical building substance and it's spatial potential to the best advantage, and in complementing this brilliantly inside and out; but they also combined the real architectural space and the imaginative space of modern pictorial worlds in an exciting way.