M.C. Escher began not as a mathematician, but as a student of architecture in Haarlem. Though he soon left those studies for the decorative arts, the imprint of that early training never left him. Look closely at his lithographs and you’ll see it: the arches, colonnades, tiled courtyards, the heavy discipline of structure. Even when the worlds he draws twist into paradox, they stand on an architect’s foundation.
In 1922, Escher wandered the Alhambra in Granada. The tessellated walls of Moorish tile—geometric birds, stars, vines—captivated him. He sketched them obsessively, tracing how a single motif could expand toward infinity. That encounter gave him his grammar. From the Alhambra came Metamorphosis, where patterns dissolve into creatures, creatures into landscapes, and back again... an architecture of change, a visual metaphor for transformation itself.
I think of the tiles underfoot as I run for my train. Simple diamonds, alternating black and white (or perhaps off-white, with the pollution and dirt of the city). After staring too long they ripple, expanding outward as though they might never end. I think of all the people who have walked across them before me, each carrying their own story, and how patterns can hold lives the way walls hold echoes.
What fascinates about Escher is not only his precision, but the way his visions echo human experience. In Relativity, staircases climb endlessly in every direction, figures passing each other as though they lived in parallel universes. It captures what grief or disorientation can feel like; life moving forward all around you, while you walk sideways on your own invisible plane.
Relativity, Escher, 1953
Think of a time you've experienced grief. The world looks normal to everyone else. People keep shopping for groceries, laughing at bus stops, making dinner plans. But you feel tilted, as if walking on walls while everyone else remains on the ground. In those disorienting times, each step seems to lead nowhere. Your own Relativity... an ordinary world made impossible by loss.
And then there is Ascending and Descending: monks circling a staircase that leads nowhere, their steps forever repeated. A haunting metaphor for the cycles we cannot break, be it addiction, arguments, patterns we replay until exhaustion. Every step feels upward, yet somehow we land back where we started—breathless, resentful, weary. At times throughout our lives, we all climb Ascending and Descending, caught in a loop that feels unbreakable.
Ascending and Descending, Escher, 1960
Escher invites us not only to marvel at impossibility, but to see ourselves within it. In Hand with Reflecting Sphere, the artist’s own face peers back from a mirrored ball, held in the palm of his hand. It is both intimate and unsettling: to see yourself reflected in the art, to realise you are inside the picture.
Relativity, Escher, 1935
It happens to us all, catching our reflections in a darkened window as we walk down the street, or on the metal trimmings of buildings in the city. For a moment, you may not recognise yourself. Older, bigger, smaller, eyes carrying love or exhaustion or both. But something always brings you back. Your partner reaching out their hand, a friend giving you a hug.
What makes Escher enduring is not merely cleverness, but tenderness. Behind every impossible angle lies a devotion to structure, to pattern, to the human longing for order. He borrowed from the tiled palaces of Granada, the cloisters of Tuscany, the mountain villages of Amalfi, and reassembled them into dreams.
And perhaps that is the truest intersection of art and architecture: both reveal the world as stranger and more beautiful than we first believed. A cathedral can lift you toward heaven. An Escher print can fold you into infinity. Both remind us that space is not just where we live, but how we see, how we remember, and how we hope.
Sometimes I think our lives as a kind of Escher print: paradoxical, dizzying, beautiful. And yet, within the impossible angles, we carve out spaces of comfort, belonging, and retreat.
