Artistic Applications of the Rhombus
Around the same time as Japanese Temple Mathematics (1600s), Scottish clansmen from the Campbell family started wearing argyle, a type of tartan or plaid. This appeared on kilts, socks, and shawls. The first argyle sweater was created in the 1920's by the Pringle Company, yes a different one than the hyperbolic paraboloid potato chips, that manufactures luxury knitwear. It took until after World War I to become the high fashion "preppy" print it maintains today. Supposedly when the president of Brooks Brothers attended a golf tournament in Scotland and returned to become the US's first manufacturer of argyle socks in 1949.
The pattern itself features different colored rhombi touching tip-to-tip and usually a very similar but horizontally shifted overlay not filled with color but just a solid or dotted outline. Even without the colors and lines, argyle can still be used in creative works beyond fashion like in crochet.
In 1816, Sir David Brewster, a physicist with emphasis in optics, created the kaleidoscope from the greek words kalos, eidos, and scopos to mean "beautiful form watcher". His was created as a tube loose pieces of colored glass being reflected by mirrors or glass lenses set at angles, so to create patterns when the tube was peered through. The patterns generally didn't focus on rhombi, but play around with this applet and consider what looking into a rhombic kaleidoscope could be like.
In expressionist architecture, we don't need to imagine this. In 1914, Bruno Taut constructed the Glashaus or Glass Pavilion, whose only purpose was to be a beautiful glass utopia. Glass architecture was largely uncharted at the time, so he was provided materials from Luxfer to promote the glass industry. The Luxfer prisms made up large glass lattice windows ranging in color so as to illuminate a room that’d ordinarily be dark.
Prior to this, stained glass could be said to have propagandized church teachings and divine light, whereas the Glashaus used new materials and was designed as a utopia for the groups of people in it to see each other and the outside world in colored light, like rose-colored-lenses, and effectively deplete hatred. Sadly it was built for an exhibition and no longer stands save for as a small-scale model in museums, so we can't know if it would work these days in neutralizing disdain for one another. The idyllic sentiment of it, though, is well displayed through its rhombic latticed windows.
