My mom recently visited Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. In the gift shop, she bought me this “game” by Ted Naos who is an artist and Professor Emeritus at the School of Architecture and Planning at the Catholic University of America (that sure was an official-sounding mouthful) in Washington, DC:

Created back in 2006, it’s basically “sixteen die-cut panels with different black and white images on them.  By overlapping and exchanging the panels, hundreds of new patterns appear…[producing] the illusion of 3-D designs.”

This Black+White set, of course, immediately reminded me of QR codes and the post I wrote last month connecting their visual design to houndstooth print.

QR code for ferragamo.com

When I can relate seemingly disparate things, the synapses in my brain do a little happy dance. It’s like a euphoric high for my gray matter, and I’m always seeking the next hit…

Update on Sept. 19, 2011: At a conference this past Saturday, I learned a few new facts about QR codes. They are two-dimensional barcodes that were originally created by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave in 1994. And earlier this year, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts created a QR-code-collage portrait of Picasso for its exhibition Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris:

A QR code collage of the Cubist master