Found this wonderful design via we-make-money-not-art. It’s a flexible, contracting pedestrian bridge by Thomas Heatherwick, which collapses upon itself to create an octagonal shape when not in use. It’s all hydraulics, and it looks fascinating.
He’s also currently working on an innovative Japanese buddhist temple design, based on folded/crumpled/draped fabric:
UPDATED: these additional photos from PingMag!
Melisande on flickr posted this insanely cool mixup of her 3d star tessellation and one of Ralf Konrad’s designs. It’s a grid of 3d star pyramids! unbelieveably cool. I’m in awe of this design.
You might also want to check out her website for more photos and diagrams!
here’s more photos of it:
Jane (mawelucky on flickr) posted this fantastic pinwheel tessellation. she took the pinwheel tessellation I put online a few days back and changed it around, flipping the hexagons to the other side of the paper (a technique she has used quite successfully on several other works).
I think I like this version more, actually.
and here’s the other side:
Saw a blip in my technorati feed- which lead me to Thinking Machine, a blog about a lot of generally fascinating vague concepts that I find particularly interesting. but what really impressed me was that he picked up on the comment I left on the dataisnature.com site. Normally I feel like I can’t convey a single word in an understandable fashion, so it was really good to see that I got a message through despite my verbal fumblings.
Thanks, Warren!
Doing some reading online about tessellations; found this little snippet from this site.
The dual of a tessellation is formed by connect the centers of the shapes in a tessellation so that these segments do not pass through a vertex of the tessellation. The dual tessellations of the regular tessellations are themselves regular tessellations. However, the duals of the semi-regular tessellations are not semi-regular tessellations.
So, now I know the official way to discover the dual of the tessellations I am folding. Helpful!
