Apart from my longstanding obsession with polyhedra, I’ve long had a fascination with this form in particular. It evolved over a few iterations in my notebooks, and is one of the earliest of my doodlings in tesselating forms. I’m not exactly sure what it is (It surely has a technical name), but it has eight faces, six of which have the same dimensions and tessellate into each other. The remaining two are equilateral triangles which bookend the others to complete the form. It might be just me, but as it revolves its centre of gravity seems to shift over and back, and from certain angles it can appear to lack bilateral symmetry altogether.
To include an organic form I needed to construct a facet and then build this form onto it. I took measurements from the digital model and carefully cut it out of MDF.
Above is some of the previs I put together. I’m not actually printing any of this data out, I’m just constructing a quick series of maquettes to see how the form of each plane interacts with itself. It can be quite difficult to keep a clear picture of all of this in your mind as you work – a two-dimensional tesselation can be difficult enough, but when a form is required to tile in three dimensions it can become a very complicated business.
The facet is built, cast, assembled with its counterparts and finished off.
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Colm Lawton 