Although I gave up on domes many years ago, I never lost my fascination with polyhedra. So when I heard about the exhibit on the roof garden at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, I went to see it. It turned out to be squashed and stretched hexagons and pentagons of steel, acrylic, and polyester. You could walk around inside it. By Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno.
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
Although I gave up on domes many years ago, I never lost my fascination with polyhedra. So when I heard about the exhibit on the roof garden at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, I went to see it. It turned out to be squashed and stretched hexagons and pentagons of steel, acrylic, and polyester. You could walk around inside it. By Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno.
Looks like an ugly mess of crashed dodecahedra. This kind of thing passes for art nowadays, but it's a shame to put up such a disjointed mess of assymmetry, when the natural polyhedra are so beautiful and symmetric.
I've discovered, for instance, that you can attach icosohedrons all over a dodecahedron, by fitting them on the dodeca pentagons where five of the icosa triangles meet to form a pentagon.
There are numerous other examples of clustering polyhedra, and any of them would have been more pleasing than the smash-up pictured above.
Perhaps beauty was not the point. . The artist seems to be commenting on the dissonance and disjoinedness of our society.
That's true. This thing is warped. I always stuck to the pure icosahedron in domebuilding. Elegance of symmetry.