Tri­an­gu­lar Pla­to­nic Sol­ids

The pla­to­nic sol­ids have been stud­ied since an­cient times. They are named after the phi­lo­so­pher Pla­to who des­cribes them in his di­a­logue "Ti­mae­us" to ex­plain the es­sence of the world. Even to­day the five pla­to­nic sol­ids are found in na­ture, sci­ence and art.
Three of the sol­ids (Te­tra­he­dron, Oc­ta­he­dron and Ico­sa­he­dron) pro­vide the ba­sis for my work. They are spec­ial be­cause they con­sist only of uni­form tri­an­gles which al­lows for an ar­bit­rary con­nec­tion among them­selves. This is the es­sen­tial idea be­hind the pro­ject: com­plex struc­tures can be cre­ated from sim­ple forms.

Light, Shad­ow And Ma­ter­i­al­i­ty

Each mod­el is made up of drink­ing straws which are held to­geth­er by twine. The straws have a uni­form length of ten cen­ti­me­ters and a dia­met­er of sev­en mil­li­me­ters. Elab­or­ate light­ing makes it dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish between ob­ject and shad­ow. This blur­ring of the line between tan­gible and in­tan­gible adds an­oth­er lay­er of com­plex­ity. Totally dif­fer­ent struc­tures can be cre­ated by mov­ing the light source even min­im­ally.

Ap­plic­a­tions

The mod­els do not only serve as art. Work­ing with dif­fer­ent ma­ter­i­als the conc­ept can be used for a range of dif­fer­ent ap­plic­a­tions. Be­cause the tri­an­gu­lar con­struc­tion of­fers re­mark­able sta­bil­ity, the de­sign can be ap­plied to ev­ery­thing from fur­niture to light in­stal­la­tions.