Developable Surface Modelling

A grasshopper definition for developable surface strips. Download here. Mårten Nettelbladt gives a nice description of developable surface types.

Developable Surfaces in Gehry's Architecture

Gehry's east river guggenheim project in NYC. The use of flexible sheet material like paper in physical models generates developable geometries.

Dennis Shelden, CTO at gt, describes in his phd thesis several ways to compute developable surfaces. Fig. (c) by Dennis Shelden.


Museum MARTa in Herford, Germany. Most of the roof surfaces are developable. Geometric modelling of the roof construction has been done by Jess Maertterer. Further discription on his page.

Exploring the PQ Strip

Helmut Pottmann and his colleagues form the Geometric Modeling and Industrial Geometry resarch unit at TU Vienna describe the concept of the PQ strip in this paper. The strip consists of planar quad faces. Fig. (c) by H. Pottmann et al.



By lofting the edges, a developable surface is generated. Developable surfaces can be flattened or unrolled without distortion.



Download a grasshopper definition of the PQ strip here.

John Pickering's Sculptures

John Pickering is a british sculptor who used the geometric principle of inversion since the 1970s. A book about his great work is published by the AA: Mathematical form: John Pickering and the architecture of the inversion

Kusner Minimal Surface

Discovered by Rob Kusner, Director of the Center for Geometry, Analysis, Numerics and Graphics (GANG). The Kusner surface is an inversion of the Boy surface. The three discs are planes "reaching infinity".

Le Topologicon

Le Topologicon is a great comic book about topology. The author is Jean-Pierre Petit who discovered the first parameterization of the boy surface in 1981. He is also the co-founder of the non-profit organization Savoir-sans-frontiers. The book deals with moebius strips, klein bottles, boy surfaces, magnetic fields, surface stiching and a lot more interesting topics. In my opinion, the Topologicon is a must-read for everyone dealing with surface modelling, mesh modelling, subdivision surfaces, surface tesselation, vector fields, deformations, or topological space. Some example pages:

Downloads available again.