Soccer: Germany vs. Greece

I am looking forward to the game tomorrow ... hopefully it does not end as in Monty Python's Philosophers' Football Match:


There is sophisticated mathematics behind the geometry of the soccer ball. Pieter Huybers, a dutch structural engineer, studied this field extensively and developed an optimized ball geometry with respect to roundness. He presented his work at the Structural Morphology Group Seminar 2011 in London.

Digital Tools in Sculptural Practice

I just discovered a great blog dealing with digital modeling and fabrication techniques in contemporary sculptural practice. Student work from two courses held by Andrew F. Scott at the Savannah College of Art and Design is presented.

Ai Weiwei in Zurich

Since last Friday Ai Weiwei's marble sculpture Sofa in White (2011) is exibited on Paradeplatz, Zurich, Switzerland, as part of the Art And The City project.



It seems not to be very comfortable though ...

ZipStrip

Chris Precht, master student at TU Vienna and founder of prechteck combined a GH definition I developed for modelling paperstrip geometries with the principle of ZipShape, developed by Christoph Schindler, to model these beautiful prototypes, as part of his thesis: Images (c) by Chris Precht.

RhinoVAULT Beta released!

The BLOCK Research Group is pleased to announce the pre-release of rhinoVAULT Beta V0.2! The current version is now freely available for download. The Rhinoceros® Plug-In emerged from current research on structural form finding based on the Thrust-Network-Approach to intuitively create and explore compression-only structures.

”The resistant virtues of the structure that we seek depend on their form; it is through their form that they are stable, not because of an awkward accumulation of material. There is nothing more noble and elegant from an intellectual viewpoint than this: to resist through form.” - Eladio Dieste, 1996

Matthias Rippmann
Lorenz Lachauer
Philippe Block

Tamedia Headquarters by Shigeru Ban

Yesterday I took pictures of the construction site of the Tamedia office building in Zurich, Switzerland, designed by Shigeru Ban. This webcam shows the construction site, it is located here.

The pictures below show the assembly of a standing frame element, five story high, in front of the already existing structure. This frame is later shifted to the position of the next frame axis in plan. Watch an animation of the construction sequence here.

Discrete Textiles

Inspired by the work of Elisa Strozyk, I wrote a script, that imposes a specific length to all edges of a given mesh. For triangulated input meshes, this results in equilateral triangles as faces. Download the python script for Rhino here.

The final geometry is a discrete representation of a crumpled developable surface, if the mesh is consisting only of nodes with the valence of six and of triangular faces. More digitally crumpled surfaces by Tamahiro Tachi on flickr.

A crumpled mesh torus.