Friday 29 May 2009

More Geodesic Shells

Mårten Nettelbladt kindly adviced me of the Korkeasaari Lookout Tower, an example of a geodesic structure build of wood.

The Japan Pavillion at the expo 2000 by Shigeru Ban and Frei Otto is an example of an geodesic shell build of paper tubes.

Friday 15 May 2009

Geodesic Shell

The structure of this shell is woven from isocurves and geodesic curves on a surface. Geodesic curves are also called plank lines, they can be build from straigth, but twisted planks. Mårten Nettelbladt studied them on his blog. Geodesic shells build in wood have been studied at the laboratory for timber construction of the EPFL.

Planks generated from lines on a surface with this script: TwistedBeams.zip


The (straight) bamboo strips of this chinese hat are following geodesic lines. Photo by drs2biz.

Monday 11 May 2009

Surface Turtle

This is an implementation of a turtle walking around on a NURBS surface. If the turtle is going straight in small steps, the resulting path is close to a geodesic.







In general relativity, the straight path in curved spacetime is a geodesic