Arizona

George W. Hart

Arizona is a sculpture I designed for the Math Department at the University of Arizona
in Tucson. Lots of people worked with me to assemble it on March 27, 2018.

We started in the morning by sanding the faces of the parts. I had sent a file ahead of time with
the part shape. Volunteers in the Art Department had cut the wood with their laser cutter.

Then we stained them. This is something of an experiment for me, with three colors.
I was aiming for a sense of desert landscape and mountains, evocative in my mind of Arizona.

Three parts join together cyclically with cable ties to make a module.

In fact, we need lots of modules. The sixty pieces are arranged as twenty modules.

The modules are joined together in groups of five.
It's a challenging puzzle to figure out where everything connects.

Two separate halves then join together to make the full orb. It's about three feet in diameter.

There's a lot of work involved in making all the cable-tie connections properly.
I had a particular plan for how each tie is oriented, to preserve symmetry.

Here you can see many of the ties are still unclipped. They are a yellow color to match the stain.

The cable ties are all clipped in this view down a five-fold axis, but
it's difficult to visualize the whole structure just from two-dimensional photo.

When complete, we can discuss its chiral icosahedral symmetry and its geometric properties.
The parts lie (in pairs) in the thirty planes of an imagined rhombic triacontahedron.

Finally, we did a test to see if it fits through the doorway. (Yes, it does!)
You can visit it in the Math department office where it is now hanging,
on the third floor of the Environment and Natural Resources 2 building.
There is an article about it by Lein Linn in the UA paper, the Daily Wildcat.

Thank you to everyone at the University of Arizona who helped in this project, especially
Doug Ulmer, Bruce Bayly, Colin Blakely, Guadalupe Lozano, and Aubrey Mouradian.
Photos above by Rob Stansfield.

And here's a smaller, 24-inch prototype I made ahead of time, to test the design and the color pattern.
I submitted this version to the Bridges 2018 Art Exhibition in Stockholm, Sweden.