This six-inch diameter paper sculpture is made of sixty identically
shaped
parts. Parts of any one color form a type of tetrahedron, and there are
five such, deeply interlocked. No glue was needed; the parts just hook
into each other. I call this type of design "modular kirigami". It took
me about four hours to assemble after several hours of false starts and
figuring out how to do it. (Addendum: I later added tiny drops of glue
at the joints, as I was worried it would vibrate apart in shipping to a
gallery.)
Above is a computer-rendered view down a five-fold axis. Observe that
the "8"-shaped parts each link with many others. So they could not be
made as single pieces of paper unless they were glued or taped together
after being linked. But I wanted to be a purist and use no glue or
tape, so I designed the parts as two overlapping "3"-shaped pieces.
Note the interesting arithmetic:
Below is a view looking directly into a five-fold axis:
This sculpture is described further in
my paper in the Proceedings of the
2007 Bridges
Conference, available here.
