Tangled Reindeer

George W. Hart

 


This is a sculpture made by solid freeform fabrication---it is automatically assembled by a computer-controlled device based on a design which I prepare. I like to think of it as what you would see if you made a kind of snowball of reindeer with their antlers on the outside and their bodies hidden inside. The form is actually the union of twelve planar shapes which weave through each other and only contact at the outer edges.  Each has the form shown here:
So you can think of it as a drawing on the faces of a great dodecahedron, which is a polyhedron composed of twelve intersecting regular pentagons. The white lines in the image above show where portions of five other planes pass through this one plane.  When I design such a thing, before fabricating it I see it as a virtual reality model on my computer screen:

 
There is more information about how I designed it in this paper.  You can make a copy of the sculpture if you have access to solid freeform fabrication equipment.  The necessary data file is on this page.


Copyright 2003, George W. Hart