This 9-inch diameter stainless steel sculpture is constructed from
thirty identical parts. It suggests to me the iconic image of palm
trees swaying on a tropical island, hence the name Paradise. It
may be hard to see the trees for the forest in the image above, so here
is the same view but a computer-rendered polygonal model, which gives
another sense of the structure:
I cut the stainless steel parts with a computer-controlled
plasma cutter. Each piece is flat and has the
shape outlined below, with notches that allow them to snap together
without any connectors.
Inserting the final element was not easy. The thirty components
lie in the face planes of a rhombic triacontahedron, and the sculpture
has chiral icosahedral symmetry.
Here is another view, looking into a
5-fold axis.
Copyright 2006, George W. Hart
