The start of a new project: Acoustics Based on Jamnitzer

Here you can see a couple of pages from "Perspectiva Corporum Regularium" (1568), a book full with perspective drawings of polyhedra by German Renaissance goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer. It already has been a couple years since I’ve found this book and wanted to make the forms in real life ever since. This year I got the chance to finally realize this project.

The more I inspected these forms, the more I started to notice. What their base is based on, each form having multiple geometric shapes, edges from those different shapes blending into each other, and so on... By dissecting these forms I started to like some more than I would've thought.

Here are two examples that became my favorite:

The base of this form is made out of 8 equilateral triangles, which form an octahedron. And each of the 4 sides have an extra 180 degrees mirrored triangle, that forms 4 hexagrams.

Not knowing all the geometric names by hard, it took me a while before seeing that this form is actually a dodecahedron. The triangles that form the tetrahedrons have some indents, but if you look closer, those indents are made out of the lines of the smaller isosceles triangle and those lines keep going further to the bigger triangle. The two outer outer lines of the two isosceles triangles are connected by a line in a right angle from the smaller one.

uMake

I wouldn't have figured out each angle and ratio of sizes without the 3D modeling app uMake. These past months I have been learning 3D modeling using this app and slowly it's becoming one of my favorite tools to design and sketch sculptures in 3D.

Here you can see my preparations and one of the 3D model from my upcoming project Acoustics Based on Jamnitzer. Next month I will be ordering the material, but for now I’m still finishing the last 3D models and contemplating whether I will create them in aluminium or cortensteel.