Group Members: Chris Turton, Jason Lee, Maxine Beckie
Original Artwork: 7 Triangles in 1 Point by Erikjan Roodbol
The original artwork piece was made out of black MDF wood, but we decided to make it out of pipe cleaners instead since it was cheaper and more accessible to us. At first, it was difficult to know how to put together the polyhedron, but the structure made more sense once we learned that the shape was made by connecting square antiprisms together. It took some experimentation, but we learned that each square antiprism could be made by connecting 4 parallelograms together where each parallelogram was made using a single pipe cleaner. Working with pipe cleaners was easy in that the shape was very malleable and we could make adjustments where needed, but also fragile and prone to getting squished for the same reasons, so we had to be gentle with it.
The main piece that we recreated was mostly 1:1 in terms of its geometry, but we also colour-coded each antiprism in the object to highlight the underlying structure. The piece being a wireframe instead of filled in also makes it a bit easier to see how the antiprisms are connected. In addition to the main piece, we also made a supplementary tetrahedron, octahedron, and icosahedron to provide motivation for why having 7 triangles around a vertex is interesting.
One aspect of the shape that felt slightly unsatisfying was that it included both triangular and square faces. We wondered if it was possible to make a similar shape that also featured vertices with 7 triangles around them which had only triangular faces. We realized this was possible by connecting square-based pyramids to the exposed square faces. So, as an extension to the project, we also made a simplified version of the shape (with just 3 square antiprisms connected together) that still contained 7-triangle vertices but which featured exclusively triangular faces (by adding square-based pyramids.) We don’t have a photo of this object, but it’s currently sitting in the presentation room beside the main piece.
EDIT: Here it is!
For our interactive activity, it felt natural to focus on the square antiprisms since those were the building blocks of the original art piece and our recreation. Each antiprism needs four parallelograms, so we thought it would be best to assign groups of three or four so that each person can at least make a parallelogram and get the experience of building up the shape from the smallest unit. After the groups put their parallelograms together, we used their antiprisms to make a common structure seen in both works: three antiprisms joined together such that their adjacent edges form a triangular prism. We were inspired by a previous group (Doreen, Minami, Yikang: Neel Shrestha's artwork) that had each person make a small part of a larger origami artwork, since we enjoyed the collaborative aspect of their activity.
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