Melbourne Museum Design Program
Art direction of 'Domes, Homes and Dinosaur Bones', a series of public workshops investigating structure and geomety and constructing large scale polyhedra with newspaper!
Polyhedra are 3D polygons. The word polygon literally means “many angle”. A polygon is a 2D shape which consists of straight lines joined by angles. The straight lines that make up the polygon are called its sides or edges and the points where the sides meet are the polygon’s vertices. This project involved creating Platonic Solids and Archimedian Polyhedra. The Platonic Solids were discovered by the Pythagoreans but described by Plato (in the Timaeus) and used by him for his theory of the 4 elements. They consist of surfaces of a single kind of regular polygon, with identical `vertices. So all sides are the same and all surfaces are the same. The Archimedean Solids, consist of surfaces of more than one kind of regular polygon, with identical vertices and identical arrangements of polygons around each polygon. Why are we constructing these? Because they are beautiful! The are also great for building with. In geometry, Platonic solids are the three-dimensional varieties of regular polygons. There are precisely five Platonic solids and the name of each derives from the number of surfaces each has. Due to their aesthetic beauty and symmetry, the Platonic solids have been a favorite subject of geometers for thousands of years. They are named for the ancient Greek philosopher Plato who claimed the classical elements were constructed from the regular solids. Many ancient philosophies used a set of archetypal classical elements to explain patterns in nature. The Greek version of these ideas dates from pre-Socratic times and persisted throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, deeply influencing European thought and culture. The basic concept is however far older in the Far East, and was widely disseminated in India and China, where it forms the basis of both Buddhism and Hinduism, particularly in an esoteric context. The modern scientific periodic table of the elements and the understanding of combustion (fire) can be considered successors to such early models.

Project Images
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Some of the shapes which were developed during the workshops

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