02/19: Deployable Space Frame

A brief recap. The past few posts have been a review of work completed as part of a class called Deployable Structures, taught at PennDesign by Mohamad Al Khayer. A few weeks were spent on folded paper modeling (origami, as seen on this pinterest page). Mohamad also review some of the ideas of D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, Platonic and Archimedean solids, and some more recent developments like the ‘Calatrava Truss’. Steve and I adapted our new ‘expansion strut’ to the Calatrava truss.

The last graphic shows how the very planar truss could be organized in to a space frame, and if you look closely you can see all the square pyramids and tetrahedrons which make up the space filling geometry.

Tomorrow will be a wrap up of this class and of the final project. By Friday I’m hoping to have a rough draft of a portfolio to post.