Fabien Vienne

architect / designer
Paris, France

I create 3D forms to convey the notion that geometry is no mere tool of composition, it's an epistemology – a way to understand the world and to express its underlying laws. Each work seeks to employ the principle of economy to find the essential in a problem and to then "substantiate" it in a least-action solution which brings that essence to light and to life.
While using modern materials to explore classical questions, I often wonder how much further along we might be today if the great minds of the past had also had these materials for their earlier explorations.

Fuzzy Precision (2D)
Fuzzy Precision (2D)
2 discs of diameter 80cm (one disc is interactive)
plastic tubes and connectors (Tubespace), colored soda straws
2010

Fuzzy Precision-2D shows the fractal structure embedded in the irrational √3 edgelengths created by overlaying, common-centering, and rotating identical triangular grids -- an interactive trip from pure periodicity to a sea of irrational near-misses to a highly-ordered √3-scaled hierarchy of nonperiodic tilings. To align the base grids, rotate the top grid to 0°. Rotate slightly away from 0° to see moiré interference patterns. Rotate to 30° to create near-misses of 3+ lines crossing at lengths of integer- and √3-multiples. You'll see scattered dodecagonal flower-shaped "rosettes" with near-miss centers that vary in their precision. If highest-precision centers are interlinked, a nonperiodic tiling results. Link the next-highest precisions, and you get an exactly similar nonperiodic tiling, deflated in the proportion √(2+√3):1. Two such tilings are shown in yellow and green on the second disc. A 3D variant with 5-fold symmetry will be constructed with Zometool at Bridges2011.