Matthew Huang Cummins
"Ubi materia, ibi geometria" - Johannes Kepler "Where there is matter,
there is geometry" My first deep dive into the beautiful symmetries of
Platonic and Archimedean solids came during a college course in
crystallography. How fascinating that the properties of our material
world are determined by the geometry of the spaces between atoms. Each
textbook diagram exploded off the page for me as sculpture. For the
nearly thirty years since, I have used computer-aided design to
meditate on these forms. My work in manufacturing has provided a
toolset for realizing them as physical objects. Now, I enjoy paying it
forward, teaching what I have learned at all levels, from pre-schools
to graduate design courses.
Shrink this bronze sculpture to roughly half a billionth of its
size and the thirteen spheres could align perfectly with the atoms
in a piece of gold. Inspired by the face-centered cubic (FCC)
crystal structure, it also displays the underlying geometry of a
cuboctahedron. Buckminster Fuller coined the term Vector
Equilibrium to describe this Archimedean solid, and Leonardo da
Vinci illustrated it for Luca Pacioli's mathematics textbook, De
Divina Proportione. Coils in Equilibrium was cast in a single pour
using a lost-wax casting process that is over 6,000 years old. In
place of a sculpted wax pattern, however, the "wax" for this piece
was achieved using a modern 3D printing technology... truly a case
of old school meets new.