2020 Bridges Conference

Nagisa Kijima, Tomohiro Tachi

Artists

Tomohiro Tachi

Professor

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo

Tokyo, Japan

tachi@idea.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp

https://origami.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Statement

I have been fascinated by the way parts fit nicely in well-designed products; the oldest examples of such products are traditional Japanese wooden joints. Together with the inspiration from space-filling polyhedra, I came up with this artwork. I created this work in the art-science collaboration class "Individual and Group," taught by Tomohiro Tachi and Aasao Tokolo, held at the University of Tokyo in 2020. The participants created artworks inspired by the connection between math, art, science, and design, including Tokyo 2020 Olympic Paralympic emblems "Harmonized Chequered Emblems" and the geometry of tessellation underlying the patterns.

Artworks

Image for entry 'Diamond Joint'

Diamond Joint

13 x 16 x 15 cm

PLA(3Dprint)

2020

Tsugite and shiguchi are Japanese traditional techniques to join timber without nails, used for buildings and furniture. Original tsugite and shiguchi can connect timbers only straight or at right angles along the orthogonal grid. I imagine that the space-filling tessellation of rhombic dodecahedron is a potential grid system in architecture. So, I designed this block system with tsugite and shiguchi that can be assembled into the diamond lattice. Each piece has a hexagonal cross-section, and every pair of pieces are joined at Maraldi angle (109.5 degrees). The surface of the piled blocks is the rhombic dodecahedron sponge that divides the space into equal halves; the surface is homeomorphic to the Schwarz D surface.