Claire Djang

This film builds on research on space-filling polyhedra in the Advanced Geometries group at Studio Olafur Eliasson. The question of how to construct an aperiodic 3D tiling led to the investigation of quasicrystals and various methods for their assembly. Although quasicrystals have been studied extensively for decades, a clear understanding of their structure and patterns are difficult to access for anyone who is not a specialist. A 4-tile approach for the construction of icosahedral quasicrystals was defined by Paul J. Steinhardt et al. in 1986, but only confirmed in 2015 by Alexey E. Madison’s well-defined substitution algorithm in only three dimensions. This animation aims to explain some of the geometrical concepts behind this more recent algorithm and explore the design potential of the resultant structure. Generative 3D design software serves as a medium to encode recursive mathematical rules and produce new visualizations.