Anne Tyng's Platonic Solids Exercise

Aaron’s video on making a dodecahedron was great and got me inspired to make a SketchUp version of this old, dusty and broken model that’s been sitting on my shelf for years that I often thought about reconstructing in SketchUp:

The model is left over from taking Anne Tyng’s class when I was in architecture school at Penn. She was very interested in platonic solids among other things, and this exercise relates a bunch of them by inscribing them inside each other. We referred to these models as “Tyng Toys,” but technically that phrase was stolen from a series of children’s toys she once designed.

After doing Aaron’s exercise, I turned it up on edge and inscribed the cube inside the dodecahedron. After that the tetrahedron and octahedron were pretty easy. For the icosahedron, I needed to make use of SketchUp’s ability to draw a golden rectangle and then orient three copies perpendicular to each other.

Fun exercise. Thanks for the prompt. Here’s the file saved back to version 2017.

Tyng Toy v1,1|17.skp (206.2 KB)

4 Likes