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.
Because of the global reach of this forum, this thread was discovered by Bader AlBader, an Assistant Professor at the College of Architecture, Kuwait University while researching a paper on Anne Tyng. The paper is published now, though behind a paywall for most. Some in academics may have access through their institution:
Much of the paper and the illustrations in particular brought back memories of her class. One illustration sent me down a rabbit hole of “How would I make that in SketchUp?”
This has to do with what she called 1-1-2 (blue) and 1-2-3 (red) triangles (actually the square roots of those numbers for the lengths), the beginning numbers of the Fibonacci series and occurrence in nature. The tetrahedron is methane and the others are iron crystal structure or something?
I need to do some more research and playing around. Doing a video has long been on my to-do list, but now I have even more to look into.
