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-------- Original Message --------
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">Subject: </th>
<td>[Deep-clock] The World's Most Complex Architecture:
Cardboard Columns With 16 Million Facets (FastCo)</td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">Date: </th>
<td>Wed, 2 Mar 2011 19:18:48 -0800</td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">From: </th>
<td>Paul Saffo <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:paul@saffo.com"><paul@saffo.com></a></td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">To: </th>
<td>Design D-List <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:deep-clock@list.longnow.org"><deep-clock@list.longnow.org></a></td>
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<div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica';
font-size: medium;"><font class="Apple-style-span"
color="#000000">Now is this coo</font>l. or what!<br>
</span></div>
-p<br>
<br>
<div><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663306/the-worlds-most-complex-architecture-cardboard-columns-with-16-million-facets">http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663306/the-worlds-most-complex-architecture-cardboard-columns-with-16-million-facets</a><br>
<br>
<br>
Hansmeyer developed his concept by taking a traditional Doric
column and feeding the form into his computer where his
subdivision algorithm could go to work on it.<br>
Photograph courtesy of Michael Hansmeyer<br>
<br>
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src="cid:part10.07020600.00070802@Emsh.CalArts.edu"
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id="c08ab294-4341-4373-aa1d-48de9a519c3e" apple-width="yes"
apple-height="yes"
src="cid:part11.01080200.01020700@Emsh.CalArts.edu"
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id="584a045c-d836-42b4-8f5d-b322a4f8d998" apple-width="yes"
apple-height="yes"
src="cid:part12.08070504.08020201@Emsh.CalArts.edu"
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id="2449bc6f-40a1-4972-bada-f7f5b588486d" apple-width="yes"
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<br>
<br>
Michael Hansmeyer uses algorithms invented by Pixar and
painstaking handicraft to generate columns with dizzying detail.<br>
When people mistake photographs of your physical prototypes for
computer renderings, you know you've achieved something amazing.
That's exactly what happened when Michael Hansmeyer showed off
his "computational architecture" column, created by iterating a
subdivision algorithm over and over again and then fabricating
it out of cardboard.<br>
<br>
Hansmeyer's column stands nine feet tall, weighs about 2000
pounds, and is made out of 2700 1mm-thin slices of cardboard
stacked on top of wooden cores. It contains somewhere between 8
and 16 million polygonal faces -- too complex for even a 3D
printer to handle, according to Hansmeyer. "Every 3D printing
facility we spoke to turned us down," he tells Co.Design.
"Typically those machines can't process more than 500,000 faces
-- the computer memory required to process the data grows
nonlinearly, and it also gets tripped up on the
self-intersecting faces of the column."<br>
<br>
But Hansmeyer's prototype is very real -- in fact, it can even
support weight, and the designer wants to experiment with more
robust materials so that he can actually start building real
structures with his "computational" architectural forms. So how
did Hansmeyer actually get this thing out of his computer and
into the real world? Take a look at this slideshow to find out.</div>
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