The best platonic solid

In Japan House London, they have lots of nice things. Through the front door, past the designer soy sauce, on a shelf to the right were some paper polyhedra. They are the work of Tomoko Azumi, and you could purchase a little kit to make them yourself. I rather shamefully went home and used ordinary printer paper to build them instead.

They were cute but flimsy replicas, and wouldn’t it be that much better if they were made of metal? UCL has a playground called the Institute of Making, where you can essentially learn any craft and build things. They also have spare parts and scrap materials to use. Up until this point, I had only carved a pencil and complementary wooden cheese block for it to live in. So this was an excuse to do something more sophisticated.

The scrap pile contained a large sheet of copper, which I could pretend was paper and then repeat the construction process. I think the best Platonic solid is the Icosahedron. You can’t glue metal, as far as I knew, so you have to use these mysterious exploding joints to connect the pieces.

These are some gruesome snapshots from an old video.

More recently, I found the work of Max Brückner, which dates to the early 20th century. It seems like he was already on to this sort of thing.