Tag Archives: sculpture

Somerville Containerhenge

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It’s been a while, but I’m back in town and finally had a moment to post something. Just before I left I had an idea for a large-scale monumental construction based around world shipping and shipping containers. It would be modeled after the Neolithic henges of Britain and Europe, but using container ports and shipping containers as the guiding landmarks and marking stones for the piece. The center of the piece represents Somerville (or, really, any city in the world), and the directions of the 20 largest container ports in the world are marked along their Great Circle directions by containers from the largest international shipping companies. Will this ever be built? I’d love to see it, but I’m not gonna hold my breath.

Click for larger images:

Cover blurb for the Containerhenge concept

Cover blurb for the Containerhenge concept

Schematic layout of the Somerville Containerhenge, to scale.

Deep Time Chronometer

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Several years ago, I became a member of the Long Now Foundation, an organization founded by Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog fame, as well as Brian Eno and various other deep thinkers and futurists. One of the aims of the Foundation is to foster thinking into the concept of “deep time”, or time that extends significantly past a human lifetime. To spark such thoughts, the Long Now Foundation is preparing a site for a clock that will keep accurate time for 10,000 years. A good source for much of this philosophizing is the book Clock of the Long Now. I enjoyed it, I hope you would too.

With that in mind, I came up with an alternative deep-time chronometer, one that is not quite as accurate but could be extended into time quite a ways. I call it my “Millenium Ball Clock”, and I have a little presentation on Vimeo for it.

Large Installation Idea: Matrix of Volumes

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Here’s a large-scale installation concept I have, basically playing with unit lengths of  1, √10 and 10, constructing volumes based around those numbers. This image is a layout shot, with the shading of the blocks corresponding to their depth, light being 1, medium being 3.16, and black being 10.

Matrix of Volumes

3D flybys of this idea, either as pools of water or blocks in the landscape, are available on Vimeo.

Tetrahedra

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Something I’ve been thinking about for well-nigh seven years is creating latticeworks out of tetrahedra, which are four-face pyramids with equilateral triangles for faces. They are the simplest 3D shape in existence, with only four points needed to define.

A Tetrahedron

What a Tetrahedron May Look Like

So far my efforts in this area have been somewhat stymied by construction difficulties. I’ve made some maquettes out of cardboard and hot glue, but the tensile strength of this construction leave something to be desired. I’ve wanted to weld triangles together, but I need to take a class and get metal equilateral triangle stock fabricated. (It’s much harder to get equilateral triangles, in whatever material, off-the-shelf than you would think.) Or I could go with ball-and-rod construction, but, again, I need to learn to weld, or maybe I could use wood-and-glue. But wood-and-glue might be hard to get good angles with.

Anyway, I’m still thinking. I have discovered that a construction with a dihedral angle (the angle between the faces) of 70.53º isn’t easy to make in a 90º world. Tetrahedrons don’t stack or pack very well, either. They don’t line up in orderly rows, and when connected face-to-face they tend to spiral back and interfere with their own growth. They’re very ornery shapes. I suppose that’s why I want to build with them.