Canon EOS 5D
ƒ/2.8
16 mm
1/15
640
Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
20 responses to “What’s That? (75)”
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I don´t know yet, but I had the automatic feeling this you took it at a museum in spanish (these catalá have the wildest things down there)
oh, now I see the dates… (nice date btw) don´t remember when you were there, but could be.
I´ll pay it a look large.
-muselmusel 😀
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I’m almost certain it is the Sagrada Familia upside down. The architect must have used the strings to model the structure, and it is reflected above to get the effect of how he wanted it seen IRL.
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I found a description of the technique:
"Drawing out the ground plan of the crypt, he hung a string from each point where a column would stand and transmit the thrust of the structure into the foundations. Then he joined the hanging strings with cross strings to stimulate arches and vaults, attaching to each string a little cotton bag of bird shot, carefully weighted to mimic the compressive load on each column, arch and vault. (The load scale was 1:100,000, or a tenth of a gram of lead, a fraction of single pellet of partridge shot, to the kilo.) Naturally, none of the strings in these complicated cats’ cradles hung vertically. All the loads in them were pure tension — the only way string, which has zero resistance to bending, knows how to hang. Gaudi then photographed the string model from all angles and turned the photos upside down. Tension became compression.
No one in the history of architecture had gone about designing a building in this way. The photos of the string models one sees in the little gallery of the Guell crypt may look odd and old-fashioned, like a dotty aunt’s dreams of chandeliers, but they point forward three-quarters of a century to an idea of designing that only computer modeling would make possible (though, alas when the computer did become part of architectural practice, there was no new Gaudi)."
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Bingo Todd with the perfect answer, and nhr for the concept and Alieness for the context. Wow… I go to dinner, and the puzzle squad nails it.
In the era before CAD tools, Gaudi used hanging weights and strings to design his structures. The structure hangs in balance below, and the mirror image above reflects the arches as they would be built, often with no two stones the same.
This exhibit in the basement of Sagrada Familia shows artifacts from Gaudi’s workshop.
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> (though, alas when the computer did become part of architectural practice, there was no new Gaudi)
Let’s wait and see. Zaha Hadid anybody?
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What I love about that technique is the great user interface for understanding how much tension/compression is on each component. I can just see him tugging each string to get a feeling for how much of a strain a new tower put on the different parts of his base.
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@Drift – I’ll keep my eyes on Zaha, her work is certainly interesting and good. I have to admit I am inherently skeptical of post-modern architecture, most of it I find excessively masturbatory and impractical. It can be done well, I love the Stata Center at MIT — a building like that needs inhabitants and culture which are equally chaotic and brilliant. Those inhabitants/culture are rare and a postmodern structure housing banal tasks comes off lame.
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Dang… I missed another one. Congrats to Todd Huffman , TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ and nhr !
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Too bad I was not around this time. It is the first puzzle I miss.
Most interesting! It is actually pretty to look at.
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arriving late: Da Vinci would have loved Gaudi! Brilliant and intuitive problem solving. I thought it was a protein scientists experiment – kinda-like the primitive wood models Watson/Crick used to model DNA structure…wonder if this technique could be used in proteomics…maybe there’s something about tension in the bonds that this would illustrate/solve even better than computer-sim…a stretch, but…
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