On 12 Apr 2014, at 20:01, threeneurons wrote: > I know. Its just that it popped out, when I went to eBay, yesterday. They > want over $400, for a pair of relatively small speakers, that can't possibly > have sound to match that price !
As a designer of more years than I care to admit, I see archetypal shapes that appear and reappear over the years and slicing a cylinder at oblique angles is one of these ideas and the example of Threeneurons' is excellent work. The tube on a stand is something else entirely. Apples and pears. I used to study slicing the platonic solids and crystallography to get the fundamental basics of geometry to see what places I could go with 3D solid structures. I originally trained as an architect, but product design is way more interesting to me. Many of the things I used to dream up have now come to fruition. The book that most influenced me was Keith Critchlow's, "Order in Space - a design source book", which I am happy to see is still in print. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Order-Space-Design-Source-Book/dp/0500340331. Keith was a lecturer at London's Architectural Association, which is not the kind of architectural association you might imagine, a trade body of some kind, but a highly regarded school of architecture. I believe Keith only had/has one eye, so perhaps this led to his deep interest in geometry in making sense of a 3D world he could not see well for himself. He discovered a new single space-filling solid (it is in the book) which attracted the admiration of Buckminster Fuller. I thought that the five platonic solids were the only ones that could be formed from equal sided convex shapes until my father, a PhD geologist, told me I was talking a crock of nonsense and gave me a book on crystals, featuring some skewed solids that had 'handedness', yet were made from one size and shape of polygon with equal length sides. I was fascinated by it all. Philosophically the harmony of the spheres and geometry became to me like a religion, full of wonder and beauty and amazement. I think mathematicians see much of this in the property of numbers, but I am personally too stupid to comprehend them. In recent years I have found Catmull-Clark and to a lesser extent Doo-Sabin subdivision surfaces to be the most innovative development in 3D design that I have seen happen in millennia. At last we have a way of taming accurately dimensioned compound curved surfaces in 3D in a coherent and predictable way, resolution independent in that they can be subdivided again and again making it purer and purer. The proliferation of products today we see with pleasing curves rather than angles is testimony to our new ability. It takes a whole new mindset to design with subdivision surfaces. In the days when we all had to draw at the drawing board on flat paper, with set squares and pens, it was no wonder that hard angles predominated. It would take ages to accurately plot and draw intersections of tubes, or a slice across a tube, in plan and two elevations. We tended to think in the ways that we could convey our concepts in flat drawing form, unless we could sculpt it rather than draw it. But engineering people wanted flat drawings to work from, not a lump of something physical. "Yes, but where are your drawings?" they would cry. We can now all model in 3D convincingly and accurately. Then we can add bones and animate our meshes. Texture it up, add some particle effects and physics and everyone is their own Pixar. John S -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/C6173D50-60F5-4F63-8C1B-4AAE5BA5C5BE%40jsdesign.co.uk. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
