FINITE AND INFINITE POLYHEDRA AND SPONGE SURFACES AND THEIR APPLICATIONS TO ARCHITECTURE, SPACE STRU
- DANIEL BURT
- Nov 27, 2016
- 1 min read
sponge-like labyrinthian, polyhedral, space dividing surfaces, until quite recently were not even considered as a research topic.
Nature is saturated with sponge structures on every possible scale of physical-biological reality. The term was first adopted in biology: "Sponge: any member of the phylum Porifera, sessile aquatic animals, with single cavity in the body, with numerous pores. The fibrous skeleton of such an animal, remarkable for its power of sucking up water". (Wordsworth dictionary).
Of course the term applied to 'spherical sponges'. It turns out that the key characteristic of porosity is attributable to a much wider morphological phenomenon.
With time the expressions: sponge, spongy, sponginess, spongeous', were adopted in many languages to describe a physical phenomenon which is characterized by porosity and visual permeability and the condition of a lump of matter which, as a result of biological-chemical-physical processes of erosion-corrosion, growth and death, acquired its characteristic porosity. Numerous examples in the surrounding nature, on the microscopic and the macroscopic scale, carry a testimony to the abundance of the phenomenon: microscopic radiolaria bones, eroded rocks and gigantic cave labyrinths. Slowly but steadily we are becoming aware that the sponge phenomenon is basic and dominant on the nano-scale of the big protein molecules and according to Stephen Hawking, also on the macro-cosmic (black-holes) scale.
An excerpt from an article by Professor Emeritus Michael Burt:
PERIODIC SPONGE SURFACES AND UNIFORM SPONGE POLYHEDRA IN
NATURE AND IN THE REALM OF THE THEORETICALLY IMAGINABLE
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