In the interest of reducing production and construction costs, architects have been fascinated by simulating dwellings using geometric shapes. Along with modern tessellated patterns, the fundamental links between architecture and geometry are deep rooted; circles, triangles, golden rectangles are all part of a compositional repertoire since the beginning of a formalized academic education and earlier as vernacular building approaches used geometry to anchor buildings. Modernism’s thirst for newness emphasized geometry as part of systemic solutions with grids and modular shapes in tune with the rhetoric of industrialized construction.
Buckminster Fullers’ use of the octet truss and icosahedron, Zvi Heckers personal brand of modular geometry along with Gerard Caris’ deployment of regular pentagons all undertook the challenge of demonstrating efficient spatial organizations from unit-shapes. Caris’ aggregated dodecahedrons embraced the same conceptual undertones of the megastructure movement along with modernism’s obsession with manufacturable units into an exponential multiplication of unique housing landscapes.
Dodecahedrons are composed of twelve regular pentagons with 5 equal length segments. The Pentagonism explored by Dutch artist Gerard Caris in the 1970s as sculptural form, patterned the same massing geometry as architecture. Juxtaposed sliced half solids could be set on any flat surface and used as an autonomous shelter or clustered in a radiating pattern of rooms by matching their planar surfaces. Unique in their underlying shapes, Caris' experimental models remained conventional in their planning articulated to a two-dimensional separation of day and night spaces which filled the volumes without exploring either their spatial or geometric potential to develop innovative interior architecture.
Marginally applied, these geometric experiments showcase a representational obsession of fractal and serial artistry. The seemingly simple to arrange shapes and their mathematical connectability proved awkward articulated to overly complex juxtaposition details suggesting spaces that are difficult to inhabit. Unlike Fuller’s octet truss based on equilateral triangles to simplify a structural complexity with a robust shape, pentagons implied a flatness and planar fields that when constructed with conventional means bring no structural advantages and remain an experiment in textural form rather than structural or architectural form.
Half dodecahedrons set flat on any site
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