are great motivators for finally finishing those models that you haven’t gotten around to. The East Bay Origami Convention was this past weekend, and in addition to teaching my circus elephant, I also had a display with this model that I finally finished the night before the convention.
I’ve had this one floating around in my head ever since I saw George Hart’s Frabjous. It’s made out of 30 identical pieces intertwined as in Frabjous, although the exact shape of the pieces is a bit different, leading to a fairly distinctive end result.
One way of understanding the underlying geometry is to think of each piece as a subset of a rhombic side of the great rhombic triacontahedron, with the subset chosen such that the pieces don’t intersect.
Another strategy for understanding the model is to think of each piece as representing a line connecting opposite vertices of two adjacent pentagons in a dodecahedron. The pieces are then necessarily curved so as to avoid intersecting with each other.
The first strategy is easier if one wishes to design similar pieces. The second is easier to visualize and understand intuitively when looking at the model.
