#euclidean-construction

Santiago Calatrava, a celebrated Spanish architect, structural engineer, sculptor, and painter, is renowned worldwide for his groundbreaking and futuristic designs, which frequently fuse architecture with engineering and artistry. Among his many notable works is the door design at Ernsting Warehouse in Coesfeld, Germany, constructed in 1985. I call this Calatrava Door because this design showcases Calatrava’s keen sense of functionality and geometry, with aluminum slats arranged vertically and connected along a curved line using hinges. When you raise the frame,…

This is an implementation of the famous Koch Snowflake Fractal in Grasshopper. We will be using the Anemone add-on to handle the iterations. In this fractal, we start from an equilateral triangle. Then, we form new equilateral triangles, one-third of the side. So that each repetition protrudes in the middle of all the sides. In summary; The Preparation for Koch Snowflake Fractal Now let’s follow the Grasshopper application step by step. We start Koch Snowflake Fractal by creating a triangle…

This is a new paper published in Nexus Network Journal. I tried to implement euclidean constructions by compass in the approximation of famous parametric curves; Bézier curves, and B-Splines. Then, I created the algorithms to calculate the number of steps on a compass-only construction of Bézier curves. I developed a simple Python script to simulate the geometric constructions. However, I have been studying this topic for nearly four years. In the future, I wish that it would be a good…

While working on an article today, I wanted to share a method I used. What ancient geometry achieved with just a compass and a straightedge is truly amazing. I’m going to show you how you can use a compass to divide a line into any number of equal parts. This video shows the method of constructing equal segments on a line by only using compass operations. Here, you can see that there is a pattern in the number of required…

I learned this method from the open math resources website. I couldn’t help myself repeat it in Rhinoceros. It was quite fun to solve circle tangency problems in 2D, this is one of them: drawing the circle that passes three given points, not using ready-made commands but only geometric tools of the circle (compass) and ruler (line). Here is the sequence of it: First of all, we need to know that the circle we are looking for is centered somewhere…

Here is a simple explanation of the famous Euclidean Constructions: Why didn’t Euclid just measure things with a ruler and calculate lengths? For example, one of the basic constructions is bisecting a line (dividing it into two equal parts). Why not just measure it with a ruler and divide by two?One theory is the the Greeks could not easily do arithmetic. They had only whole numbers, no zero, and no negative numbers. This meant they could not for example divide…

The first-year Architectural Geometry course includes Euclidean constructions as a study of associative geometry. We have exercised the below questions to study this topic. These are three mutually tangent circles, that can be drawn using only a compass and ruler, without built-in tangency functions in Rhino. Such exercises are expected to improve students’ reasoning. We believe architectural geometry education should encourage a conception that allows students to think about what they are doing and control their process, rather than just…