Progress after First pin-up

Erich advised me to move forward with modeling the system that is diagrammed here. It is a network of poles and threads made from the connection of multiple unrolled sea urchin maps. Below is my first iteration of what this would look like in a laser-cut paper model.









































Progress in GC. There is only one control point causing the arms to grow and number of points to increase.

Spine movement

Second shell study

This time I molded the entire shell.



Here is the complete shell mapped out. Note the number of broken pieces needed to deal with the flatten curvature.

Shell study & cell division

I am currently using clay to study the unrolled pattern of a sea urchin shell. I wrapped the piece of clay around the north and south pole of the shell in order to see the transition from the two halves of the sphere.













This process revealed something interesting. If the overall shape of the sea urchin is approached on its end, i.e. along its "equator line", it reminds me of the process of mitosis. In particular, it reminds me of the stage of mitosis called anaphase. See below.



The only exception is that the two splitting "cells" are not equal in size. There is a defined hierarchy, just as there is a hierarchy in the longitudinal banding of the sea urchin shell.

I then found this: a study on cell division in sea urchins. It turns out that humans and the purple sea urchin share approximately 7,000 genes. In addition, a sea urchin embryo is clear which allows scientists to use these organisms to better understand the biological process after fertilization or cell division. This discovery seemed strangely coincidental.

Helmholtz resonators

"Grazing sea urchins create reef cacophony"

The ambient underwater noise on rocky reefs becomes a hundred times louder just before dawn and just after dusk. To find out why, Craig Radford and his colleagues at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, recorded the sounds made by individual reef animals in the lab, and then compared them with the dominant sound in the natural reef din.

Listen to a recording of the sea urchins in the lab

They found that grazing sea urchins produced the noise as they scraped algae off rocks. The hard, dome-shaped bodies of the animals act like resonance chambers, amplifying the sound of their chewing (Marine Ecology Progress Series, vol 362, p 37).

The urchins hide in crevices during the day, out of sight from predators, and emerge to feed at dusk. "When they first come out I guess they're hungry, so they're eating with lots of gusto and making lots of munching noises," says co-author Andrew Jeffs. He suggests that the peak in urchin feeding just before dawn may be their "supper", before they tuck themselves back into crevices for the day.

Listen to a recording of the chorus on the reef

This regular noise could even help the larvae of fish and crabs find their way to reefs, says Jeffs, as previous studies have found that some larvae can orient towards sound.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg19926655.200-grazing-sea-urchins-create-reef-cacophony.html?feedId=online-news_rss20

transcribing a sea code

I've decided to proceed with studying the patterning on a sea urchin shell as well as understanding the mechanics behind the creature's locomotion.

Here is my first transcription of a slice across the sea urchin plane. The sea urchin is composed of 5 equal measures like in music. There are only three types of notes, which I picked arbitrarily as F, A and E. The tube feet or podia are the E notes. The podia repeat twice in one measure, in opposite directions. So, they are two variations of E in one octave. (I hope this makes sense.)

Natural Geometry

Fall 2008: Biomimicry Studio

Biomimicry

This studio section will explore the potentials of Biomimicry as a strategy for form finding, program organization as well as the investigation of structural solutions.

Site

The site for this studio is located in the Lower East Side.













Program: Design a YMCA that is particular to the context of the Lower East Side that can roughly be a combination of a community center, a sports facility and contain rental units for temporay guests.