Tuesday, January 27, 2009

fibonacci spiral

i have built, painted and installed three shelves for the freshly painted room. the narrow shelf had to be mounted using toggle bolts since there were no studs to support the shelf. i use the old timey kind that have a spring and open in the wall like a butterfly.

you have to drill kinda large holes in the walls but the result is normally very sturdy.

the final shelf needed to be large and look nice. we had a standard shelf there before that i'd re-purposed which looked kinda crappy. i decided that i needed to design something to exactly fit the intended space in a balanced fashion. i also thought i might like it to have an asian flair. having never designed any structures intentionally before i struggled to find inspiration. i really like phillip stark but he's way out of my caliber. i remembered, probably from some PBS special, that there is a magical proportion for rectangles and it has something to do with rectangles spiraling like a nautilus. a little google-foo later and i found the fibonacci spiral.

after spending far too much time in adobe illustrator and trying to turn that thing into shelves. i decided to steal the basic rectangle and move on.

i nested the rectangles and added recessed staggered shelves in the two fibonacci rectangles. here is what i have so far.

don't mind the messy garage.

i'll sand, fill, paint and mount it later.

9 comments:

Woody said...

Nice work Karl...that is a very handsome design. I know now what you have been doing while all the ice is building up around ya'll. Stay safe and warm.

peace

Matt said...

Do you serve fibonacci spirals with a marinara sauce or alfredo sauce?
BTW, cool boxes!

warren said...

Very cool! Good work. The spiral is neat but you can't really stack stuff on a curve too well! I dig the rectangles!

Anonymous said...

I'm a bit jealous of that shelving unit... Beautiful!

Wendy said...

Wow! That looks awesome! Almost like an optical illusion. I wish I'd commented more quickly on your "share the love" post. I'd want one of those :).

And here I thought I was doing well with my one shelf installation over the window in my freshly painted room ... :).

Danielle said...

That looks really nice! I did not shovel the drive, it is crazy long and we paid someone to do it!

syncbox said...

The golden mean/section/ration or sometimes called the "divine proportion" as defined by the number pi (or phi). I think the proportions are 1 to 1.6 or something like that or... to put it another way - the point where you divide one of two equal lines so that the ratio of the second part to the first part is the same as the first part to the second line.

DaVinci and all the great artists used it in their work. Nice work, Karl and very pleasing to the eye!

Beachbum said...

Nice! Thanks for the drawing, too. Someday I'm going to use it... I like that you mentioned PBS - good to know others get ideas there, too!

white_lilly said...

I Love it! What a craftsman...nice job.

Can't wait to see it painted and mounted :)

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