Is there a basic geometric unit?
The patented building system is applicable as an assembly structure of custom-made, prefabricated building elements as well as a kit of mass-produced building elements.
Assembly sets make irregularly triangulated free-form-envelopes possible while a kit needs a basic geometric shape and principle. Only a kit will be described here.
For a kit, so-called "zomes" are very suitable. A zome - invented in the nineteen-sixties by Steve Baer - is a zonohedral dome. Baer has developed a structural system of struts and nodes, which he has tested by prototypes, and which is available today as an educational toy produced in series.
A zome has structural similarities to the quasicrystals discovered not before the nineteen-eighties. Quasicrystals do not have a solid global grid like crystals, but merely local symmetries. A zome is formed of zonohedra or fragments of them. Zonohedra are convex polyhedra of lozenge-shaped faces.
Zonohedra and Zomes are characterised by groups of lozenges with parallel edges forming zones, which can be removed or added to make the structure grow or shrink. The irregularity and their partial symmetries produce mental associations to structures in living nature - in contrast to the "real" crystals.
On the borders of a zonohedral shell structure, the lozenge-shaped faces can be cut in half or in quarters in order to get on these cuts flat oblong horizontal faces lying upon a ground plane - or flat oblong vertical faces adjacent to a vertical wall. Furthermore, Zomes can be extended or changed by additional faces having other shapes than a lozenge.
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