Diamond Lattice Tower Practice Build

In preparation for the announced JMM build, we worked out some kinks this past weekend with a practice build.

Since the final structure is just shy of 17 feet tall, it was important to have a venue with high ceilings. The Seattle Universal Math Museum has an ongoing partnership with the Georgetown Steam Plant, who generously offered their boiler room. (For fun, you can use their virtual tour to navigate yourself to the boiler room, as featured in the photos below.)

Folks arrived at the Georgetown Steam Plant at 10am to help unload the van, carrying materials up the scaffold staircase in the back of the plant to the second floor boiler room door. Here’s the boiler room after most of the materials had been loaded in:

By about 10:30am, we were all loaded in and began to velcro the half-net hemispheres into Giant Octablocks. (Ironically enough, it was a little cool in the steam plant, so we all wore layers!)

Around 11:30am, the Octablocks were finished. This build required 25 white blocks, 10 yellow blocks, and 7 black blocks.

At this point, it was just a matter of connecting them. The plan was to build smaller component “crystals” and put them together. First we made a lot of double units, connected at a hexagonal face. From there, the steps were roughly as follows:

1. Build the topknot from four yellow-white units (one with the SUMM logo) and a black block.

2. Hoist the topknot onto three white blocks.

3. Build three copies of a shoulder unit, each using two yellow-white units, a white block, and a black block.

4. Connect the three shoulder units into a ring (shown below from a top-down angle):

5. Hoist the augmented topknot onto the shoulder ring.

6. Finally, lift the structure so far onto six leg units.

The build went mostly like this. We added the dowels late into the build and applied the SUMM logo after the topknot was built. Here you can see several of components during assembly:

Here is the stage where the augmented topknot was lifted onto the shoulder ring:

After the final lift, the structure was basically finished around 1:20pm. Since the next step was to disassemble and it stood firmly on its own, we didn’t bother to connect the legs to the shoulder ring:

Since the combining steps took a bit shy of 2 hours, which is the timeframe we need for the JMM Opening Reception, we will velcro all of the blocks together in advance.

The crew ate lunch and posed for a picture before starting disassembly. Jenny Quinn, SUMM’s Executive Director, made a rare photo appearance, since she was behind the camera for most of these photos!

The structure came down much more quickly than it went up. Ryan posed with the last stack of half-nets before taking them out to the van:

We booked the boiler room until 6pm, but we were all packed up and ready to go around 3:45pm.

Thanks again to our volunteer crew, the Seattle Universal Math Museum for their fiscal sponsorship, and the Georgetown Steam Plant for giving us space to build!