Intersections, 2025

Dandelion Sphere No.15 is a 3D print, 6.5 inches on each side, to be shown in Intersections: Math, Art, Truth, Humanity at the Seattle Universal Math Museum in 2025. The museum describes it as five layers of progressively complex polyhedra that branch outward from each vertex to form the next layer. It continues an earlier work, the 2019 Dandelion Sphere, a metre across and built from 3D-printed connectors and wooden moulding strips, which was shown at the 2021 Bridges conference. In that first version the framework grows from a cube core, expanding layer by layer to an outermost Truncated Icosidodecahedron. Reiner, who founded and led the Advanced Geometries Department at Studio Olafur Eliasson before starting protoCtrl in Berlin, developed the underlying method there.

Research:
The geometry is driven by a node-classification algorithm. It finds every set of identical nodes in a wireframe, generates the three-dimensional joint connector each type needs, and accounts for chiral pairs, so a structure of many layers reduces to a manageable set of printed joints. The five layers each add complexity outward from the core.