Figure 57: John Klein (left) and Alexander Peña de Leon (right) in a Copenhagen hotel at 3 a.m. writing code six hours before the start of SmartGeometry 2011.
7.1 Introduction To be writing code in Copenhagen at 3 a.m. was not an unusual occurrence. We had spent the past week in Copenhagen sleeping only a couple of hours each night as we rushed to get ready for SmartGeometry 2011. It turns out casting plaster hyperboloids is hard, much harder than the model makers from Sagrada Família make it look. And it turns out joining hyperboloids is hard, much harder than Gaudí makes it seem.1 When figure 57 was taken, we were just six hours away from the start of SmartGeometry 2011, and we were all exhausted from days spent fighting with the geometry and each other. So naturally, rather than verify the plaster hyperboloids joined as expected, we went to sleep for a couple of hours. Sleeping is a decision we would come to regret two days later. The workshop was half way through and we had cut the formwork for roughly forty hexagonal plaster hyperboloid bricks, when we realised none of the hyperboloids joined together. Instead of sitting flush against one another, the brick’s wooden sides were angled such that they could only join together if there were slight gaps between the bricks. The error was small (less than 5mm on a brick 450mm wide) but these small errors accumulated through the stacking of the bricks, which caused visible gaps in the upper courses and prevented the topmost courses coming together at all (fig. 58). Without the time to recut the formwork, that single small 1
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The Responsive Acoustic Surface was built to test the hypothesis that hyperboloid geometry contributed to the diffuse sound of the interior of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família. For more information about the rationale for using hyperboloids in the Responsive Acoustic Surface and for more information about the surface’s acoustic properties, see Modelling Hyperboloid Sound Scattering by Jane Burry et al. (2011).