about pods and panel structures
I’ve always been an admirer of plywood, starting with my first career in concrete construction, where we used it for the forms. The best quality plywood was Finland Form, still being produced today. With other countries now also producing structurally identical material, Euro Ply, Baltic Birch, and Euro color ply are also names currently associated with it. The unique quality it has is that it is made from all Birch plies, and Birch is a hardwood. Consequently it is much stronger (4 times) than conventional plywood. I used it on a large cubic panel play structure assembly in 1972 and I’ve never looked back. The play structures evolved into a complex of pods geometrically “fully truncated rhombic dodecahedrons“ which include 12 silver rhombic faces (diamond faces shaped in a ratio on 1 to the square root of two) and has angles between their faces of 120 degrees all around allowing it to be space filling. The panels are centered in the diamond faces and the connectors cross what would be the diamond edges at 90 degrees. The Playgoda, the best play structure I could do, was completed in 2007. In 2011 it morphed into the Otic Oasis series. a pod and node hybrid which also included the Man Base Pistil 2012, the Temple of Whollyness 2013 and the Otic Way 2014, all at Burning Man, Black Rock City, Nevada.
Several solid sheet panel structures were built between 2006 and 2010 that were eclipsed by the bubble domes. A new system, they included curving birch plywood ribs orthogonally arranged in spherical form.