After countless hours of consideration, discussion, and research, we’ve composed a final plan for our tower. We decided to follow the idea mentioned in our previous blog post of merging design elements of the Chinese Tower from the English Garden in Munich with a Tensegrity structure. For the Tensegrity part, we were inspired by the Needle Tower from Washington, D.C. as it looks impressive because it stands almost 27 meters tall, but is also really sturdy. At first, we tried to determine its exact measurements by estimating them with pictures of the tower. This proved difficult though, because the individual sticks decrease in size the higher up they are. So instead, we found an existing 3D model online that looked very similar to the Needle tower and had sticks that were all equal in length. We analyzed this model carefully and quickly recognized a pattern we could theoretically recreate.
Other than the design, we also needed to consider what materials we should use as we had a very strict list of allowed materials to follow. We also wanted to circumvent buying completely new stuff and instead use what we already had at home. Luckily, we had a lot of sticks left over from firework rockets that are perfect for our endeavor as they’re the exact size we were looking for. Other than that we have strings, wires, and toothpicks that we can use.
We’ve already prepared a base plate from wood that we had lying around and even painted it black so that it looks a little more professional.
With nothing in our way now to stop us from working you can expect to see major progress from us soon 😊!
(author: Emilie)