Simon Starling & Superflex

In connection with Simon Starling & Superflex. e.g.

A cross-departmental, pan-Styrian, polyphonic project directed by Simon Starling and Superflex, with Super Eggs by Piet Hein designed in light of a mathematical formula by Gabriel Lamé set within a museum founded by Arch Duke Johann of Austria following an elliptical epiphany by Johannes Kepler.

As it navigates across Styrian time and space the Super Egg finds itself in the planetary room of the Eggenberg Castle. The design for this cosmic castle was based on the logic of Johannes Kepler’s Grazian epiphany of 1595 that led him to what he believed to be the Universe’s divine geometry and one year later to the publishing of his book Mysterium Cosmographicum. Kepler pursued this thinking by attempting to establish the orbit of Mars and in early 1605, after approximately 40 failed attempts, he at last hit upon the idea of an elliptical orbit. Finding that this idea matched the Mars data he had gathered, he immediately concluded in his First Law of Planetary Motion, that all planets move in ellipses around the sun.

Some 354 years later, in 1959, city planners in Stockholm, Sweden were struggling with the design of a roundabout in their newly constructed modernist urban development, Sergels Torg and decided to announce a design competition. Surprisingly perhaps, the winning proposal came from a little known Danish mathematician Piet Hein. A former student of the physicist Nils Bohr, Hein conceived of a roundabout based on an even more complicated elliptical formula, the Superellipse – this mathematical halfway-house between a square and a circle inviting the cars to move around Sergels Torg in newly cosmic order. By further rotating a Superellipse around its longest axis, Piet Hein then created the Super Egg, a solid egg-like form that could miraculously stand upright.

Design by PIET HEIN © Piet Hein A/S Denmark
SUPERELLIPSE® Piet Hein A/S Denmark