Children's Play Structure

This kaleidoscape will sit in the children’s play area outside the Makers Paradise art gallery in Reno, Nevada.  It will be just under seven feet high and will sit on a 7’ x 7’ footprint. In the reflections, it will create a 24-sided polyhedron. The doorways will reflect into eight hexagonal pyramids and the cutout on the third side will reflect into six square pyramids.  The cutout at the apex will reflect into a 24-sided polyhedron. The children will feel as if they are inside a 16 foot diameter ball with the 24-sided polyhedron created by the apex floating at the center.

View inside the pyramid at floor level. On the left you can see the array of 14 buttons that can be pushed to play different notes.

The diamond shaped panel with the colorful round buttons in the corner of the space is actually a control panel. Pressing one of the buttons will cause a musical note to play and will also cause a light near the apex to light up. These lights are not currently shown in the model. The fourteen buttons on the panel represent the twelve tones of the scale plus a major chord and a minor chord, so children will be able to make music by pressing the different buttons.

There will be a staircase on the outside of the structure so that children can climb up and look inside the pyramid-shaped window partway up the wall (not shown in the current model). When someone is looking in the window, people inside the structure will see their face sitting inside an octahedron. There will appear to be 12 of these octahedra floating inside the space, centered around the apex. You can see some of them in the image to the right - they are the pale turquoise crystal shapes.

View inside the pyramid looking toward the apex. A reflection of the pyramid-shaped window can be seen slightly above and to the right of the reflections of the sky coming from the apex.