About

New Tools Lab is a teaching arts and science collaborative based out of New York City. We’ve developed an integrated building system for experiencing structure. Our system allows you to model all the known simple structures and to understand their relationships to one another.

The models are made from poster board, tape and rubber cement. Once made, they work like dimensional puzzles that you can take apart and put back together. In the process, all sorts of things can be learned. One of the biggest ‘aha’ moments comes from realizing that what we’ve been studying separately, as this shape or that structure, are actually part of a single network or matrix.

Even more revealing is the process of building the models themselves. Drawing the grids and building the basic pieces shows the persistence and versatility of the matrix’s modular and self-organizing properties.

Roots & Accuracy

R. Buckminster Fuller had a huge impact on the development of the New Tools Building System. Our work sits at the intersection of his opus Synergetics 1 and 2, Keith Critchlow’s Order in Space and the idea of self similarity from fractal geometry.

The New Tools System essentially acts as a solution to the visualization and modelability problems brought about by Synergetics 1 and 2. The system unifies the tetrahedral and closest packing geometries in to one modeling system mathematically accurate to one billionth of a millimeter with a twelve place calculator. It does so using only basic arithmetic: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division (including squares and square roots of numbers). This allows even beginners the ability to accurately start building, exploring and making discoveries.

Since a scale number had to precipitate tuning the matrix to a realizable hand held modeling system, we chose the ping pong ball. The ping pong ball offered itself obviously and uniformly over to our closest packing models because it’s globally standardized and available everywhere at a reasonably low cost. Thus the entire system, as we’re conveying it, is tuned to the two centimeter radius of the regulation ping pong ball.

The beauty of the matrix, is that it can be tuned to any scale number. Once you understand the basic calculations and relationships, you can build or calculate by entering any number.

Think about it like a spider web where, when one part changes they all change. So if one spindle section goes from two centimeters to four centimeters then the whole web changes in unison. This is the way the structural matrix works and why learning about it could be a useful tool.

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