This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

Wired has an essay on the by PTW Architects. Some interesting quotes:

“Our engineers became obsessed with the concept of bubbles,” says PTW project director John Bilmon. Combing through existing literature on the structure of bubbles and foam, PTW and Arup discovered an old physics problem originally elaborated by Lord Kelvin in the 19th century that concerns the most efficient method of subdividing space in equal-volume cells. Kelvin proposed that the answer involved identical geometric bubbles. But in 1994, Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan, physics professors at Trinity College, did one better by finding a more efficient way of subdividing space with a foam that used two bubbles of equal volume but different shape. That mathematical foam became the basis for the Water Cube.

Read more and see additional photos on Flickr.