On the Stanford University campus there’s a large geometric design / structure that they call “the soccer ball”, or “the buckey ball”. There are three of them arranged concentrically — the smallest inside the medium one inside the largest. It is simple, yet also complex, and I like looking at it when I’m there (I was there today).
Here are some pictures of it.
It’s a bit tantalizing, isn’t it?
Once as I was taking pictures a random guy said to me, you should see it at night when it’s lit up, it’s really beautiful. At night the colors change.
So here it is in all its glory and colors and lights at night.
Note the reflections off of the first floor windows:
I include several pictures because I think it’s really pretty.
Per Wiki, the truncated icosahedron is an Archimedean solid, one of 13 convex isogonal nonprismatic solids whose 32 faces are two or more types of regular polygons. It is the only one of these shapes that does not contain triangles or squares. In general usage, the degree of truncation is assumed to be uniform unless specified.
It has 12 regular pentagonal faces, 20 regular hexagonal faces, 60 vertices and 90 edges.
It is the Goldberg polyhedron GPV_(1,1) or {5+,3}_1,1, containing pentagonal and hexagonal faces.
This geometry is associated with footballs (soccer balls) typically patterned with white hexagons and black pentagons. Geodesic domes such as those whose architecture Buckminster Fuller pioneered are often based on this structure. It also corresponds to the geometry of the fullerene C60 (“buckyball”) molecule.
The nesting is reminiscent of some sort of four-dimensional structure, though I don’t think there’s any particular hypersolid that would correspond to that.
Fun fact: If a polyhedron is made up entirely of pentagons and hexagons, then the number of pentagons is exactly 12. Starting with a dodecahedron with 12 pentagons and no hexagons.
