An Italian Renaissance Palazzo Sand Castle Mold

thingiverse

Not all castles follow the traditional sand castle pattern. And we thought it was time some of the more unconventional historical architectural 'castles' made their way to the beach (and to #BuildACastle )—like the Renaissance Italian 'palazzo' or 'palace.' Blockier and with a single complex bell tower, the base of an Italian palazzo is fairly easy to translate into a sandcastle, but the towers pose an extra-ordinary challenge--one which parallels the original maths and physics feats the original architects dared to take on when they started constructing their versions of castles. This particular sand castle palazzo is modeled after Florence, Italy's central 'Palazzo Vecchio' ('the Old Palace')—a multi-generational feat of esoteric mathematical engineering. A typical sandcastle mold wouldn't allow for the fiddly multi-tier crenelations or the top-heavy tower, so taking a cue from the engineering efforts of bakers, this palazzo's sandcastle mold is done up as a spring form. Each piece is designed as a partial mold, with one side detached and an open bottom, so that the whole can be compressed together and then released without disturbing the final architecture. The base mold features a specially crafted stamp that will carve out the top castle crenelations rather than rely on a traditional mold format. Top tip I learned the hard way while printing sand castle pieces: be sure to print the pieces large enough for the crenelations to work on sand/other materials (approx a half inch of larger). Use the crenelation size as the starting point for the size of the print—even if that means having to print any of the larger mold sizes in multiple pieces. The original model of Palazzo Vecchio that was split to become the various parts of the sand castle 'mold' was crafted from a high resolution, millimeter accurate point cloud of the front of the castle, decimated down to a mesh, and then extruded and manipulated to ensure a variant that would handle the gravitational particulars of working with wet sand. As an educational model, a palazzo sand castle offers students the chances to explore the physics of sand, the mathematics of architecture, and the history of the world's diverse castles.