Truncated Octahedron

The 14-faced Archimedean solid Fuller named the "mecon."

The truncated octahedron is an Archimedean solid with fourteen faces, comprising eight regular hexagons and six squares. It carries the Schläfli symbol t{3,4} and is catalogued as a uniform polyhedron under several standard indexing systems. Its dual polyhedron is the tetrakis hexahedron.

Within Buckminster Fuller's vocabulary of geometry, the truncated octahedron was known as the "mecon" (as recorded by Rawles, 1997). Fuller's interest in such forms flowed from his broader project of describing nature's structural and space-organizing principles through polyhedral geometry, where solids of this kind serve as building blocks of energetic and space-filling systems.

The truncated octahedron is notable geometrically because it is one of the space-filling polyhedra, tiling three-dimensional space without gaps, which made it a natural object of study for a thinker preoccupied with the most efficient packing and enclosure of space.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
• Synergetics (Synergetics) — Fuller's geometry of nature's coordinate system

Sources

• Truncated Octahedron (Wolfram MathWorld)