Giant Easter Egg

April 8, 2004 2:40 PM

This giant Ukrainian Easter Egg (pysanka) was built in 1975 in Vegreville, Canada by (then) Univ. Utah Computer Science Professor Ronald Resch. Interesting egg factoids can be found here--including that it swivels like a weather vane. Vegreville has an annual festival. More images of egg here. The Vegreville Pysanka was the first physical structure completely designed with computer-aided geometric modeling software. There is a good description here of the complex geometry involved. It's based on a technique (PDF) he developed and patented for folding a flat material (i.e. sheet metal) into flexible surfaces. Ronald Resch has had an interesting career.
posted by lobakgo (6 comments total)

That's really cute. Those crazy Canadians!

Fun post, lobakgo. Just a shame that the Geocities site seems to have died a MetaDeath...
posted by chrismear at 3:50 PM on April 8, 2004

...every summer my family drove out of Edmonton for vacation, and whenever we passed The Egg I knew it meant the trip had only just begun and that I was in for another couple dozen hours in the car....
posted by aramaic at 3:53 PM on April 8, 2004

I asked some friends to check the Geocities links themselves and they're working for them, so hopefully they're okay.
posted by lobakgo at 4:13 PM on April 8, 2004

that first link is one of the most surreal photos I've ever seen.
posted by mcsweetie at 5:57 PM on April 8, 2004

It looks like it was built in 1975.

Man what was that with all the brown?
posted by Blue Stone at 6:08 PM on April 8, 2004

BTW, this came up on last year's Pysanky thread, which has plenty of links to more normal-sized pysanka.
posted by soyjoy at 9:49 AM on April 9, 2004