I dont know if this has a name. It is a kind of tensegrity structure I thought up. ( Though I would imagine other people have made them too ). You can think of it as a tower consisting of separate levels. The whole tower would fit into a cylinder. Each level consists of 5 struts joining the bottom to the top. The bottoms and tops of the struts form pentagons, rotated 1/10 of a circle about eachother. The sides of these pentagons are tension elements ( yes - nylon! ). The tops are also linked to the bottoms by other tension elements. The length of the tension elements divides the length of the struts in the golden ratio. Just like you would find in a pentagon. That basically means each level is similar in shape to the middle part of an icosahedron - ie what you would have left if you remove the bottom 5 and the top 5 triangles.

The end result is 5 helixes held together, and held apart by tension, never touching eachother, but nevertheless stable. It looks particularly pleasing when spinning round in the wind.

This structure has some interesting properties, which it inherits from the fact that it is based on the icosahedron. For instance:

• the angle at the corners joining struts is a right angle.
• the distance between 2 levels is the length of one strut
• there's loads of golden rectangles. ( eg 2 levels height * one pentagon side )
• there's loads of equilateral triangles ( see if you can find them ! )

In some of the pictures below, I have added a red spiral running counterclockwise to the main 5 spirals.

The picture with the TV has a small dodecahedron upon it, with an inscribed cube, which explains the right angles.

And from above...