Article of the month June

Analemmatic sundial
in a bus shelter

A contribution by Niels Welmer

I am a student at Eindhoven University, after having attended a technical college.
Recently I used some information on your web site concerning the design of an analemmatic sundial.
For a project, I designed a bus shelter that doubles as an analemmatic sundial.
I would like to show you the result.

Explanation of the design:
The reason that one must wait at a bus stop is that one is too early or too late.
Time is therefore essential at a bus stop.
This seemed like an interesting basis for a bus shelter.

Actually turning this into a design proved cumbersome, until I found a reference to a Rietveld bus shelter with a mosaic street map.

This prompted me to design a kind of interactivity with waiting people.

I decided to transform an analemmatic sundial into a practical design for a bus shelter.
An analemmatic sundial is a sundial where the observer provides the reading shadow.

The outline is derived from the rising and setting of the sun. The rear wall goes from low to high and back to low, like the sun does.
The choice of materials represents the use man has made of them through the centuries: from stone to wood and, currently, glass.