“The mosque with 60 domes”
The largest mosque among the buildings in the “Mosque City of Bagerhat," a World Heritage Site in Bangladesh, is the Shait Gumbad Mosque (Shait Gumbad Masjid).
The name apparently means “mosque with 60 domes". But in fact, there are 77 domes lined up in 7×11 as shown in the figure, and 81 if you include the domes of the four corner towers. (However, the domes of the center row are rectangle, so I don’t know if I can call it domes.)
Well, how can I make these rows of domes with pop-up cards?
I thought that if I make half of the building, I can express the atmosphere of the building, so I decided to make about half. Let’s make up to 4 rows, which is about half of the 7 rows.
At first, I thought of making a dome like the Noi Gombuz Mosque I made last time, but each dome is so small that it would be impossible to make it the same way.
So I decided to make the card in this way.
The central part of the entire roof is high, so I create domes for each row and make it like the photo.
It seems impossible to express the roundness of the dome one by one, so I glue different parts to express the roundness.
And if I tried to fold the dome without the separate parts, there would be too many thin parts and it would not fold properly. I thought that another part was needed to reinforce the card.
It is troublesome to stick the domes one by one, so I connected each row and cut out the parts. I pasted with woodworking bond.
The left and right towers, I attached another part on the back so that they would stand up when opened, and glued them at three points: the dome at the top, the ground, and the roof of the main body.
Here’s the finished card with all the parts attached. This time I insist, “These are the domes."
I sometimes don’t take photos of cards with different parts attached, with the light shining from the back. However, this time, I think that shooting with light from behind looks better than normal shooting.
Stick the cover paper from the back and check the opening and closing. The pasted parts were reinforced and opened and closed more smoothly than I expected.
Here’s a video showing how it opens and closes.