The Ballerina in the Breathing Tower

The Ballerina in the Breathing Tower is a miniature scenic machine, conceived to bring together architecture, movement, and sound within a single paper object. Behind the tower’s apparent severity, a small mechanical theatre is revealed, where the dancer’s motion and the voice of the music box create a scene that is intimate, light, and surprising.

The model is built around a modular RIP system, using removable paper pins and interlocking joints to simplify assembly and maintenance. Its development combined Algodoo for lever geometry, Gear Template Generator for the gears, Metasequoia for 3D design, Pepakura Designer for unfolding, and CorelDRAW for the final graphics. A hand crank drives a worm screw connected to a 30-tooth gear, requiring thirty turns for one complete opening-and-closing cycle. Two successive 30:10 gear stages increase the speed so that the ballerina rotates nine times faster than the main door mechanism. The gear teeth were deliberately simplified to make hand cutting practical while retaining sufficient mechanical efficiency. A small commercial music box is mechanically linked to the system and fitted with a paper gramophone horn that acts as a passive acoustic amplifier. The model can be built with ordinary tools such as a cutter, scissors, ruler, tweezers, scoring tool and standard paper adhesives. The project is accompanied by detailed 3D illustrated assembly instructions, available in both English and Italian.