01 · −4 °C
Needles
Warm · thin vapour
Ice runs long and narrow along one axis. Slender spars, barely branched — the fastest, hungriest reach of the six.
CRYSTALLOGRAPHY STUDIO 六花 · six flowers
Weave one, once.
Set a temperature and a breath of vapour on Ukichiro Nakaya's diagram. A single seed of ice threads outward under real crystal-growth rules — needles, plates, sector plates, dendrites — and settles into a six-fold figure the sky has never made before, and never will again.
Nakaya grew thousands of crystals on rabbit-fur filaments in a Hokkaidō cold room and found the shape is a fingerprint of the air. These are the loom's four registers.
Ice runs long and narrow along one axis. Slender spars, barely branched — the fastest, hungriest reach of the six.
Growth fills instead of reaches. A flat, near-solid hexagon — the crystal's calmest, most geometric mood.
Ribs divide each arm into panes. Structure without abandon — a plate that has started to think about branching.
The storybook star. Every arm throws side-branches, and those throw their own — the runaway, fractal register of the loom.
No two, ever — and the loom keeps the same promise.
Each crystal is a real cellular automaton: a hexagonal field of vapour, a single frozen seed, and Reiter's diffuse-freeze-accrete rules stepping outward. Six-fold symmetry isn't painted on — one sixty-degree wedge is woven and reflected twelve ways, exactly as the crystal's lattice does it.
The dials are the physics. Temperature and vapour bend the rules toward one register or another, so the diagram you drag is the same diagram Nakaya drew — a map from a scrap of weather to a shape. Read how the loom was built →