If you expand an icosahedron by moving the faces away from the origin the right amount, without changing the orientation or size of the faces, or do the same to its dual dodecahedron, and patch the square holes in the result, you get a rhombicosidodecahedron. Therefore, it has the same number of triangles as an icosahedron and the same number of pentagons as a dodecahedron, with a square for each edge of either.
Alternatively, if you expand each of five cubes by moving the faces away from the origin the right amount and rotating each of the five 72° around so they are equidistant from each other, without changing the orientation or size of the faces, and patch the pentagonal and triangular holes in the result, you get a rhombicosidodecahedron. Therefore, it has the same number of squares as five cubes.
Two clusters of faces of the bilunabirotunda, the lunes (each lune featuring two triangles adjacent to opposite sides of one square), can be aligned with a congruent patch of faces on the rhombicosidodecahedron. If two bilunabirotundae are aligned this way on opposite sides of the rhombicosidodecahedron, then a cube can be put between the bilunabirotundae at the very center of the rhombicosidodecahedron.
The rhombicosidodecahedron shares the vertex arrangement with the small stellated truncated dodecahedron, and with the uniform compounds of six or twelve pentagrammic prisms.
The Zometool kits for making geodesic domes and other polyhedra use slotted balls as connectors. The balls are "expanded" rhombicosidodecahedra, with the squares replaced by rectangles. The expansion is chosen so that the resulting rectangles are golden rectangles.
Twelve of the 92 Johnson solids are derived from the rhombicosidodecahedron, four of them by rotation of one or more pentagonal cupolae: the gyrate, parabigyrate, metabigyrate, and trigyrate rhombicosidodecahedron. Eight more can be constructed by removing up to three cupolae, sometimes also rotating one or more of the other cupolae.
