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Chuck Hoberman | |
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 Hoberman mid-description, 2009 | |
| Born | 1956 (age 67–68) |
| Education | Cooper Union (BA) Columbia University (MS) |
| Occupation(s) | Artist, engineer, architect, and inventor of folding toys |
| Known for | Hoberman sphere Hoberman Arch |
Chuck Hoberman (born 1956) is an artist, engineer, architect, and inventor of folding toys and structures, most notably the Hoberman sphere. [1] [2]
Hoberman's father was an architect, and his mother, Mary Ann Hoberman, was a children's book author. [3] He wanted to be an artist from an early age, doing drawing and painting, and eventually taking courses at Cooper Union in New York City. He studied liberal arts at Brown University, and went on to earn a bachelor's degree in sculpture from Cooper Union in 1979, and a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. At some point during his education, he was asked to produce a sculpture that could move. He made a work that unrolled colored plastic sheets on the floor, and he became fascinated with kinetic art. [3] Finishing his formal education, he then went to work for a robotics engineering firm, where he added computer modeling (CAD-CAM) to his skills. [3] After six years, he left to pursue his artistic and technical interests full-time.
The two largest Hoberman spheres are motorized, 5.5–6 m in diameter, and suspended above open rooms in science centers. One is displayed in the AHHAA Science Center in Tartu, Estonia, and the second is displayed in Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Hoberman has designed other folding architectural structures, such as the Expanding Hypar (1997) at the California Museum of Science and Industry; the Hoberman Arch, the centerpiece of the medals plaza for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics; and a retractable dome featured at the World's Fair 2000 in Hanover, Germany. His artwork has been exhibited at international museums including the New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Mycal Otaru Bay in Hokkaidō, Japan.
Hoberman has installed permanent building facades that transform in transparency at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering of Harvard University and the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University. [4] He designed the Hoberman Arch as a centerpiece of Salt Lake City during the 2002 Olympics. It was later moved to Olympic Cauldron Park and then to the Salt Lake City airport.
In July 2011, the rock band U2 concluded a nearly three-year world-wide concert tour (called "360°") that featured Hoberman's expanding video screen, a 3,800 square feet (350 m2) elliptical display that would grow into a seven-story cone. The display weighed 120,000 pounds (54,000 kg), and incorporated 888 LED screens displaying a total of 500,000 pixels. The complex apparatus was successfully transported and reassembled for 110 concerts during that time. [4]
In addition to toys such as the Hoberman sphere, Hoberman created the "Brain Twist", a hard plastic tetrahedron that folds, stellates, and becomes self-dual while having a component that rotates similarly to a Rubik's Cube. Likewise, Hoberman's "Pocket Flight Ring" is a folding, throwable toy resembling a chakram. [5] Hoberman has also created the Expandagon Construction System, a kind of construction toy, [6] and the Switch Pitch, a toy which turns itself inside out when tossed into the air, thus appearing to change colors. [7]
In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art added the Hoberman sphere into its permanent collection. [8] Hoberman won the Chrysler Design Award for Innovation and Design in 1997 and was a finalist for the 2000 Smithsonian National Design Award. He shared the LDI2009 Award for Excellence in Video Design and Technology for the U2360 expanding video screen. [9]
In 2016, he was appointed the Pierce Anderson Lecturer in Design Engineering at Harvard University. [10] In 2018, he received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology. [11]
In 1990, he formed Hoberman Associates. In 1995, he co-founded Hoberman Designs with his wife and business partner, Carolyn Hoberman.
Hoberman has been granted numerous US and foreign patents. These include:
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion", "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
A machine is a physical system that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action. The term is commonly applied to artificial devices, such as those employing engines or motors, but also to natural biological macromolecules, such as molecular machines. Machines can be driven by animals and people, by natural forces such as wind and water, and by chemical, thermal, or electrical power, and include a system of mechanisms that shape the actuator input to achieve a specific application of output forces and movement. They can also include computers and sensors that monitor performance and plan movement, often called mechanical systems.
A truss is an assembly of members such as beams, connected by nodes, that creates a rigid structure.
A Hoberman sphere is an isokinetic structure patented by Chuck Hoberman that resembles a geodesic dome, but is capable of folding down to a fraction of its normal size by the scissor-like action of its joints. Colorful plastic versions have become popular as children's toys: several toy sizes exist, with the original design capable of expanding from 5.9 inches (15 cm) in diameter to 30 inches (76 cm).
A mechanical linkage is an assembly of systems connected to manage forces and movement. The movement of a body, or link, is studied using geometry so the link is considered to be rigid. The connections between links are modeled as providing ideal movement, pure rotation or sliding for example, and are called joints. A linkage modeled as a network of rigid links and ideal joints is called a kinematic chain.
A construction set is a set of standardized pieces that allow for the construction of a variety of different models. Construction sets are generally marketed as toys. One very popular brand of construction set toys is Lego.
An awning or overhang is a secondary covering attached to the exterior wall of a building. It is typically composed of canvas woven of acrylic, cotton or polyester yarn, or vinyl laminated to polyester fabric that is stretched tightly over a light structure of aluminium, iron or steel, possibly wood or transparent material. The configuration of this structure is something of a truss, space frame or planar frame. Awnings are also often constructed of aluminium understructure with aluminium sheeting. These aluminium awnings are often used when a fabric awning is not a practical application where snow load as well as wind loads may be a factor.
The Hoberman Arch was the centerpiece of the Olympic Medals Plaza in downtown Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Olympics. Following the Olympics, the arch was moved to the Salt Lake 2002 Olympic Cauldron Park at the University of Utah where, along with the Olympic cauldron, it was one of the main features and an important part of Salt Lake's Olympic legacy. In August 2014, the arch was removed from the park and placed in storage. The restored arch was placed on display alongside the exit road of the Salt Lake City International Airport in August 2023.
Precast concrete is a construction product produced by casting concrete in a reusable mold or "form" which is then cured in a controlled environment, transported to the construction site and maneuvered into place; examples include precast beams, and wall panels for tilt up construction. In contrast, cast-in-place concrete is poured into site-specific forms and cured on site.
The Integrated Truss Structure (ITS) of the International Space Station (ISS) consists of a linear arranged sequence of connected trusses on which various unpressurized components are mounted such as logistics carriers, radiators, solar arrays, and other equipment. It supplies the ISS with a bus architecture. It is approximately 110 meters long and is made from aluminium and stainless steel.
Girder and Panel Building Sets were a series of plastic toy construction kits created by Kenner Toys in the mid-1950s. Since then, the building sets have gone in and out of production several times, under a succession of different owners of the designs.
Kinetic architecture is a concept through which buildings are designed to allow parts of the structure to move, without reducing overall structural integrity.
Educational toys are objects of play, generally designed for children, which are expected to stimulate learning. They are often intended to meet an educational purpose such as helping a child develop a particular skill or teaching a child about a particular subject. They often simplify, miniaturize, or even model activities and objects used by adults.
Donald E. Ingber is an American cell biologist and bioengineer. He is the founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also a member of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Hanif Mohamed Kara is a structural engineer and is design director and co-founder of London-based structural engineering practice AKT II. He has taught design internationally, is a member of the board of trustees for the Architecture Foundation and was a commissioner for CABE from 2008 to 2011. He is currently Professor in Practice of Architectural Technology at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He also taught as professor of Architectural Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm from 2009 until 2012. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters.
A Hoberman mechanism, or Hoberman linkage, is a deployable mechanism that turns linear motion into radial motion.
The project to create the International Space Station required the utilization and/or construction of new and existing manufacturing facilities around the world, mostly in the United States and Europe. The agencies overseeing the manufacturing involved NASA, Roscosmos, the European Space Agency, JAXA, and the Canadian Space Agency. Hundreds of contractors working for the five space agencies were assigned the task of fabricating the modules, trusses, experiments and other hardware elements for the station.
David Gruber is an American marine biologist, a Presidential Professor of Biology and Environmental Sciences at Baruch College, City University of New York, and a National Geographic Explorer.
Tomohiro Tachi is a Japanese academic who studies origami from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining approaches from the mathematics of paper folding, structural rigidity, computational geometry, architecture, and materials science. His work was profiled in "The Origami Revolution" (2017), part of the Nova series of US science documentaries. He is a professor at the University of Tokyo.
Radar calibration satellites are orbital satellites used to calibrate ground-based space surveillance radars. There are two types: active and passive.
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