Mechanical magician Chuck Hoberman makes ever bigger creations that get smaller all the time.
Chuck Hoberman is 35 feet high inside the atrium of Los Angeles's California Science Center. He instructs the crane operator to move the bucket in which he's standing close to the iris of his invention: a 5,000-pound expandable sculpture that's a cross between a gigantic, twisted spider web and a six-pointed star. The expanding hyperbolic paraboloid, or Hypar, as he calls it, is suspended by steel cables mounted in the walls, floor, and ceiling of the court.
The crane's arm is now completely outstretched and the bucket is bobbing up and down precariously. Hoberman doesn't appear to care or even notice. He pulls an oversize dentist's mirror from his pocket and sticks it into the small central opening of the Hypar. With only days remaining until the Science Center's February opening, Hoberman is methodically squashing the few remaining bugs that have been preventing the Hypar, the new museum's central objet d'art, from working smoothly. After making an adjustment with a tool, he is brought back down to the floor.
"Want to see it operate?" Hoberman asks. He opens an access panel on a refrigerator-sized Plexiglas box full of motors and microprocessors and punches a code on a keypad. The Hypar, which is about 15 feet in diameter, smoothly and silently begins to blossom. Each of the thousands of curved struts, made of machined aircraft alloy, silently pivots on a scissor joint, opening the adjacent struts, until the contraption has expanded to a diameter of 50 feet. The program then reverses the operation of the winches, and the Hypar exhales, shrinking back, back, back to its smaller dimensions. Throughout its transformation in size, the Hypar retains its form.
The few people in the area - mainly security guards and construction workers - have stopped what they're doing and are watching the Hypar breathe. The workers see a dizzying assembly of metal parts conspiring to move as one fluid entity.
Hoberman, too, studies his creation. But he sees something different, something beautiful. He sees an object that is disappearing.
Arms akimbo, head cocked toward his sculpture, starkly minimalist clothes draped across a lean figure of angles and joints, with cropped orange hair and a deadpan expression of supreme confidence, engineer and artist Chuck Hoberman comes off as a latter-day Howard Roark. Like Ayn Rand's fiercely independent architect, he is obsessed with a vision that mere mortals cannot comprehend.
The Hypar is the latest realization of that vision. An elegant geometric assembly, its vectors of tension and compression working effortlessly together to maintain graceful equilibrium, it serves no obvious purpose other than as a work of kinetic art. But its defiance of our expectations - we assume automechanical objects will move like conveyor-belt ducks in a shooting gallery, not fool the part of our brains that distinguish the living from the nonliving - hints at its creator's fixation. This mechanism is possessed with deceptive animality, but it's impossible to locate its trick. Like people in the 19th century who saw a steam engine for the first time and wondered how the horses were able to fit inside the cylinders, one can't help but search the Hypar for a camouflaged secret. Yet Hoberman hasn't hidden anything. Instead, he's made that part of the Hypar invisible.
Chuck Hoberman, 42, is a man obsessed with disappearance, hiding, transformation. He's invented a two-person tent that pops open and snaps shut, a stadium dome that dilates like a pupil, a briefcase that folds down to the size of a book, medical instruments that extend and retract, a Frisbee-like disk that collapses to pocket size, and dozens of other transformable devices. Each of the inventions, based on one or more of his five patents, is an answer to the question he's asked himself every day since 1984: How can I make an object disappear?
Currently, he is answering that question by designing and creating gigantic unfolding structures for museums; inexpensive, plastic, miniature unfolding structures for toy stores; and, for a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company called Molecular Geodesics, microscale unfolding structures for potential use on new materials and medical devices. At every scale of human perception, Hoberman wants, as he puts it, to infiltrate the functional world with unfolding structures. Because they can be useful as space savers - a million-dollar gimmick for late-night infomercials? No. Simply because Hoberman believes such devices are magical and beautiful.
His fascination with disappearance extends past his structures into almost everything he does. The logo of his toy company, Hoberman Designs, is a drawing of Hoberman in a suit and tie, with glasses and bright orange hair, but without facial features or even an outline of a head. The invisible man. A magician.
Like any magician, Hoberman is surrounded by props - his bag of tricks, he calls them. Chief among them are his toys. Hoberman's toys are easily distinguished from other children's notions, if only by their package descriptions. His Mini Sphere, for example, is based on the "intersection of a cube and an octahedron, which makes a folding polyhedron called a trapezoidal icositetrahedron."
Even with this technical explanation, the toy sphere's mystery remains locked within its process of transformation. It grows. It shrinks. Yet open and close it over and over again and you still can't tease the answer out of its plastic struts and joints. I examined the motion of each piece in relation to the other, hoping to get a picture of how the whole works from the sum of its parts. After an hour, I gave up and called Bill Record, a mechanical engineer who has worked on Hoberman's designs for thousands of hours and has assembled and installed all of his major projects. I hoped he might be able to give me a nice, neat layperson's explanation of the secret behind the unfolding objects. "I don't have a clue," Record told me. "I just make 'em."
Hoberman's journey down the road toward invisibility began 20 years ago. With a degree in fine art from Cooper Union in New York, he worked with conceptual artist Vito Acconci on projects such as Decoy for Birds and People, a mechanical sculpture made of ladders that seesawed through the windows of a Manhattan building.
Hoberman, who says he's long been entranced by structural art, beautiful structures, and mechanisms, linkages, and different types of machines, always knew he wanted to create complex mechanical art. He'd been influenced by the pioneering work earlier this century of the Dadaists and of the Constructivists, whose clean design and use of industrial materials appealed to the inventor in him (a title he prefers to artist or engineer). He was intrigued, especially, by the creations of Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, who created kinetic artworks in the early 1920s and who, like Hoberman, wanted to market his works to a broader public as perceptual novelties. Equally captivating were Duchamp's contemporaries, including Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, who invented machines that had no function other than to pump and chug in an exercise in futility.
But these artists used well-known physical phenomena to express an artistic message. Hoberman wanted his art to be about discovery and invention. Aware that his lack of formal mathematics and physics training was holding back his artistic explorations, Hoberman enrolled at Columbia University, 108 blocks north of Cooper Union, and took a master's degree in mechanical engineering.
Immersed in an engineering environment, where computers were an essential part of the design process, Hoberman noticed a startling difference between a design on the screen and the real-world object that resulted. On a computer screen, a part can be easily translated, stretched, twisted, flattened, and shrunk. Once the object is built, however, its transformational capabilities are frozen.
"Binary code can represent a very full gamut of images and experiences," Hoberman says. "I wanted to update the mechanical vocabulary into the media/electronic age." His goal was for viewers to look at his structures and sense they were looking at a computer graphic. In Hoberman-speak, he wanted to build a bridge between the hyperactive electronic media and the static built environment.
The challenge was still fresh in his mind when he took a job at Honeybee Robotics, a small New York City firm specializing in building automation systems that include industrial robots. By day, Hoberman designed processes that incorporated computer vision and remote control. By night, he cobbled together Rube Goldberg contraptions with components scrounged from the junk stores lining Canal Street. The devices he built were, to him, unsatisfactory because they required too many supplementary, peripheral mechanisms to make them fold up. These failed experiments made him realize that in order to make an object fold and unfold in a beautiful way, he would have to integrate the mechanism that controlled the structures into the structures themselves. In other words, the mechanism would have to disappear into the device.
He put aside pulleys, cogs, and pistons and started working with much simpler materials: sheets of paper and plastic, which could be folded and unfolded like origami. Hoberman still keeps his early paper experiments packaged neatly together in a handmade cardboard box. He brings the box with him, along with other props, whenever he travels. The little pleated bundles can be transformed into curvy, corrugated 3-D shapes by gently pulling on their corners. Just as beautifully, a gentle push sends them back into their original bundled shapes. Unlike Hoberman's klugey Canal Street devices, the paper models were designed so that their own structural integrity transmitted the necessary forces to make them open and close.
The paper experiments transformed Hoberman's understanding of his challenge and his art. The easier it was to unfold a model, the more interesting it was, he recalls. Which is to say, anybody can take a piece of paper and fold it in half and fold it in half again and again and again, making it quite compact, but the process of doing that looks pretty silly - opening and closing the structure is clumsy and repetitive. "So," Hoberman says, "the question became, Could I transform a very simple motion - for example, my hands moving apart - into a complete three-dimensional transformation?"
As subsequent designs became more complex, he wrote Basic programs on his 128K Macintosh to compute the angles of his models and to draw and shade his renderings in three dimensions. He could define what the tiling pattern on a flat sheet of paper would be, and the program could calculate what would happen if he introduced one fold, and how everything else would then have to shift to accommodate that. Whenever he came up with a structure that showed potential, he'd pull out his construction materials and build it. He'd use the feedback from physically assembling an object to refine the computer model. Hoberman looks back almost nostalgically on these antediluvian days. It was a rich area to mine, and yet the cost of doing it was nil - just a PC, paper, and an X-Acto blade.
One day at Honeybee Robotics, he learned from a client about an engineering field called deployable structures - objects, including parabolic dish antennas, solar panels, and extended booms with sensors on them, that can be folded into a tight package and stowed in the cargo bin of a space shuttle to be released in orbit, where they unfold themselves. Deployables struck a chord with Hoberman. In the world of mechanism design, the process of folding and unfolding was secondary to the importance of the object. By contrast, the idea of deployability is at the core of what space artifacts are designed to achieve.
For someone obsessed with disappearance, it was a dream gig. Which is how Chuck Hoberman, East Village artist, found himself working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Hoberman's NASA contract, secured through Honeybee, was to design a large, foldable machine in which the mechanism that unfolded the structure was also part of the structure itself. His design - never built - contained no superfluous parts and was able to fold up into a cylindrical package one-fifth as wide as the deployed reflector.
But Hoberman's great epiphany came later. While attending a lecture on an unrelated subject, he envisioned a series of slightly curved scissor joints. Each end of one of the scissor halves was connected to another scissor half, so that when a long series was linked together, a circle formed. In his mind's eye, Hoberman saw that this design could smoothly fold up from a large circle into a small circle. It was, he thought, beautiful.
The way in which an object transforms in size or shape is crucial for Hoberman. If it doesn't open smoothly, it is not beautiful. Beauty, Hoberman says, is the result of a highly mysterious relationship between mathematics, nature, and our minds. He recalls a speech given by mathematician Roger Penrose: "He drew a three-part picture. Out of a person's mind comes mathematics. Out of mathematics comes nature, which is governed by mathematics - whatever governed means. But out of nature, the person comes, because we're all part of a biological web."
The unfolding structures that Hoberman invents are a boiled-down-to-the-essence demonstration of the mathematical principles that govern this biological web of nature. And because nature appeals to people, the symmetries and transformations of Hoberman's unfolding structures hold the same attraction. People are mesmerized by his Hypar and his Mini Sphere not because they appreciate the mathematical formulae and relationships behind them (it's hard to remember one's Fibonacci numbers when admiring how leaves spiral up a flower stem), but because of the way mathematics is expressed in such actions.
Hoberman uploaded his epiphany onto his computer and determined that the design was viable. Using cardboard and grommets, he constructed a small model of an expanding sphere. Next, he scraped up his savings and hired Bill Record, who was then Honeybee's machinist, to build a metal version of the sphere.
Hoberman and Record are like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: They each have a side that is the exact complement of the other. Hoberman is dapper and lanky, the consummate sharp-creased industrial designer. Record, 10 years his senior, is grizzled and gruff, wears overalls and an engineer's cap, and has a gray beard halfway down his belly. Hoberman lives in Manhattan and hangs with artists and architects. Record, who used to run a trans-African motorcycle-safari business, lives in the woods of upstate New York and has a shop full of computer-controlled milling machines. He calls his company Zengineering. (When asked how he came up with the title, he says, "Brain fart, I guess.")
After Record machined all the struts on Hoberman's first aluminum sphere and drilled 13,000 holes - a number he never lets Hoberman forget - to lighten the structure, he filed off the burrs and Hoberman assembled the piece. It worked: The ball expanded seamlessly from an 18-inch diameter to 6 feet across.
The completion of the sphere also marked a curious transition for Hoberman. An artist who learned engineering to further his art, he now began thinking of himself as a robotics engineer. In 1990, he formed Hoberman Associates and approached architects, toy companies, and museums.
His first break came during an exhibit at his alma mater, Cooper Union, where Hoberman's retrofuturist mechanisms were featured in their own room. Two administrators from the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey, saw the 6-foot, 12-pound sphere and asked Hoberman to propose something for the center. He suggested building a structure three magnitudes larger than the Cooper Union sphere: a ball suspended overhead in the middle of the atrium that would expand from 4 1/2 feet to 18 feet across and would weigh 750 pounds. The science center not only gave Hoberman the go-ahead, it turned his contraption into a kind of icon for the Liberty Science Center, whose newsletter is now called The Sphere.
The Liberty sphere led to a series of sculptures for other science museums, of which the Hypar (a video can be viewed at www.hoberman.com/fold/exhibits.html) is the largest and most complex. But this wasn't enough. Hoberman didn't want his ideas relegated to museum atriums; he wanted to make his form of beauty cheap and accessible to the masses. With his wife Carolyn, he started Hoberman Designs, a toy company that so far has brought to market two expanding spheres based on the scissor-joint invention and a flying disc that resembles a camera's iris. They range in price from US$7 to $40.
Hoberman likes to maintain an air of mystery about his future projects. When asked if he has a lot of neat prototypes in his workshop, he says, "Oh sure. Like this." He pulls a little rectangle of plastic no larger than a credit card from his pocket and tugs the corners, expanding it to the size of a sheet of writing paper. "You didn't see this - top secret," he says, pocketing the gizmo.
One dream project he willingly talks about is his desire to incorporate unfolding inventions into architecture. He wants to make a dense object the size of your body that grows and develops and actually envelops you, becoming building size.
"Architecture is highly dimensional and even kinetic; you're meant to see it from different angles and move through it," Hoberman explains. "I want to invert that relationship. Rather than depending on the viewer to synthesize all the relationships in the architecture by moving through it, I want the architecture itself to transform, and you to just sit there and see it happening." To that end, he's also been shopping around the idea of an Iris Dome to developers of sports stadiums, theme parks, theaters, and pavilions. He has yet to find any takers - but has no doubt he will.
"I don't know how soon," Hoberman says, breaking into a rare grin, "but we're going to find a way to do it."
