Buckyball is a series of art installations by Leo Villareal Studio that pay homage to the geometric brilliance of Buckminster Fuller. The geometry of the Buckyball’s structure is based on a truncated icosahedron, which is an arrangement of hexagons and pentagons that approximate a spherical form. The largest of these installations to date is located outside the new Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California. In this installation, a 30-foot-diameter Buckyball suspends a 20-foot diameter Buckyball within it, which in turn suspends a 10-foot-diameter Buckyball. The resulting geometry creates a stage for the artist’s performance with light and color. CRAFT worked closely with the fabricator, 4th State Metals, along with the artist’s team, to develop components and realize the installation.
The structural challenge comes from the members and joints subjected to varying loading conditions throughout the sculpture. Details were required to maintain the overall visual appearance while simultaneously increasing strength. The base of the sculpture, for example, was imagined as a solid, shop-fabricated weldment to generate the necessary resistance to loads and minimize deflections. The remaining nodes and elements were site-assembled using mechanical fasteners with variations in quantity and material thickness to allow further gradation for structural performance.
A combination of linear and solid finite elements were used to represent the overall behavior of the sculptures under loading conditions while providing the ability to isolate and analyze highly stressed components. In this example, the assembly of components in the outer buckyball that hangs the inner balls are evaluated and verified for conformance with load combinations that include the effect of seismic activity.
PROJECT TEAM
Artist: Leo Villareal Studio, Fabricator: 4th State LLC
