The Snub Cube in the Glanville Courtyard of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology

Abstract

In the central (Glanville) courtyard of the recently constructed Beckman Institute building at the California Institute of Technology is a fountain, placed there by the architect, Mr. Tim Vreeland, to create some “white noise” and thus separate acoustically four areas of the courtyard designed for conversational groups. The architect asked for help from the future occupants of the building in designing the fountain itself; several suggestions were made and rejected by the Caltech administration as not having any relationship to the purpose of the building. Arnold O. Beckman, the donor of the building, had specified that he wanted this Institute to develop new methods and instruments that would advance research in the fields of biology and chemistry, including their interface. After our latest suggestion had been rejected, Harry B. Gray, then the Director-designate of the Beckman Institute (now Director), recalled a paper [1] describing the tertiary structure of the iron-containing protein ferritin; the molecule of ferritin was found to have 432 (read as four, three, two) symmetry; i.e., it has fourfold axes, threefold axes, and twofold axes relating the 24 subunits of the protein.