Science Center’s Cube Aims to Make a Point

What could be more simple than the ordinary cube? Every box, every pair of dice follows its straight perpendicular lines, its tidy right angles.

But when it comes to one rather extraordinary cube--a 400,000-pound construction sitting above the soon-to-be-opened Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana--nothing is simple.

The mere calculations for building the cube would fill enough pages of legal paper to be stacked 3 feet high. When the cube’s outdoor erection is completed, it will be the center’s most visible example of mathematics, physics and geometry combined.

In a seeming and flamboyant defiance of gravity, the 108-foot-tall cube will balance on just one point. It is a position meant to raise questions of science in the minds of passersby.

“It’s a very familiar object positioned in a very, very unfamiliar way,” said James “Walkie” Ray, chairman of the science center board.

“As people drive by and see it, they’ll think, ‘What is preventing this thing from falling over?’ ” he said. “The mind would be inclined to think of the science which allows it to sit as it does.”

In fact, the cube won’t exactly be trembling en pointe up there.

“The cube looks like it’s precariously sitting on one point, but actually it’s also connected to two A-frames adjacent to the existing structure,” said Bruce Gay, project manager for ASI Advanced Structures Inc., the Santa Monica firm that designed the cube.

The science center, a 59,000-square-foot hands-on science museum for children, also will have its share of attractions inside.

It is scheduled to open Dec. 20, with high-tech exhibits and attractions.

Visitors will be able to learn how to make a rocket out of plastic film canisters, build a space rover and experience earthquakes of varying magnitudes. Other exhibits will let visitors walk through a tornado, create sand dunes and even make clouds.

The cube, however, is likely to serve as a magnet or gateway to the museum.

Ray and other officials expect it to become one of Southern California’s most prominent landmarks, one to rival the sphere at Walt Disney World in Orlando, the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles and even--yes, even--the Eiffel Tower in Paris, he said.

“We may be guilty of thinking too highly of it, but if you drive up and down the Santa Ana Freeway, from San Diego to L.A., you are on that definitive freeway that connects almost 8% of the population of the United States.

“If you examine the architectural statements that abut the freeway, you only have a few examples which are especially interesting.”

The cube’s “space frame” measures 64 by 64 feet square and is made of 2,636 struts, or tubes, and held together by 667 nodes. An 80,000-pound fiberglass “skin” will cover the entire structure, which will be hollow.

“It’s a miracle of structural engineering,” Ray said. “It’s Newton,” referring to the laws of gravity and motion and the elements of differential calculus formulated by 17th century mathematician Sir Isaac Newton.

“It’s as simple as the physics familiar to high school students, yet it also explains how we get to the moon,” Ray said.

When completed, the cube will be connected to the second floor of the museum by a bridge, and visitors will be able to enter the hollow structure for exhibits.

“They’re going to be looking up into this volume, approximately 85 feet, and we’ll be able to mount and suspend exhibitry from the space frame,” he said.

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Balancing Act

Over the next few weeks, commuters whizzing by on the Santa Ana Freeway will see a 10-story cube take shape, standing on one point. Destined to become an Orange County landmark, the $1-million Discovery Science Center cube is expected to take four to six weeks to construct.

59,000-square-foot hands-on science museum scheduled to open Dec. 20.

Fiber-optic lights line edges

Exhibit planned for cube cavity

Single point supports 400,000-pound cube

A-frames hidden in wall anchor cube

108 feet (height of cube)

64 feet (length of side)

Source: Discovery Science Center