This is Lisa Mangold-White, Robert Mangold’s daughter. I will be reading for Robert today and quoting him verbatim.
This sculpture is one in a series I call “Tetrahedral Hyperspheres.” The whole series exists because of a dream. All of my life, I’ve had exceptionally interesting and mostly fun dreams. If I sleep for more than one hour, I will become involved in strange environments peopled by folks I have never met in my waking world. The dream where I first heard the word Tetrahedral Hyperspheres was very different in that I was in an environment that I recognized easily, and I met sculptor Carl Andre that I knew very well. He asked me what I was involved with, and I answered glibly “tetrahedral hyperspheres.” My answer shocked me so much that I woke up and sat for awhile, walked for awhile, and thought about how I had put together “tetrahedron” and “spheres.” I was very familiar with both of these things--I had been working with hyperspheres for a number of years. The last series I had done was an I-beam series where I had carved hyperspheres inside the I-beams. I had been made familiar with tetrahedrons much earlier than I had worked with hyperspheres. I had studied R. Buckminster Fuller from my first year in basic design at Indiana University. I had met with him twice and read everything I could find that he had written. I collected and installed his work for an exhibition at Indiana University, so I knew about the push-pull theory and why Bucky thought that the tetrahedron was the strongest form in nature.
For the next two weeks, every bit of time that wasn’t absolutely necessary for some other subject, I worked trying to decide how these two things could possibly work together. Within one day, while thinking about this problem, it occurred to me that I liked creating hyperspheres in my work. I liked it because spheres were a very natural form that many things in nature took in the process of forming themselves. Water falling from clouds forms little spherical droplets; gasses, like the sun and other stars; planets made up of space junk forms in orbit around those stars and collects into basic spherical masses. All of these were held together and held in place by a combination of the weight of the relative mass and the pull of electromagnetic forces. Everywhere are natural spheres that are formed and held together by the push-pull that Bucky found so fascinating in the tetrahedral tension and compression. It took me the rest of the two-week period playing with paper models and mechanical drawing systems to find something interesting that accomplished what I was looking for. The solution I finally accepted was one i discovered doing projection drawing with a T-square and triangle. I discovered that if I put a cylinder through each of the four faces of the tetrahedron, where they met would form the hypersphere.
