Chuck Hoberman life and biography

Chuck Hoberman is an artist, inventor, entrepreneur and architect who specializes in unfolding structures - toys, buildings, and devices which can be expanded and contracted. He worked as a robotics engineer prior to founding Hoberman Associates ("a multidisciplinary practice that specializes in transformable design") in 1990, and holds more than a dozen patents for folding and linkage systems, including his most familiar work, the Hoberman Sphere, a multicolored toy that expands from nine to thirty inches in diameter. In 2006 he applied his innovative engineering technique to design the RDS (Rapid Deployment System) tent, a compact box weighing just a few hundred pounds and easily transportable in an automobile, which can be expanded in minutes to become a large emergency tent strong enough to withstand 65-mile-per-hour winds and the weight of thousands of pounds of snow.

In addition to toys such as the Hoberman sphere,the largest of which resides at Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey, Hoberman created the BrainTwist, a hard plastic tetrahedron that folds, stellates, and becomes self-dual while having a component that rotates similarly to a Rubiks Cube. Likewise, Chuck Hoberman's Pocket Flight Ring is a folding, throwable toy resembling a chakram.

Hoberman also has designed folding architectural structures like the Expanding Hypar (1997) at the California Museum of Science and Industry, the Hoberman Arch, the centerpiece of the medals plaza for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, to a retractable dome featured at the World's Fair 2000 in Hanover, Germany. His artwork has been exhibited at international museums including New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Mycal Otaru Bay in Hokkaido, Japan.

Hoberman has also created the Expandagon Construction System, a kind of construction toy.

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