“Like after a nice walk when you have seen many lovely sights you decide to go home, after a while I decided it was time to go home, let us put the cubes back in order. And it was at that moment that I came face to face with the Big Challenge: What is the way home?” — Erno Rubik
I had the honor of meeting Ernő Rubik who made a rare appearance at the SNF Conference at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Ernő Rubik is the Hungarian inventor, architect and professor of architecture who invented the Rubik’s Cube in 1974. It is one of the most popular puzzles of all time.
According to Rubiks.com:
“Erno has always thought of the Cube primarily as an object of art, a mobile sculpture symbolizing stark contrasts of the human condition: bewildering problems and triumphant intelligence; simplicity and complexity; stability and dynamism; order and chaos.”
A Rubik’s Cube consists of 26 small cubes that rotate on a central axis; nine coloured cube faces, in three rows of three each, form each side of the cube. When the cube is twisted out of its original arrangement, the player must then return it to the original configuration.
“Space always intrigued me, with its incredibly rich possibilities, space alteration by (architectural) objects, objects’ transformation in space (sculpture, design), movement in space and in time, their correlation, their repercussion on mankind, the relation between man and space, the object and time. I think the CUBE arose from this interest, from this search for expression and for this always more increased acuteness of these thoughts.”