DESCRIPTION
The polyhedron in the fountain is a snub cube, an Archimedean semi-regular solid derived from a cube, with all its edges of equal length. This shape was chosen for the central fountain in the Beckman Institute because it mimics the symetry of the iron storage protein ferritin, which has 24 identical protein subunits arranged in 432 symetry about a core of perhaps 4500 iron atoms in the form of dehydrated ferric hydroxyphosphate. The snub cube has 38 faces and 24 vertices, the vertices then representing the subunits of ferritin.