Examples of Sol LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes on display at
City Hall Park in New York City. A cube has six faces, eight
vertices, and twelve edges. In his series titled Incomplete Open
Cubes, conceptual and minimalist artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007)
chose to work with cubes represented as frameworks. LeWitt
started by removing one edge from an open cube, then two edges,
and so on, as an exploration of how many variations of an
incomplete open cube exist and what they look like. One key
constraint was that the remaining edges had to be joined.
Removing one edge results in just one possible configuration for
an incomplete open cube. By experiment, LeWitt identified 122
unique variations of open cubes with three edges (the minimum
number needed to suggest three dimensions) to eleven edges. Nine
of these frameworks, rendered in painted aluminum, were recently
on display in the exhibition "Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965-2006"
at City Hall Park in New York City. Three connected edges is the
minimum number needed to s