A "curiosity molecule" named after American architect Buckminster Fuller is one of the weird and wonderful allotropes of carbon, explains nanomaterials professor Andrei Khlobystov.
Following an in-depth interview with Dezeen about the "unprecedented" properties of carbon conducted as part of our carbon revolution series, Khlobystov talked us through the various allotropes of the element.
"The existence of allotropes is just a manifestation of the very rich chemistry of carbon as an element," said Khlobystov, who heads the University of Nottingham's Nanocarbon group and Nanoscale and Microscale Research Centre.
Allotropes are different forms of the same chemical element. They have the same atoms but in different arrangements. Buckminsterfullerene named after architect famous for geodesic domes
One of these is buckminsterfullerene, nano-scale spheres of atoms that resemble the geodesic domes popularised by the architect Richard Buckminster Fuller.
A geodesic dome, which Buckminster Fuller patented in 1954, is a lattice-shell structure based on a geodesic polyhedron, a three-dimensional shape made up of a series of triangles.
These triangular elements distribute stress throughout the structure, a phenomenon that Buckminster Fuller termed tensegrity, which makes the domes very strong for their size and weight.

The buckminsterfullerene molecule is not technically a geodesic polyhedron. Rather than triangles, the molecular structure is made up of a...