Buckminster fuller who is

Fuller adapted the principles for the Geodesic Dome from an earlier proposal, created by an engineer after the first world war, and then patented the design in the US in Today, there are , interpretations across the world, according to the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Over his career, Fuller designed a series of prefabricated residences called Dymaxion Houses — a term that merges the words dynamic, maximum, and tension.

Although differing slightly, each house is made of elements that could be produced in a factory and airlifted to different locations. Fuller intended them to be constructed anywhere. In a final proposal for an aluminium scheme, a central column forms the main structure.

A number of "autonomous" design features are also included, like a cone that extends from the top to aid natural ventilation system and rainwater collection. The Dymaxion series also included a three-wheeled car that could make extremely tight turns. The streamlined vehicle was designed as an investigation into the taxiing stage of an aircraft, and the first phase in developing an automobile for both driving on land and flying.

Fuller developed three prototypes during his lifetime, but two have since been scrapped or damaged. In , British architect Norman Foster — Fuller's friend, student and collaborator — built a replica of the car to replace one of the lost designs.

Not limiting himself to any one discipline, Fuller took on cartography with this invention — credited as the first two-dimensional map of the entire Earth's surface that shows it without distortions. To create the piece, Fuller projected the world map onto the surface of a three-dimensional icosahedron, which was then unfolded and laid flat.

Soon after the discovery of electromagnetics, in the nineteenth century, he said, scientists had decided that because electrical energy was invisible, it could not be represented to the layman in the form of models, and so they had decided to stop trying to explain what they were doing in terms that the layman could understand.

Having made sure that this point was firmly established, Fuller set off on a survey of his self-education in mathematics. She showed us that an eighth is point one two five, and a quarter is point two five, and a third is point three three three, and so on with threes, out the window and over the hill.

And then she stacked the planes one on top of the other, so that they made a cube, and she said that existed. I wondered how you could get existence out of nonexistence to the third power. It seemed unreasonable. I asked her what it weighed and I asked how hot it was, and she got angry. I was sent to work in a factory in Canada making cotton-mill machinery, and I did very well there. It was a very important phase of my life, for I met shop foremen and machinists, and got to know a lot about their tools and about metals in general.

This time, I enlisted in the Navy, where again I began to do very well. Well, one day in I was standing on the deck of my ship looking back at the wake—it was all white because of the bubbles—and I began wondering idly how many bubbles there were back there.

Millions, obviously. To how many places, I wondered, did frustrated nature factor pi? He liked vectors tremendously, he said, because they were descriptions of actual physical events.

I was interested in exploring a geometry of vectors, which always represent energy events and actions in respect to other energy events and actions. The vector has velocity, and time is a function of velocity, so such a geometry would automatically have a time dimension.

Can you fellows go on taking this, or are you getting too tired? No rubber-jointed polygon holds its shape except one that is based on the triangle. Fuller had been picking up steam right along, and by this time he was talking very rapidly. Pausing to take a Japanese felt-tipped pen from his pocket, he proceeded to illustrate the next phase of the lecture with vigorous drawings on a white pad. I found that it takes a minimum of three triangles around a point. When you put in three triangles, with three common sides, around a point, they form a fourth triangle at the base and what you get is a tetrahedron.

We know that nature always does things in the simplest and most efficient way, and structures based on tetrahedrons are the structures that nature uses—these are the only babies that count. All the metals are made up of some form of tetrahedron. All the other shapes you find in nature are only transformable states of the tetrahedron.

This is what nature is really doing. Everything was now back in modellable form, I told him. And soon after that Snow said on the radio that he believed that the chasm between the sciences and the humanities could be closed—that the conceptual bridge had been found. A gust of wind buffeted the cottage, throwing open the doors on both sides and scattering the loose sheets of paper that Fuller had torn from the pad.

When the doors had been secured again, Fuller poured himself a cup of tea from a large pot he had been working on ever since dinner. It was quite clear that the Bear Island atmosphere was not making him sleepy. He talked for a while about the immense changes that were taking place in the world, and how the really significant developments were going on quite independently of politics, and this brought him to the subject of the fourth Dartmouth Conference, held in Russia the previous summer, which he had attended.

We had some very exciting people, though. It was a wonderful meeting, and it was decided that it would end with a prognostication by a Russian and a prognostication by an American.

The Russians, though, were convinced that they had one fundamental advantage over us. And some of the Americans were not able to answer right away whether it was true or not. The Russian one took up the whole morning, and I had the whole afternoon—fabulous. Anyway, I found myself standing up and talking in the following way. If you show that to children, they never see it any other way, and they can really understand how the earth revolves the sun out of sight.

But you scientists still see the sun setting. They were off their high horse. Well, the Russians really had a good sense of humor. They realized they were all just after honey themselves, and that their whole argument about singleness of purpose was pretty silly, and that the whole thing was working quite independently of politics. My main prognostication was based on the point that, for the first time in the history of the world, man is just beginning to take conscious participation in some of his evolutionary formulations.

Fuller broke off and looked from Rosen to me and back, a sudden smile illuminating his face. I set out many years ago to see what would happen if an individual did certain things. Back in , just after our second child was born, I committed myself to as much of a fresh start as a human being can have—to try to go back to the fundamentals and see what nature was really up to. But I was all alone, and up against the massive corporation and the massive state.

How could I work in the system without capital backing? And I came to the following conclusion: In the universe, everything is always in motion, and everything is always moving in the directions of least resistance. What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions.

The same in an airplane—you have this great big rudder up there, with a little tiny trim tab on the trailing edge, and by moving that little trim tab to one side or the other you throw a low pressure that moves the whole airplane. The last thing, after the airplane has gone by, you just move that little tab. Fuller broke off again, and poured himself a last cup of cold tea. The wind made a sudden restless sound in the fireplace chimney.

He leaned back and stared at the ceiling. But you can always get nearer to the truth. And today the young people really want to know about things, they want to get closer to the truth, and my job is to do all I can to help them. The child is really the trim tab of the future. Not infrequently, people meeting him for the first time are so taken aback by what seems to them a torrential outpouring of ego that they hear nothing he says, and go away in a state of shock.

Others are convinced that, having suffered for years at the hands of people who refused to take his ideas seriously, he is simply enjoying his revenge. Such reactions are rarely experienced by students, who pack lecture halls to hear him and often keep him talking long after the scheduled time.

After the first hour, which is usually perplexing, students find themselves tuned in to the unique Fuller wave length, with its oddly necessary word coinings and its synergetic constructions. Nothing irritates Fuller more than occasional implications by journalists that he is a non-stop talker who loves to hear himself hold forth; he never talks, he says, unless he is invited to do so, but he cannot limit himself to one or two aspects of a complex subject.

Fuller began drinking heavily; he recalls that he used to stay up all night drinking, and still have enough energy to work twelve or fourteen hours the next day. When his father-in-law was obliged to sell his stock in the building-block company in , Fuller, a minority stockholder, was informed by the new owners that his services were no longer needed.

This blow came shortly after a second daughter, Allegra, was born to the Fullers. In the belief that he had made a complete mess of his life thus far, Fuller considered what seemed to him the only two courses open to him: he could do away with himself, thereby giving his wife and new baby a chance to find someone better equipped to take care of them, or he could devote the rest of his life to the service of something greater than he was, and try to get straightened out that way.

In the light of his background—eight generations of Boston idealists, Unitarian ministers, and transcendental thinkers Margaret Fuller was his great aunt —the answer was never really in much doubt. You belong to the universe. Fuller moved his family into a slum neighborhood in Chicago, cut himself off from contact with everyone he had known before, and began, he says, to do his own thinking.

It seemed to him that, purely by chance, he had already acquired a great deal of valuable experience, having repeatedly found himself working in areas that gave him an insight into the new world of accelerating technology. In the Navy, particularly, his exposure to the principles of ballistics, logistics, radio electronics, and naval aviation had given him a glimpse of future industrial developments that would make it possible—through the use of the new alloys, for example —to do more and more with less and less.

This sort of technological movement seemed even then to promise, if carried far enough, a reversal of the old Malthusian concept of the economic forces at work in the world. But if technology could provide more and more goods from fewer and fewer resources, it was conceivable that man could convert himself from an inherent failure, as Malthus had depicted him, into a success in his environment.

Technology, of course, is dependent on science, for it requires the discovery by science of certain basic patterns in nature that can be isolated and reproduced by industrial processes. In , then, Fuller dedicated himself to a search not only for these patterns but also for ways in which they could be made to benefit his fellow-man.

He is almost alone among twentieth-century scientists in having thus concerned himself at all times with the social implications of his discoveries. Although society has not always been ready to accept what Fuller has come up with since then, he insists that not one of his inventions has been a failure.

His first Dymaxion house, a circular dwelling unit suspended by cables from a central mast, was a successful exploitation of the discovery that the tensile strength of certain metals and alloys is far greater than the strength of the same materials when used in compression. His Dymaxion Airocean World Map was the first cartographic system to receive a United States patent, and was one of the first Fuller inventions to arouse the serious interest of other scientists; it shows the whole surface of the earth in a single flat view with no visible distortion.

It was to sell for sixty-four hundred dollars, and was scheduled to go into mass production as an emergency solution to the postwar housing shortage, but with the end of the war and the end of rationing the arrangement fell apart. Like a die-stamped, mass-producible bathroom unit that Fuller had designed earlier, the Wichita House was ultimately the victim of caution and inertia in the building industry.

Fuller had decided long before that housing was technologically the most backward of all the major industries, and he continued to concentrate his efforts in the field of shelter. For a while, all geodesic domes were manufactured by two companies Fuller set up for that purpose, Synergetics, Inc. But now he has licensed about two hundred construction and other firms to do the actual manufacturing and building under his patent, and for every dome sold he receives a royalty of five per cent of the selling price.

The Marine Corps has adopted air-liftable geodesic domes as its advance-base shelters, and the Department of Commerce has been using them since to house its exhibits at international trade fairs. Because their strength is all in the invisible mathematics, they can be made of almost any material, including paper, and because the basic structural formula is simple, they can be assembled by unskilled labor, using color-coded parts, in unbelievably short order; in Hawaii, for example, a hundred-and-forty-five foot-in diameter dome was assembled in one day by the Kaiser Aluminum company, in time for a symphony orchestra to give a concert inside it that same evening.

Although Fuller has farmed out the production of his domes to individual licensees, he has more requests than he can handle to adapt the basic design for various purposes. The domes have brought Fuller wealth and fame, but there are times when he grows a little tired of hearing about them.

He once told his friend and biographer Robert W. I started with the universe—as an organization of regenerative principles frequently manifest as energy systems of which all our experiences, and possible experiences, are only local instances.

I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers. Although, technically speaking, Fuller is not an architect, he has come to be recognized as a powerful force in contemporary architecture. Leading architects here and abroad often make a point of praising his contributions in their field, even though what he has done, in a sense, has been to challenge the whole basis of their aesthetic, pointing out that the supposedly modern and functional Bauhaus-derived architecture of our time is only superficially functional and not modern at all.

At breakfast the morning after the three-hour lecture on mathematics and other matters, Fuller, seeming not in the least winded, talked for quite a while about the deficiencies of contemporary architecture. He had come to breakfast in a bright-orange slicker, looking somewhat disconsolate, with the announcement that only about ten per cent of the runoff from a brief, hard rain that had taken place during the night had gone into the cisterns; he had been out checking the gutters and rainspouts, and had found most of them badly clogged.

This bit of non-functionalism—the drinking water on Bear Island comes from a spring, but water for washing is collected as runoff—led him, by way of a chance remark, to a discussion of the Bauhaus idea and how it differed from his own work. Obviously, one of the things they could do without was decoration.

Walter Gropius and those people looked at American industrial engineering about this time, and decided maybe they could turn that into an aesthetic. These men simply used the hard edge that had been developed in engineering. Mies van der Rohe, who was the most perceptive of all of them, saw the glasswork in American stores and began making drawings of buildings that were all glass. Now, I was proposing something completely different at that time. I was saying that the same science that had gone into weaponry and the development of the advanced technology of the aircraft industry had also made it possible to make very much lighter and more powerful structures.

Einstein and Max Planck demonstrated once again that energy could neither be created nor lost and that it left one system only to join another—the famous law of conservation of energy. And this meant that wealth was not only without practical limit but indestructible.

The main thing, then, was to use this great energy-wealth to help man instead of to kill him—for example, in designing ways to house the third of humanity that was without adequate shelter. At any rate, that was very different from what Gropius taught his students.

Only about four per cent of the building done in America involves architects, in fact. So who does design what you build? The first electric-light bulbs were developed for use on board battleships. The same thing with refrigeration and desalinization plants, which the Navy has had for half a century. Ninety-nine per cent of humanity has lived on only about five per cent of the earth—a few little dry spots. Now, the law has always been applicable only to this five per cent of the earth, and anyone who went outside of it—the tiny minority that went to sea, for example—immediately found himself outside the law.

I find this fascinating and utterly true. All improvement has to be made in the outlaw area. A good example of what I mean is going on right now in the space program.

Now, the real purpose of the space programs at the present time is simply to get the highest weapons advantage, and the side that gets it will rule the universe.

This is greatly hidden from people by all the talk of getting to the moon, but the space platform, the military advantage, is really it. Buckminster Fuller, - The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.

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