R. Buckminster Fuller

I

Introduction

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), American engineer, inventor, designer, architect, writer, educator, philosopher, and poet, noted for his innovative use of technology to deal with global problems facing humanity in the second half of the 20th century.

Richard Buckminster Fuller, a great-nephew of the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, was born in Milton, Massachusetts, July 12, 1895. He attended Harvard University from 1913 to 1915. In the early 1920s he joined his father-in-law in developing the Stockade Building System for producing lightweight, insulated, fireproof, and waterproof housing. When the company failed, Fuller dedicated himself to finding entirely new ways to increase the social benefits accruing from efficient and principled use of the earth's energy and material resources.

II

Dymaxion Designs

In 1932 Fuller founded the Dymaxion Corporation to produce a variety of his innovative designs. (The name is a play on the words maximum, dynamic, and ion.) His inexpensive, factory-assembled, and highly portable Dymaxion House was a doughnut-shaped structure hung from a central mast; his Dymaxion Airocean World Map is a flat cartographic projection that can be folded into a rough globe without the usual visible distortions of other world maps. His Dymaxion car was an omnidirectional, three-wheeled, fuel-efficient, versatile automobile, but it was never mass-produced. During World War II Fuller served on the Board of Economic Warfare as head of the mechanical engineering department.

III

The Geodesic Dome

In 1947 and 1948, Fuller developed what he called a synergetic-energetic system of geometry, an architectural consequence of which is the geodesic dome. The geodesic dome (patented in 1947) comprises a spidery network of interconnected tetrahedrons (four-sided pyramids of equilateral triangles) forming a three-way, hemispherical grid that distributes stress evenly to all members of the entire structure and hence exhibits a high strength-to-weight ratio. This led to his extensive development of geodesics, the mathematical study of economical space-spanning structures. In 1953 the Ford Motor Company commissioned Fuller to design the Ford Rotunda Dome in Dearborn, Michigan. Thereafter he designed domes housing military radar antennas (radomes), the 117-m (384-ft) Union Tank Car Company dome in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (1958), the 60-m (200-ft) “golden dome” that dominated the U.S. pavilion at the American Exchange Exhibition (1959) in Moscow, and the dome for the American pavilion at Expo '67 in Montréal, among many other structures. (In 1985 chemists succeeded in synthesizing a perfectly round carbon molecule consisting of 60 carbon atoms. Because the molecule resembled a geodesic dome, the chemists named it a buckminsterfullerene, or buckyball. See also Nanotechnology.)

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IV

Later Career

In the course of his work, Fuller evolved a philosophy of anticipatory design: “I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.” In 1959 he became a research professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he established his World Game research team for the application of design theory to the security of humankind and preservation of the earth. In 1972 Fuller was named a World Fellow in residence at the University City Science Center, administered by a consortium of institutions in the Philadelphia area. The same year, the nonprofit Design Science Institute was established in Washington, D.C., to disseminate Fuller's philosophy and work. He died in Los Angeles on July 1, 1983.

Among his many influential published works are Nine Chains to the Moon (1938, reissued 1963), Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), Approaching the Benign Environment (1970), Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), written in collaboration with E. J. Applewhite, and Critical Path (1982).

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