I've been interested in geodesics since I was a teenager. The triangulated geometry of these structures has always exerted a strong fascination upon me. I've often immersed myself in several of the many books by Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome, and once met him in San Francisco a few months before his death in 1983.
This design is my own variation on one of Bucky's designs, which he called the Fly's Eye dome. In his design a circular panel occupies each of the faces of a classis pent-hex geodesic dome, which resembles a soccer ball. The result is spheroid with 32 circular panels joined by triangular components having negative saddle curvature. Structurally it's very strong, as is normally the case with well-built geodesics.
My dome is a simplification of that design. Bucky was working with a truncated icosahedron, which is what produces the soccer ball geometry. Instead of this I've taken a dodecahedron, a regular figure with 12 pentagonal faces, and placed a circular panel in each of those faces. The result is a spheroid with 12 circular faces, as seen above. In the second drawing, the figure is modified so that it rests upon a floor, leaving nine circular panels - or eight, if you allow one opening for a doorway, as I've done here.
This design is functionally related to my long-term interest in curvilinear perspective. I came up with it as a way of supporting an immersive perspective matrix. I'll try to elucidate this idea in future posts.
"Humanity is characterized by extraordinary love for its new life, and yet has been misinforming its new life to such an extent that the new life is
ReplyDeletecontinually at a greater disadvantage than it would be if abandoned in the wilderness by its parents."
-R. Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1962), p. 9.
"This book is written with the conviction that there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people, no matter how offensive or eccentric to society they may seem."
ReplyDelete-R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, 1981
Yeah, I've always been a Bucky fan. He has his detractors, but I like where he's coming from.
ReplyDeleteMarshall McLuhan said that once every 500 years we encounter someone with the intelligence and scope of Buckminster Fuller, the last prior to him being Leonardo da Vinci. Who the fuck could possibly be his detractors? He was the last human capable of saving us from our rapidly approaching, grim and dismal fate.
ReplyDeleteIt is not a matter of being a "fan" of his. He spelled out what had to be done clearly and lucidly going even to the extent of creating a mathematics rooted in solid geometry. It is detailed in his book "Synergetics".
Heed Ludwig Wittgenstein:
"There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics."
"We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry."
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (New York 1922).
I love the Wittgenstein quote. Geometry means far more to me than the realms of abstraction, be they mathematical or philosophical. It's something you can grasp with the mind immediately, visually and tangibly, and yet that contains great depths, warranting many years of study.
ReplyDeleteAs for Bucky's detractors, I can name two of them offhand. Lloyd Kahn, author of Domebook I and Domebook II, in which he popularized geodesics, and who built many geodesic domes back in the 60s, ultimately rejected them, claiming them to be impractical as dwellings. John Michael Greer, blogmaster of the Archdruid Report and author of many books, finds Bucky's writings to be hubristic in tone and his ideas "cornucopian," as Greer puts it - meaning, prone to promise a higher degree of universal prosperity to all humanity than is really attainable, given the inherent limits to planetary resources.
I respect both those gentlemen, but I'm not really of their opinion on Bucky. Had his ideas been applied on a wide scale back in the day - say, during the latter half of the twentieth century, when he was active - it could have done much to avert the civilizational and ecological disaster that is now absolutely certain to overtake us.
Unfortunately, at this point in history, it's too late. Bucky's ideas rely heavily upon the economies of scale that come with industrial processes, in both production and distribution. Now that we've blown our planetary resource wad, especially in terms of energy, it's no longer feasible to put his ideas into practice on the necessary scale. So basically we're screwed, as you rightly state. The best we can hope for now is to try to ameliorate the catastrophe in very minor ways, around the fringes, as death rates worldwide inexorably climb and our global industrial civilization continues its accelerating descent into oneness with the fate of Nineveh and Rome.
Fuller always said that small domes, and that's all that have ever been built so far including the largest ones, are only models. Their real significance comes when they are more than a mile or two in diameter.
ReplyDeleteAs for the resources, remember that it was Fuller who started the World Resources Inventory. He, more than anyone else, knew that we only have what is available to us on our planet in the form of the 92 regenerative elements. And never forget that a geodesic encloses the same amount of space as the next most efficient structure while using only one-tenth of the material necessary to build it. And finally, remember Fuller was involved in many other areas other than domes. He built the Dymaxion car to name one. Also the Dymaxion house. Another was his floating tetrahedronal city which was almost started in Tokyo when the Japanese man funding the project died. He designed boats, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He called what he did "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science". Fuller's detractors are little more than "worthless shits" to use William S. Burroughs quaint phrase.
And do not forget Bucky's Dymaxion Map which has no distortion as do other maps. The maps we use to teach children usually show Greenland to be three times the size of Australia when in fact the reverse is true. Fuller's map corrects these errors and lies that we are fed. It is no wonder we have spawned a world full of idiots who possess a head full of illusions.
DeleteWillem