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The Life and Times of Buckminster Fuller
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Jun 22, 2008 08:02 PM
from the comprehensivist-for-short dept.
from the comprehensivist-for-short dept.
The New Yorker features a review of the life and work of R. Buckminster Fuller, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition in New York 25 years after his death. Fuller was a deeply strange man. He documented his life so thoroughly (in the "Dymaxion Chronofile," which had grown to over 200K pages by his death) that biographers have had trouble putting their fingers on what, exactly, Fuller's contribution to civilization had been. The review quotes Stewart Brand's resignation from the cult of the Fuller Dome (in 1994): "Domes leaked, always. The angles between the facets could never be sealed successfully. If you gave up and tried to shingle the whole damn thing — dangerous process, ugly result — the nearly horizontal shingles on top still took in water. The inside was basically one big room, impossible to subdivide, with too much space wasted up high. The shape made it a whispering gallery that broadcast private sounds to everyone." From the article: "Fuller's schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past... He was a material determinist who believed in radical autonomy, an individualist who extolled mass production, and an environmentalist who wanted to dome over the Arctic. In the end, Fuller's greatest accomplishment may consist not in any particular idea or artifact but in the whole unlikely experiment that was Guinea Pig B [which is how Fuller referred to himself]."
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Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:2, Interesting)
Genius, no doubt, but likely to never be full understood.
Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds a bit like Tesla...Genius, no doubt, but likely to never be full understood.
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Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)
You may think him a nut, but he did have some engineering talent beyond the norm.
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Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also how a spoked wheel works so it was nothing new in terms of engineering.
The basic calculations for stealth technology predate the development of stealth aircraft SIGNIFICANTLY because there wasn't enough available computer time, and the initial stealth aircraft were angular not because it's necessary for stealth but because the computations are dramatically simpler that way. Does that mean that modern stealth aircraft are nothing new in terms of engineering? Let's face it, progress is iterative.
Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Insightful)
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This article gives a very distorted view. (Score:5, Informative)
Fuller's domes may not be The One True Faith that people like Brand wanted but they're still a damn good choice for certain kinds of commercial structures. They also got modern engineers thinking about dynamic load distribution in ways that are very relevant and important now, a time when yurt design, for example, is going high-tech fast.
Tensegrity Posts [blogspot.com] are just now starting to be appreciated for the resource-frugal, vastly compressible wonders they are. I guarantee that we'll see more and more variations on this scheme in the coming years in structures that need to be boosted out of the gravity well or simply transported at very low cost in absolutely minimal space.
Fuller's cardboard versions of his dome worked quite well as temporary structures during World War II. If we had any sense at all we'd be making them now out of modern materials.
Many of his designs failed in large part for lack of, basically, computing power and, to a lesser degree, modern materials. Done with modern resources they're practical as all get out. You may want to laugh at his two piece steel bathroom but the hundreds of thousands of blowmolded shower enclosures sold every year at places like Home Despot are direct descendents. His cooling approach in the Dymaxion Home was far more sophisticated and resource-savvy than most of the "eco-homes" being built even today. And trust me, I've reviewed the plans of hundreds.
I agree, Fuller was an obscurantist pain in the ass with some serious delusions. He also got a hell of a lot of useful work done that considerably advanced manufacturing technology, approaches in several branches of engineering, and topology. Where he focused his attention, things advanced. As for his stuff including make-do components, like the famed Ford suspension put on its side in the Dymaxion Car, he made it clear from day one that this was a proof of concept, a proof that, even with make-do parts, carried ten passengers, got over 30 mpg, and turned on its own radius. Go ahead, show me that the first proofs of concept by Burt Rutan or Armadillo Aerospace or OLPC work that well.
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Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Funny)
Given that his first model of a geodesic dome collapsed under its own weight...
As did the second. The third one burned down, fell over, and then collapsed under its own weight.
But the fourth one stayed up, and that's what we have now: the strongest dome in all England.
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Conservatives HATE Bucky (Score:3, Insightful)
Just looked at the people posting slanderous comments against Buckminster Fuller. Surprise, surprise, conservatives hat a man who spoke out against the status quo and against corporatism.
If you want to understand why certain people seem to hate Bucky with an unreasonable passion, read Critical Path.
Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)
When you look at only one invention of his, it's easy to tear apart... But when you study the breadth of his work, including his piercing insight in to globalization... I think scientists should be more like Fuller. Overspecialization has made our culture perfect, but very boring.
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not only that (Score:3, Interesting)
just think how frequent were the inventions in the 19th century. if you force yourself, you can see that institutionalization and specialization of new science branches have also brought refinements of earlier discoveries, but decreased the number of discoveries and inventions too.
we need discovery, inventions. we are sorely lacking them these days.
Re:not only that (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 19th century, we got the internal combustion engine, radio, telephone, railroads, and cars, among other things. In the past 30 years alone, we've sequenced the entire human genome, can make computers pretty much any size you want, can predict weather accurately just about anywhere on the planet up to a week... the list kind of goes on like this. None of that would be possible without some serious inventiveness.
Keep in mind that there was so little that anybody knew about our world and the universe in 1800 that it really didn't take much to come up with inventions that took advantage of the new knowledge of the time, like electricity and radio waves. Nowadays, new knowledge involves quantum physics or genetic manipulation. I'm sure that, 100 years from now, anything we come up with will seem almost trivial, but keep in mind that it took over 50 years for someone to figure out how a battery worked and what to use one with. Turnaround time on using new discoveries is, for the most part, a little faster these days.
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Re:not only that (Score:4, Interesting)
Also I think the previous parent to which you were responding doesn't understand that as things become MORE complicated, we tend to remix and combine our past inventions with new ones, but the newer ones tend to be even more complex, which takes more time, this is offset somewhat by computers but right now we are OVERLOADED with information. There is so much potential for invention with the internet it's unreal, we're just too slow to realize it all.
I'm sure in the future inventions and much of science will be automated by computer AI, and scientists will have even less of a roll to play, if ray kurzweil is even moderately right.
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Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)
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Naw Tesla was a briliant man that became a nutcase. Bucky was mostly a con man. He sold dreams and people bought them.
Bucky was in the classic words of Douglas Adams, "mostly harmless"
Not the worst way to be remembered.
Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA: "instead of finding a job, [BF] took to spending his days in the library, reading Gandhi and Leonardo."
We need more people like this. I'm not saying that it would be a good thing if everyone were like this, but we do need more dream sellers.
If nothing else, they make the world less boring.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I seem to recall from one of his biographies that , even in the best times of his life when he wasn't short on money, he had compulsions, such as having to calculate the volume of his food before he ate it, and phobias, such as not being able to touch other people's hair (except perhaps under duress "at gunpoint").
I'm sure that once he wasn't coming up with novel, and, more importantly, immediately profitable, ideas at a rapid rate, those quirks didn't help him much. I can believe that his mental issues mi
Who needs a single contribution... (Score:5, Funny)
...when you can have the entire world referring to 'Bucky Balls'.
That should be enough for any man.
Re:Part contributor, part crazy person (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a really strange take on Einstein. I would suggest (unless I am hopeless misinformed) that you look into what he meant when he said that god didn't play dice, you may be pleasantly surprised.
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Re:Part contributor, part crazy person (Score:5, Insightful)
Putting religious beliefs before science? That's something I really don't understand. If there's anything I've learned by reading about Einstein's views on religion, it's that he was the quintessential scientist even in this respect: he didn't subscribe to any known organized religion, but vehemently refused to rule out the existence of god- and found atheists arrogant for doing so. His religious views seem to be somewhere in between pantheistic and agnostic, and I don't see how they affected his scientific work.
Perhaps you're referring to the famous quote "God does not play dice". I don't think this quote expresses a religious belief as much as it articulates a "gut instinct" about the way the universe worked: that it's fundamentally deterministic. Of course, being Einstein, he had to word it in a deliberately provocative fashion. I think gut instincts have a real place in science- they can often be useful starting points for hypotheses, or used to guide an investigation in a direction that one only grasps subconsciously at first. The only real restriction is that one needs to be able to recognize when experimental evidence has proven one's gut instincts wrong. I don't think Einstein lived to see this point; local hidden variable theories hadn't been experimentally ruled out by Bell inequality experiments such as the Aspect experiments before he died.
And I'm not even sure Einstein was thoroughly wrong about the universe being fundamentally deterministic. Even though the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics contains an element of randomness (the very randomness that Einstein railed against), the Everett-Wheeler interpretation says otherwise. The Many Worlds interpretation, as it is often called, asserts that random wave collapse merely looks random from within our own "branch" of a larger wave function that encompasses many universes. If you were somehow able to view the entire wave function, it would look completely deterministic. The only reason we see randomness in quantum "collapse" is because our macroscopic detectors (such as our eyeballs) induce decoherence in quantum states that cause environmentally-induced superselection. (Explaining that sentence in english would take many pages, so if you're curious I suggest you use those words, plus the abbreviation einselection, to do some googling.)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
From what I picked up, the "God" who doesn't like dice, is more of the deist personification of natural law, than a best friend in the sky. The same "God" who America's founding father's talked about, and that most Enlightenment philosopher/naturalists referred to. More akin to Aristotle's "unmoved mover", than to the modern Judeo-Christian gray haired old man.
A metaphorical god, rather than a literal one, would be the most succinct way of putting it, I suppose.
The Bohr/Einstein debate though, is probably
Re:bullpucky (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because by the time you've encountered it, it's in the past and so it's determined. Chaos does deceptively look like randomness. The difference is subtle. It's in the moving present instant that the randomness becomes determined from our point of view. It may be that the determination defines our perspective, you might say. To say that the outcome is predetermined and so there is only one world line requires faith in Fate. That's not scientific, but it's a very old argument that's on point for this discussion. BTW, Everett-Wheeler does not contradict your view. In that theory every possible outcome has a predetermined world-line in which that outcome was Fate. It's just that with Everett-Wheeler all possibilities happen, spawning near-infinite worldlines. To the observer the universe with and without Everett-Wheeler look the same because it is not possible to observe events that have not occurred, yet. Perhaps after we measure the quantum unit of probability this will be possible, but I believe we will just be able to select views of the outcomes we desire and we'll wind up with the Delphi Oracle.
Personally I'm not a big believer in chaos. Misunderstood order, yes. Chaos not so much. In a multiverse where every outcome is preordained for its particular worldline, chaos goes undefined. Chaos theory, maybe. Is that weird? It's important that Everett-Wheeler be correct for a number of reasons, and certainly I believe it plausible -- but I'm not an anonymous physics grad.
For some really out-there metaphysics, consider the possibility that observers get to select their worldlines by believing in a particular outcome. A consensus vote of faith might select some outcome for a particular group of observers. This doesn't contradict Everett-Wheeler because for each possible outcome some subset of observers select the resultant worldline. In this philosophy, all things are possible through faith. Which brings us back to the topic of the thread. Perhaps BF wasn't so wacky after all.
Where in the multiverse is John Titor?
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally I'm not a big believer in chaos. Misunderstood order, yes.
This view was shared by David Bohm. Bohm believed that there is no such thing as randomness, only order of a very high degree, so high that it is not recognizable as such at first glance or, possibly, ever.
An example I came across is that of a random number generator. A decent one will spit out numbers that are indistinguishable from a random sequence. If the RNG is started twice with the same seed it will produce the same sequence, proving that the numbers aren't really random at all. They have a defi
Cough cough (Score:5, Funny)
Likely would have been a slashdotter (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Only idiots say "prolly". (Score:4, Insightful)
But anonymous troll is correct..."prolly"? Keep using that, let us know how it works out in your career.
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hallucinatory? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe he was prophet [thirteen.org], giving us a car that by today's standard would have been fantastic on gas mileage back in 1933. We're all gonna be using three wheels soon when we have to try to get gas at Bartertown [wikipedia.org]
Whitney show (Score:2)
R. Buckminster Fullofhimself! (Score:5, Insightful)
...is the conclusion I came to after trying to read "Critical Path."
Re:R. Buckminster Fullofhimself! (Score:5, Informative)
R. Buckminster Fullofhimself!...is the conclusion I came to after trying to read "Critical Path."
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Re:R. Buckminster Fullofhimself! (Score:5, Funny)
That is the response I usually expect from a self-zeigleblantamous spurion migitar-analphlaxis.
~X~
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Cloud Cities (Score:2, Interesting)
They 'd find his influence if they read his books (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That book should be required reading in all schools. It's out of print, but on the net [reactor-core.org]. Take the time to read.
The Bucky Ball Globe (Score:5, Interesting)
If anybody wants a small sample of Bucky's genius, museum stores often sell die-cut sheets of paper which, when assembled, form a dodecahedral globe. This model is the "Fuller Projection", a more accurate representation of the world where landmasses more closely resemble their actual sizes (that is, Greenland is not as large as South America).
I think what's more interesting about the globe is how the continents are laid out on the die-cut paper. Real relationships between continents are "duh" obvious to viewers because it's clear how people would travel from one part of the world to another (or not). It all comes together when you assemble the globe. They're cheap, so buy two.
I had the great privilege to drive his Honda Accord (he was a spokesperson for Honda in the 70s, I think) with a relative of his across the country in 1979 or 1980 and had a chance to meet him and talk with him. The experience was transformative and motivational for me, and gave me more direction in life.
The above paragraph may sound mushy and corny, but apparently the curators of the Whitney seem to agree with some of my sentiments. And they're harder sells than a 23-year-old.
Tacoma Dome (Score:4, Interesting)
Sealing domes... (Score:5, Informative)
...is not a problem. Spray foam or ferrocement works just fine. I have helped build and lived in examples of each. As to subdividing for rooms, you can use cables and tensioners (turnbuckles) for the additional floor(s) supports, build from there, with nice drop down or spiral staircases. You can get a variety of living levels then in the same structure, plus suspended walkways and..you name it, use your imagination, it's slick. They make very nice living structures. They are *much* stronger than 90 degree flat square stick frame construction (which is actually about the weakest joints you can make, it is just easier, that is why it is done so much).
Link to print version (no ads, all on one page) (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/09/080609fa_fact_kolbert/?printable=true [newyorker.com]
As a resident of three domes (Score:5, Informative)
We live in three twice-subdivided, spherically extruded gyroelognated pentagonal dipyramids [wikipedia.org] built in 1972. Two of them are stuccoed and one is shingled. They don't leak.
They're each a single room, one with a pentagonal downstairs. I can't begin to explain how wonderful it is to live in a sphere. I love the geometry and the womb-like feeling. But I hate domes that are mangled and partitioned off like a normal house. You have to let the dome be what it is, if you do it works. And if you can't do that then you need to go with something else.
What about Buckyballs? (Score:3, Funny)
The Domes Work (Score:5, Informative)
I've been inside two geodesic dome houses, and neither of them leaked, nor were they shingled (which seems like a big pain in the ass completely contrary to the principle of the dome). The residents were very happy with the living conditions, and not just because they were into "science fiction". One had lived in it since the 1970s, and the other had worked pretty hard to get to be the latest resident of one that dated from a few years earlier.
The interior of the domes had cubical/rectangular rooms built within them, with the spaces between then and the dome structure used for storage, not living space. Nothing stops anyone from hanging floors inside the dome, or hanging walls from the floors. And above 3m high, the top floor can have a dome ceiling. The structure itself is very strong, so you can hang all kinds of stuff off it, like a hot tub on a non-reinforced floor (because it's hanging inside a distributed load webbing, not standing on a compressed pillar). The point is to use a very small amount of material and not have to worry about straining the structure as you do things with it.
I guess if you're like the hippies who just bought Stewart Brand's _Whole Earth Catalog_ as a conversation piece, a coffeetable book (rather than a book about how to make or do without coffee tables), you would just use a geodesic dome as a conversation piece. You'd fail to clamp plastic sheeting along the joints or caulk the joints properly, but you'd probably do that wrong on your regular old house, too.
Fuller was a geometer, a mathematician, not a magician. His designs can be executed spectacularly wrong, just as they're spectacularly right when executed right.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
When properly engineered, a house based on a dome design have these advantages:
1) They're extremely structurally strong. In fact, a properly-engineered dome house would probably survive a Category 5 hurricane or even an F5 tornado.
2) They're very energy efficient, often needing substantially lower energy bills to heat and cool the structure.
The trouble with domes. (Score:5, Informative)
Geodesic domes work quite well if built properly from the right materials. They've been protecting big radars in arctic environments since the 1950s, which is an impressive achievement.
The residential domeheads took a wrong turn when they tried to make small domes out of "natural materials". Trying to shingle a sphere was a terrible idea. Putting together prefab parts is the way to go. Fibreglas works well, but the "Mr. Natural" types didn't like Fibreglas. As Fuller pointed out, domes have to be manufactured products made cheaply, with precision, in quantity.
There's also a subtle structural problem with domes that wasn't well understood until they could be computer-simulated. The abstract geometry produces a good structure. But in the real world, differential thermal expansion, when the sun is hitting one side of the dome more than the other, produces sizable stresses in the dome, which distorts slighlty. This was one of the major causes of leaks.
The other major problems come from the fact that domes require a whole range of architectural components specifically designed for them, from electrical conduits to kitchen cabinets to windows. Parts designed for rectangular structures don't fit well.
Dymaxion House -- one *does* exist (Score:4, Informative)
The article is wrong.
There is a full-scale Dymaxion House: in Dearborn, Michigan at the Henry Ford Museum. That a New Yorker writer couldn't turn that fact up with a quick Google search is disappointing.Two prototypes were built, and one was modified and lived in for several years by the Graham family. The rebuilt house is made from parts cobbled together from the other two, and some parts that had to be re-manufactured from the original plans. Tours are given through the Dymaxion House in the museum, and I've been several times.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
That Dymaxion vehicle supposedly had a top speed of 120mph, got 30mpg, and could carry up to eleven passengers. If that's true, then it was simply amazing. Of course, it looked a bit like a bullet (read: silly) so Americans would never go for it unless gas got up to like $5/gal, but let's face it'll never go that high :). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car
Re: (Score:2)
Of the prototypes, one remains that flipped and had killed its driver, injuring its passengers. Read it at Wired, I believe. People have been making this design subsequently for years, Morgan, Messershmitt and others. The specs above aren't quite correct, but the design had other flaws, as many of BM's did. Nonetheless, an inspirational thinker.
Stability of the Dymaxion car (Score:4, Informative)
A.) The crash you're talking about, as you would know if you'd RTFA, was determined not to be the fault of the car.
B.) Otoh, the thing was set up, for no sufficient reason, to steer "backwards". Like the rear seat of a fire truck, you steered left to turn right and vice-versa. Fuller liked boats, that's how tillers work, so he built it that way. This did make the car less safe, as drivers complained, but it in no way relates to the fundamental design.
C.) On yet a third hand, the whole beastie, since it was designed to "take off" at high enough speeds, had a dangerous tendency for the rear wheel to lose touch with the road once the car was moving at any kind of serious slip. This was bad design, no doubt, but again, easy enough to fix and would have been if more had been built.
D.) Being so lightweight, it tended to be pushed sideways by wind. This would be harder to address but seemed far worse to drivers of the time, used to big honkin' steel contraptions, than it would to, say, modern riders of enclosed bicycles, who have long since figured out ways to deal with this.
E.) Whatever its flaws, the thing was fantastically maneuverable. Its turning radius makes the average BMW look like a freight train. It was also, as I wrote above, built with cheap salvaged parts for many of the innards that would have been replaced with decent ones if it had ever gone into production. It's not reasonable to compare it to a production car in terms of things like the suspension, which was a total kluge.
F.) If you want to criticize the Dymaxion car, first read a book like Small Wonder on the creation of the Volkwagen bug. It took over ten frickin' years to get Professor Porsche's original chowderheaded version refined into the car that has now earned such reverence. But like the Dymaxion, his fundamental ideas were good, and those eventually made it great. The difference is that Porsche's team was able to keep going through years of rebuilding, prototyping, and redesign, up to and including inventing new kinds of steel since the unibody design and the suspension couldn't be made with the kinds that existed when Porsche first designed it.
Get the facts. Otherwise you're just wasting everybody's time.
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wonder what he might have done had he finished his studies at college?
He wouldn't have been nearly as successful. It's difficult to maintain your wild flights of fancy on the face of education. When you don't know nuthin', anything seems possible. In fact, the less someone knows, the more likely they are to treat a given impossibility as trivial to accomplish. No, maintaining your "inner dreamer" is orders of magnitude harder when you truly understand the limitations of the real world. Those few that can--- Steve Wozniak comes to mind--- are the true precious gems of society