The Life and Times of Buckminster Fuller 203
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]."
Re:Neat (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:R. Buckminster Fullofhimself! (Score:5, Informative)
R. Buckminster Fullofhimself!...is the conclusion I came to after trying to read "Critical Path."
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]
Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Part contributor, part crazy person (Score:2, Informative)
As with most things the religious nutters believe, this just doesn't happen to actually be true.
I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.
- Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945,
Re:Tacoma Dome (Score:1, Informative)
According to the Wikipedia article you referred to, the Tacoma Dome is in fact not a geodesic dome but "a planar radian structure of glue-laminated beams".
Not the Dymaxion vehicle's fault? (Score:2, Informative)
FTA:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car [wikipedia.org]
[2] http://shl.stanford.edu/Bucky/dymaxion/index.htm [stanford.edu]
The Synergetics Collaborative and Bucky's legacy (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What about Buckyballs? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Another parallell: Heidelberg and Gates. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The Domes Work (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.
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.