The Life and Times of Buckminster Fuller

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]."

Who needs a single contribution...

...when you can have the entire world referring to 'Bucky Balls'.

That should be enough for any man.

Re:Part contributor, part crazy person

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.

Re:Part contributor, part crazy person

Einstein's contributions to quantum theory ranged from groundbreaking (e.g. the photoelectric effect) to unintentionally insightful (e.g. entanglement in the EPR paper) to playing a vital role as devil's advocate (e.g. Bohr-Einstein debates). Disruptive? I can't say I agree.

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.)

Cough cough

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.

Future historians will note that this trend spiralled upwards, as more and more ceaseless bloggers continued to kick the bucket.

Likely would have been a slashdotter

Given the stuff that I have read about him, he prolly would have fit in nicely with this little place we call Slashdot.

hallucinatory?

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]

R. Buckminster Fullofhimself!

...is the conclusion I came to after trying to read "Critical Path."

Re:R. Buckminster Fullofhimself!

R. Buckminster Fullofhimself!...is the conclusion I came to after trying to read "Critical Path."

Whoever modded the above "flamebait" has obviously never tried to read Critical Path.... or if they have, they're overly impressed with hyphenated nonsense words.

Re:R. Buckminster Fullofhimself!

That is the response I usually expect from a self-zeigleblantamous spurion migitar-analphlaxis.

~X~

They 'd find his influence if they read his books

a bunch of wusses in NY who couldn't build a dog house don't impress me much as critics. I will have to RTFA to see if they completely missed his most important influence. As a kid in high school I read Spaceship Earth. That was mid '60s, a world most of you won't remember but be assured...nobody had heard of peak oil or cared much about gas mileage. I have pretty much been for greener and less wasteful ways of doing things ever since.

The Bucky Ball Globe

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.

Sealing domes...

...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)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/09/080609fa_fact_kolbert/?printable=true [newyorker.com]

As a resident of three domes

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.

The Domes Work

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.

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.

Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla

Sounds a bit like Tesla...Genius, no doubt, but likely to never be full understood.

I'd say that comparison is a little unfair to Tesla. Tesla seems nutty, but largely because he was exploring and defining the cutting edge of the science of electricity. Conversely, Fuller seems nutty simply because he was a freakin' nut.

Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla

I went to a talk given by Buckminster Fuller. He was pretty happy that a short time before, some chemists had indeed figured out *how* to craft a buckyball. (They hadn't yet, but had formulated the process). Anyway, he showed off a model of a structure he invented. He created (and showed) a sphere built of sticks and joints held together by tension (not compression). In other words, even when you pressed on it, it redistributed the load via tension.

You may think him a nut, but he did have some engineering talent beyond the norm.

Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity [wikipedia.org]

Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla

You may think him a nut, but he did have some engineering talent beyond the norm.

Given that his first model of a geodesic dome collapsed under its own weight, I'd say it's more likely the engineering "talent" behind its design was chance, in that he happened to discover an interesting 3D geometric pattern. He had no particular knack for engineering. After that first dome collapsed, he tried to claim he intentionally built it too weakly, in order to see where it would fail. No one present was convinced. He imagined his "dymaxion car" would be able to cross any terrain, climb any mountain, and eventually even fly. He had no idea how this would happen, nor did he seem to care--- because he was a "visionary", not an engineer. The guy invented his own map geometry that avoided the use of pi because he found the indeterminate nature of pi "unsatisfying". A distaste for the facts of mathematics is not a trait found in engineers. No, he wasn't an engineer by any stretch of the definition of the word. The guy was a salesman, and what he sold was enthusiasm. He made most of his money on the lecture circuit, which he then blew on his harebrained "Dymaxion" crap, which lost money but generated "buzz", which drew people to his lectures. Good work if you can get it, but he was no engineer.

This article gives a very distorted view.

For once I can't respond with a firm RTFA since the FA is fundamentally clueless. Which since it's in a publication with less genuine interest in technology and engineering than Parade Magazine shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

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.

Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla

Dymaxion car was actually w-a-y ahead of its time. It got 30 mpg in 1933.

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.

Re:not only that

No we're not. They're just so commonplace now that we take them for granted.

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.

Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla

And you probably weren't even born when Fuller was inventing up a storm. He was a genius, period. WAY ahead of his time, and STILL ahead of his time. I had the good fortune to hear Fuller speak when I was in grad school; he was in his early 80's. He walked on to a stage with a small folding chair and weighed in on everything from physics to the environment, and everything in between for THREE HOURS! He didn't repeat one idea; he connected everything. To this day, I have NEVER been exposed to that kind of genius. He was otherworldly - a true Renaissance man.

Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla

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.