R. buckminster fuller

1. R. Buckminster Fuller

2. Early Life Richard Buckminster Fuller   was born on July 12, 1895 in  Milton, Massachusetts , U.S. and died on July 1, 1983 in  Los Angeles. He was a U.S . engineer and architect who developed the  Geodesic Dome , the only large dome that can be set directly on the ground as a complete structure, and the only practical kind of building that has no limiting dimensions ( i.e. , beyond which the structural strength must be insufficient ). He was also a poet and a philosopher, he was noted for unorthodox ideas on global issues.

3. Education He attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and after that began studying at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House. He was expelled from Harvard twice: first for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe, and then, after having been readmitted, for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest.’’ Many years later he received a Sc.D. from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

4. Best-Known Work For the next half-century, Fuller developed many ideas, designs and inventions, particularly regarding practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. He documented his life, philosophy and ideas scrupulously by a daily diary (later called the  Dymaxion Chronofile ), and by twenty-eight publications.

5. Concepts and Buildings His concepts and buildings include : Dymaxion house  (1928) Aerodynamic Dymaxion car (1933) Prefabricated compact bathroom cell (1937) Dymaxion Deployment Unit  (1940) Dymaxion Map  of the world (1946) Tensegrity  structures (1949) Geodesic dome  for Ford Motor Company (1953) The  World Game  (1961) and the World Game Institute (1972) Montreal Biosphère  (1967), United States pavilion at  Expo 67

6. Design Philosophy and Principles His designs focused around being more efficient and lower cost. Design principle: “ Ephemeralization ” which translates to …Doing More With Less

7. Practical A chievements Fuller introduced a number of concepts, and helped develop others. However , more than 500,000 geodesic domes have been built around the world and many are in use. According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute ,  the largest geodesic-dome structures are : Seagaia Ocean Dome :  Miyazaki, Japan , 216 m (710 ft) Multi-Purpose Arena:  Nagoya, Japan , 187 m (614 ft) Tacoma Dome :  Tacoma , Washington, USA, 162 m (530 ft) Superior Dome : Northern Michigan Univ.  Marquette, Michigan , USA, 160 m (525 ft) Walkup Skydome : Northern Arizona Univ.  Flagstaff, Arizona , USA, 153 m (502 ft) Poliedro de Caracas :  Caracas , Venezuela, 145 m (475 ft) Round Valley High School Stadium:  Springerville - Eagar, Arizona , USA, 134 m (440 ft) Former Spruce Goose Hangar:  Long Beach, California , USA, 126 m (415 ft). Formosa Plastics Storage Facility:  Mai Liao ,  Taiwan , 123 m (402 ft). Union Tank Car Maintenance Facility:  Baton Rouge, Louisiana USA, 117 m (384 ft), destroyed in November 2007. Lehigh Portland Cement Storage Facility:  Union Bridge, Maryland USA, 114 m (374 ft). The Eden Project , Cornwall, United Kingdom

8. Geodesic Domes Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in  North Carolina  during the summers of 1948 and 1949 ,  serving as its Summer Institute director in 1949. There, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began reinventing a project that would make him famous: the geodesic dome. Although the geodesic dome had been created some 30 years earlier by Dr. Walther Bauersfeld , Fuller was awarded United States patents. He is credited for popularizing this type of structure. One of his early models was first constructed in 1945 at Bennington College in Vermont, where he frequently lectured. In 1949, he erected his first geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. It was 4.3 meters (14 ft) in diameter and constructed of aluminum aircraft tubing and a vinyl-plastic skin. The U.S. government recognized the importance of his work, and employed his firm Geodesics, Inc. in Raleigh, North Carolina to make small domes for the marines. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the world. His first "continuous tension – discontinuous compression" geodesic dome (full sphere in this case) was constructed at the University of Oregon Architecture School in 1959 with the help of students .

9. A  geodesic dome  is a spherical or partial-spherical shell structure or lattice shell based on a network of great circles (geodesics) on the surface of a sphere. The geodesics intersect to form triangular elements that have local triangular rigidity and also distribute the stress across the structure. When completed to form a complete sphere, it is a  geodesic sphere . A dome is enclosed, unlike open geodesic structures such as playground climbers. Typically a geodesic dome design begins with an  icosahedron  inscribed in a hypothetical sphere, tiling each triangular face with smaller triangles, then projecting the vertices of each tile to the sphere. The endpoints of the links of the completed sphere are the projected endpoints on the sphere's surface. If this is done exactly, sub-triangle edge lengths take on many different values, requiring links of many sizes. To minimize this, simplifications are made. The result is a compromise of triangles with their vertices lying approximately on the sphere. The edges of the triangles form approximate geodesic paths over the surface of the dome. Geodesic designs can be used to form any curved, enclosed space. Standard designs tend to be used because unusual configurations may require complex, expensive custom design of each strut, vertex and panel.

10. Montreal Biosphère

11. The  Biosphère  is a museum in Montreal dedicated to the  environment. It is located at  Parc Jean- Drapeau , on  Île Sainte-Hélène in the former pavilion of the United States for the 1967 World Fair Expo 67 . It features exhibitions and activities which are entertaining and educational to better understand major environmental issues related to water, air, climate change, the sustainable development and responsible consumption . The Biosphère changed its name in 2007 to become an environment museum.

12. It's a place where you can amble through a rainforest, the Arctic Circle, rolling woodlands, or along the raw Atlantic oceanfront. Inside the Montreal Biosphere, the four ecosystems house thousands of animal and plant species. The Gulf of St. Lawrence has an underwater observatory where you can watch cod feeding alongside lobsters and sea urchins in the tidal pools. The appearance of the Laurentian Forest varies widely with the seasons .

13. Interior View

14. The America Pavilion for the 1967 Expo in Montreal was as high as a 20-storey building. The building originally formed an enclosed structure of steel and acrylic cells, 76 metres (250 ft) in diameter and 62 metres (200 ft) high . During the Exposition, it contained 6 inner floors housing American artefacts . The architects for the interior exhibition space were from Golden Metak Productions. Visitors had access to 4 large theme platforms divided into 7 levels. The building included a 37m long escalator, the longest ever built at the time. The  Minirail  monorail ran through the pavilion.

15. Side View

16. In 1990, Environment Canada purchased the site to turn it into an interactive museum, showcasing and exploring the water ecosystems of the Great Lakes-Saint Lawrence River regions. The new museum was completed in 1995 and is currently in operation. A complex system of shades was used to control the internal temperature. Appearances in movies The structure is used prominently in the original  Battlestar Galactica  television series episode, "Greetings from Earth". Scenes for Robert Altman's post-apocalyptic ice age film  Quintet  were shot on site as well.

17. The structure was covered by a transparent outer shell composed of tinted acrylic panels, which later burned in a 1976 fire, shutting down the building for fourteen years.

18. Dymaxion The word  Dymaxion  is a brand name that  Fuller  used for several of his inventions . It is a  portmanteau (a combination of two or more words and their definitions, into one new word) of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension . A brand name was needed for the display of Fuller's first architectural model, later to be known as the  Dymaxion house, at the Marshall Field's department store in Chicago. In order to invent a word, a wordsmith hired by Marshall Field's spent two days listening to Fuller and trying to get a feel for the type of language he used. He then played with syllables from typical Fuller words, until he and Fuller agreed on the word " Dymaxion ". Fuller was excited about the word and used it for many of his inventions during the decades to follow, including the  Dymaxion house, the  Dymaxion car, and the  Dymaxion World Map. He also renamed his elaborate journal, in which he sought to document his life as an experiment with the greatest possible detail, as theDymaxion Chronofile .

19. Other Designs Dymaxion Car: seats 11, provided high mileage and ran on 3 wheels Dymaxion Map: Accurate view of the world Accurate to 2%

20. Dymaxion House

21. The  Dymaxion House  was developed by Fuller  to address several perceived shortcomings with existing homebuilding techniques . It was completed in 1929 after two years of development, and later redesigned in 1945. Fuller wanted to mass produce a bathroom and a house. His first " Dymaxion " design was based on the design of a grain bin. The Siberian grain-silo house was the first system in which Fuller noted the "dome effect." Many installations have reported that a dome induces a local vertical heat-driven vortex that sucks cooler air downward into a dome if the dome is vented properly (a single overhead vent, and peripheral vents ). Fuller adapted the later units of the grain-silo house to use this effect.

22. The final design of the Dymaxion house used a central vertical stainless-steel strut on a single foundation. Structures similar to the spokes of a bicycle-wheel hung down from this supporting the roof, while beams radiated out supported the floor. Wedge-shaped fans of sheet metal aluminum formed the roof, ceiling and floor. Each structure was assembled at ground level and then winched up the strut. It was a prototype proposed to use a packaging toilet, water storage and a convection-driven ventilator built into the roof. It was designed for the stormy areas of the world: temperate oceanic islands, and the Great Plains of North America, South America and  Eurasia. In most modern houses, laundry, showers and commodes are the major water uses, with drinking, cooking and dish-washing consuming less than 20 liters per day. The Dymaxion house was intended to reduce water use by a  greywater system , a packaging commode, and a "fogger" to replace showers. The fogger was based on efficient compressed-air and water degreasers, but with much smaller water particles to make it comfortable.

23. Two Dymaxion houses were prototyped – one indoor (the " Barwise " house) and one outdoor (the "Danbury" house ). No Dymaxion house built according to Fuller's intentions was ever constructed and lived in . Since there was no evidence of the crucial internal rain-gutter system, some elements of the rain collecting system were omitted from the restored exhibit. The roof was designed to wick water inside and drip into the rain-gutter and then to the cistern, rather than have a difficult-to-fit, perfectly waterproof roof. There was to be a waterless packaging toilet that deftly shrink-wrapped the waste for pickup for later composting. During the prototyping process, the idea for the packaging toilet was replaced immediately by a conventional septic system because the packaging plastic was not available. Other features worked as advertised, notably the heating, and the passive air conditioning system, based on the "dome effect."

24. Section Dymaxion Bathroom

25. Wichita House (1944-1946)

26. Fuller saw new potential to revisit ideas he had investigated with the Dymaxion House in the booming postwar American economy in 1944. With the necessary money and support in place, he moved into the Beech Aircraft Factory in Wichita, Kansas, where he would research an updated Dymaxion and introduce it to the public. Because of the earlier financial failure, Fuller had to convince his investors that what he was researching was, in fact,  not  a prefabricated house. Fuller was able to claim that the house was not, in fact, prefabricated by toying with a rigid trade definition that identified prefabrication as the "fabrication of semifinished products such as panels and parts that are used at the site as a subassembly .“ The Wichita House was delivered as a whole. Fuller's system therefore marks a bifurcating moment when two strains of veritably prefabricated construction become evident: the panel system of flat parts (known largely today as "flat pack") and the newer modular system of prefinished pieces .

27. Formally the house was refined from the hexagonal, faceted face of the Dymaxion to a hemispherical form with a monocoque dome and a ventilator at its cap. Rather than being suspended a full story in the air, the Wichita House sat just a few inches off the ground . The central mast no longer contained an elevator and laundry facilities, retaining only its function as a utility core. Fuller's monocoque drop-in Dymaxion bathroom, which he had patented, was added to the layout. The gentle curves created a more satisfying interior flow: the palette of finishes on the inside were more refined and better constructed. Like the Dymaxion , the Wichita was intended to be a "dwelling machine," and Fuller pursued this notion in lectures and writing, suggesting that industrial design and architecture had never been more compatible. Fuller and his team had to leave the Wichita plant in 1947. Like the Dymaxion , the Wichita House would enter the annals of replicable utopian homes that would never see the light of day .

28. Ground Floor Plan

29.  Jay Baldwin, who worked with Fuller, described the Wichita house, which has a single pole as it's structural support. "Bucky thought that tearing up the land was a ridiculous thing to do". The aerodynamic shape was designed to reduce wind resistance- it was hurricane proof. Convection currents inside kept it cool. It used very little material-"nature works with minimal energy" and the entire house "weighed less than two volvos’ ’. While building an entire house out of aluminum looks less environmentally correct today, in the immediate postwar era there were empty aircraft factories and a lot of aluminum from airplanes to be recycled.