0 Geodesic Structures
1The vertexes of the geometric figures which form Fuller’s ‘‘systems’’ are points which determine great circles on the surface of a sphere. In modern geometry, as we have seen, any arc of a great circle is called a ‘‘geodesic.’’
2 When Fuller began to construct domes that were essentially networks of spherical triangles formed by the inter-crossing great circles, he called these structures ‘‘Geodesic.’’
3 The three sides of a spherical triangle are formed by three great circles. A complete over-all network of great circles can be defined as a ‘‘grid’’; since to form triangles a grid must have lines extending in three directions, Fuller regarded the Geodesic dome as a three-way grid of great circles.
4 It is not practical to catalog the thousand or more Geodesic domes constructed between 1948 and 1959 by Fuller, his associates, his companies, his licensee corporations, and his university students. It suffices to note that once the Geodesic idea got going it began—as Eugene Field once predicted of Chicago—to make culture hum.
5 In 1952 the Ford Motor Company became the first industrial organization to be licensed under Fuller’s patents. Under this license they had constructed the 93- foot aluminum and plastic dome over the Dearborn Rotunda Building. Fuller considers the Ford Geodesic Dome as the fulfillment of his 1927 prediction of a quarter-century gestation period for his Dymaxion enterprise. The dome arrived on schedule. Fuller refers to his first customer as ‘‘Mr. Industry himself.’’
6 Of great importance were the Geodesic radomes Fuller began producing in 1955 for the frozen tundra and icy hills of the U. S. Air Force’s DEW (Distant Early Warning) line—the 3,000 mile strip of radar installations which clings to the northern rim of Alaska and Canada. Because of the violent and uncertain weather along the Arctic Circle, the Air. Force required a structure that could be flown knocked-down to site, and then set up in the 20-hour margin of predictable good weather. The installation, when completed, was required to withstand a 210-mile-per-hour wind, and to be fabricated from materials which would be invisible to the radar’s microwave beam. A radar beam is reflected by metal.
7 Fuller responded with domes 55 feet in diameter, made of fiberglass plastic. Standing 40 feet high, these domes in 1954 were the largest plastic structures that had ever been built. They were assembled on delivery, not in 20 but 14 hours; and they withstood static load testing for wind velocities in excess of 220 miles per hour.
8 By the time the Air Force radomes were constructed across the DEW line, the Marines had about 300 Fuller domes in use, some in the Antarctic, some around the equator. Fuller’s 4D ‘‘anticipatory’’ realism of 1927 had at last begun to orbit; his structures, delivered in the air ocean, had spiralled the earth.
9 Another innovation was Fuller’s paper dome; two such domes, manufactured by the Container Corporation of America, were sent, on invitation, to Italy—to be shown at Milan’s international design exhibition, the Tenth Triennale, in 1954.
10 The domes were awarded the Triennale’s Gran Premio, the highest prize given to any participating country. The award was ironic since the United States had no official entry at the Triennale; Fuller’s exhibit was a consequence of his exuberance, his dedicated belief in Dymaxion-Geodesic values, and the fact that he was able to muster enough support to lob his structures across the Atlantic.
11 In Fuller’s opinion, however, the paper Geodesic domes were anticipatory rather than actual; they bear the same relation to the corrugated paper available today as the 4D house bore to the soft aluminum which was the only aluminum available in 1927. Even in 1954 Kraft paper having exceptional ‘‘wet tensile strength’’ had been developed—‘‘wet strength’’ meaning the ability of the paper to retain its structural quality when saturated. But in 1954 corrugated paper board with good wet compressive strength had not yet been developed. When wet, corrugated paper board folded up like an accordion. To avoid the collapse of the Triennale and other paperboard domes, Fuller covered them with vinyl ‘‘bathing caps,’’ aluminum foil, and other water impervious materials. He has delayed, however, any production enterprise in this area. High wet compression strength papers have already been demonstrated successfully in the laboratory, but they are not yet industrially available. When they become so, Fuller proposes to license the paperboard domes for mass production.
12 Large paper manufacturing mills have the capacity to produce 3000 domes per day, each dome with a floor area of 1000 square feet. Fuller estimates that domes of this type could be retailed in the $500 price range, that is, at approximately 50¢per square foot. A concrete floor would cost about $200. The autonomous ‘‘mechanical package’’ for the domes—sanitary facilities, cooking and heating units—could be rolled in under such a dome for another $2000 purchase price or rented on a trail-it-yourself basis for a dollar per day. The conclusion Fuller draws is that with this type of structure, people, in time, may be able to enjoy high standard dwelling advantages at costs readily met out of a single year’s income.
13 The U. S. Department of Commerce decided to set up a Geodesic dome as its Pavilion in the 1956 International Trade Fair, at Kabul, Afghanistan. What followed was perhaps an historical speed record for engineering planning, manufacture, and construction. The project contract was signed May 23rd. Seven days later all designs, calculations, engineering plans had been completed. By the end of June, the entire dome had been manufactured and packaged, ready for air shipment to Kabul in the company of a single engineer. The dome was light enough and compact enough to be flown from America to Afghanistan in one DC-4 plane. It was designed to be erected anywhere, by workmen speaking any language, who were in no way trained or briefed for the operation. Directed only by one Geodesic engineer, the Afghans fastened blue-ended dome parts to other parts whose ends were blue. Red ends were matched to red ends. And forty-eight hours after the arrival of the air shipment, the Afghans found that they had erected a great dome. A stranger, ambling innocently into Kabul, might reasonably have concluded that the Afghans were the most skilled craftsmen.
14 The Kabul dome, like Fuller’s Air Force radomes, established another historical ‘‘first’’; it was, in 1956, the world’s largest Geodesic structure, 100 feet in diameter, 35 feet high at the center, it provided a clear-span, entirely uninterrupted floor area of approximately 8,000 square feet. The dome frame was formed by 480 aluminum tubes, three inches in diameter. The frame weighed 9,200 pounds; the nylon skin, 1,300 pounds.
15 A signal feature of the dome’s ‘‘informational’’ value, at Kabul, was the fact that the dome attracted far greater attention, and attendance than all other exhibits including the Russian and the Chinese Communist. Both groups had spent months and many times the cost of the U. S. exhibit, in the preparation of their special pavilions.
16 Capitalizing on this success, the United States government arranged to have Geodesic domes set up at other international trade fairs. The Department of Commerce had now become interested in the kudos value of Geodesic domes. The Geodesics, it was argued, dramatized American ingenuity, vision, and technological dynamism; as structures to house American trade exhibits they would be tangible symbols of progress. Fuller’s three-way grids were better propaganda than double-meaning speeches broadcast to regions in which radios were scarce. Domes as large as the Kabul dome, and larger, were flown from country to country, girdling the globe; and many of these also set attendance records. Within a short space, Fuller’s domes were seen in Poznan, Casablanca, Tunis, Salonika, Istanbul, Madras, Delhi, Bombay, Rangoon, Bangkok, Tokyo, and Osaka.
17 The breakthrough to large-scale industrial marketing of the Geodesic idea began in the latter part of 1956. Donald Richter, a former student and associate of Fuller’s, had gone to work for Henry J. Kaiser. Like many of Fuller’s students, Richter had become an avid constructor of Geodesic models and had installed one miniscule dome in his office. Kaiser strode through the office one day and saw the model. ‘‘What’s this?’’ Kaiser asked, with reasonable interest. Richter explained; and the consequence of this seemingly accidental event was that Kaiser’s metal-fabricating customers geared up to mass-produce quarter-million-dollar domes.
18 The Geodesic ‘‘building construction,’’ as it is called in the patent application, was covered fully by a U. S. patent (No. 2,682,235) issued to Fuller in June, 1954; and from this time on, all users of the system were required to be licensed by Fuller. Kaiser Aluminum became one of the early licensees. The initial Kaiser project was an aluminum-skinned, 145-foot-diameter auditorium for Henry Kaiser’s Hawaiian Village, in Honolulu. The project construction men were startled by the speed with which the Geodesic dome went up. For Kaiser the speed had almost a shock effect. He wanted to see the dome rise; and the day the workmen started on the structure he hopped a plane from San Francisco, intending to be on hand during the first week’s construction. By the time his plane reached Honolulu, however, the dome was finished. As a dramatic fillip, the Kaiser promotion men arranged to have it formally opened the same night, when it housed an audience of 1,832 and a symphony orchestra.
19 By the end of 1958, Kaiser Aluminum’s fabricator customers had produced eight domes, including one used as a theatre in Fort Worth, Texas, one as a bank in Oklahoma City. The Kaiser organization assumed that there was a probable market for at least one dome to every American town large enough to use a community center. The domes are now available in a number of sizes, at prices ranging from $50,000 to $190,000, exclusive of foundation and interior detail. The most publicized Kaiser-erected Fuller dome of 1959, however, was the Geodesic dome housing the United States exhibit at the World’s Fair in Moscow. It was on seeing this dome that Nikita Khrushchev exclaimed, ‘‘I would like to have J. Buckingham Fuller come to Russia and teach our engineers.’’
20 The largest clear-span enclosure ever to be erected anywhere in the world is the steel-skinned Geodesic structure Fuller’s own company, Synergetics, Inc., designed for the Union Tank Car Company, and which was completed and put into operation at Baton Rouge, La., in October,
- 1958.
- This dome is about 23 times the volumetric size of the dome on St. Peter’s Church in Rome. It has a total clear span (i.e., without posts or obstructions of any kind) of 384 feet; it rises 128 feet at the center. The relation of dimensions to weight and to cost is extraordinary: the dome has a floor area of 115,558 square feet and encloses 15,000,000 cubic feet, yet its total weight is only 1,200 tons. In simple units, this is two ounces of structural weight for every cubic foot the dome encloses. Total cost was less than $10 per square foot.
21 A similar dome, planned of the same dimensions was under construction in Wood River, Illinois, by Union Tank Car Company’s Graver Tank Division, and was to be completed by December, 1959.
22 The Union Tank Car projects were born when the company was scouting for some economic way to construct a railroad car rebuilding and reconditioning plant large enough to accommodate trainloads of cars at a time. It was important to have an enormous span of clear space to permit shuttling of engines and the swing of cars around a central turntable.
23 Union Tank is now a licensee of Fuller’s, and, through its Graver Tank and Manufacturing Company Division, is offering all-steel Geodesic domes at a probable cost of $10 per square foot, or less, in competition with the Kaiser aluminum domes.
24 At the close of 1959, there were more than a hundred licensees operating under Fuller’s cumulative array of patents. He now has patent coverage in many foreign countries, and a number of foreign licensees. And his experiences in past operations have led him to a personal philosophy of patents. In the craft equation, he holds, the patrons have the design initiative. Professional architects and engineers are retained, and rewarded for services rendered, only at the express command of the patron initiator. In the industrial equation, by contrast, a ‘‘comprehensive, anticipatory, design scientist’’ not only takes the initiative in development, but holds it—years in advance of any awareness on the part of industry, the government, or the public, that there is such an initiative to be taken and held.
25 In the industrial equation, as Fuller views it, the designer never renders his service under patronage command. Because of the complexity of industry, and of the economic accounting by industry and the government, the only possible control the individual designer can exercise over the economic inhibition by society of the technical advantages he anticipates on behalf of society, is through the patent. The patent safeguards the designer’s right to protect the future from the inertias of the past. Society, like the guppy, devours its offspring. ‘‘Future comprehensive designers,’’ says Fuller, ‘‘will have to be masters of patent law as well as their other fundamental disciplines—if they are going to be able to preserve the regenerative advantage innate in the individual.’’
26 Of the hundred Fuller industrial licensees, the largest, at this writing, is North American Aviation—a company whose total gross is on the billion dollar level. North American, in 1959, constructed a 250-foot-diameter aluminum Geodesic dome for the American Society for Metals, the official organization of metallurgical scientists. This dome, at the headquarters of the metals society, in Cleveland, was designed by John Kelly, and is a delicate, open structure functioning as a gossamer net arching over the society’s buildings, gardens, and pools. Kelly looks on this dome as a forthright statement of the advances made in the alloying sciences, and as a realization of Fuller’s concept of advancing technology’s ‘‘over-all trend to invisibility.’’
27 Advancing technology, Fuller reasons, crossed the threshold to invisibility in World War I, advancing from wire communications to wireless, from tracked transportation to trackless. Technology’s alloying evolution developed invisible solutions to problems of strength; and these invisible solutions indirectly, in 40 years, have shrunken the world to a one-town community. The real Magic Carpet is an alloy web.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GEODESIC BREAKTHROUGH
28For most of the three decades, following 1927 and the days of 4D, the Dymaxion house, and the Dymaxion car, architectural and national news magazines made frequent reference to Fuller as ‘‘failure prone.’’ Condescending accolades were heaped on his ideas, but the assumption was that nothing would come of them; nothing, it was held, came of the house, the car, the bathroom, and the host of other early prototype developments. Today the picture is quite different. Fuller has suddenly become the conservative industrialists’ ideal of the pioneer scientist. Pictures of his latest projects appear regularly on the front cover of the magazines which symbolize the tycoon press, and both business and the Armed Services have deluged him with construction projects.
29 To keep pace with the demands for his ideas, his technological knowledge, and his computations, and to keep in order his rapidly expanding bookkeeping chores, Fuller organized several corporations wholly owned by him, which channel the licenses for the use of his patents. Geodesics, Inc., handles all government and Armed Services developments; Synergetics, Inc., deals with design and research for all private industrial operations; Plydome, Inc., is one of Fuller’s private research and development companies.
30 There are several explanations for the sudden change-about in the world’s attitude toward Fuller. Long ago Fuller observed that conservatism is part of the normal social process, and that—according to the timetable then in effect—about 25 years were required to bring about general acceptance of an important new idea. Fuller waited out his quarter-century. The praise which is now generally heaped on his head can be attributed in part to another factor: industry, which recently awoke to the vision of the great economies and profit possibilities of Geodesic structures, has tried to side-step Fuller’s patent and found the evasion impossible. Fuller has a hammerlock hold on the construction principles.
31 Fuller attributes his sudden success to the fact that technological developments have caught up with him. His early designs were ‘‘anticipatory,’’ not actual; they required materials which were to come but which were not then in existence, particularly the extremely strong light alloys, and strong, transparent, weather-resistant plastics. ‘‘All you need now is the knowledge of what you want to do—the billion dollars’ worth of anticipatorily scheduled research has been done,’’ he claims, referring to the estimate he made of the cost of producing the true prototype Dymaxion house in 1927. ‘‘But society did it the easy and slow way, which partially accounts for the 300 billion dollar national debt.’’
32 He regards domes as basic environment valves, differentiating human ecological patterns from all other patterns, microcosm from macrocosm, yet permitting a controlled interchange of energy (including heat and light) between the two separated pattern regions. As an environment valve, the Geodesic dome is not limited in size; its span can be anything from a few yards to a few miles; it can envelop living quarters, gardens, lawns, acres, or cities. As an environment valve it can make possible cities of temperate climate domed over in the Arctic, the Antarctic, or at the bottom of the sea. It can shelter the lawns, gardens, and grounds in the midst of which a house is customarily established, thus causing the conventional house to become, if not obsolete, at least increasingly superfluous. To erect an expensive house, with rugged foundations and solid walls, under a highly efficient and relatively inexpensive environment valve would be equivalent to wearing a mink coat in an apartment with central heating.
33 Geodesic domes of sufficient size, covered with a transparent plastic skin, tend to become invisible; the permitted extreme slenderness of supporting struts enable them to escape detection when the radius of the sphere increases beyond a certain limit. The domes can be geared to rise from the ground, or to hug the earth, at the instance of control devices operating pneumatic or hydraulic jacks. Air vents and light-regulating louvres can be introduced at will. Winter heat can be effected locally, with radiant coils coupled to heat-exchange pumps. Privacy and space division, even room and room divisions, can be established in a variety of ways without requiring an architectural imitation of an Italian palazzo, a Norman villa, or the peristyle of a Greek temple. Some alternate possibilities are suggested in the latter part of the book.
34 Yet Fuller puts no undue emphasis on his domes. They are steps in a progression, not an end in themselves. What is important to him in the domes is their Pythagorean overtones—the fact that they are tangible, measurable illustrations of laws fundamental to the nature of the universe, of the spread and temper of energy patterns. He finds a measure of satisfaction in that the domes perform according to the predictions of Energetic Geometry, and that they function as evolving forms in a comprehensive design science.
35 The possibility of the good life for any man depends on the possibility of realizing it for all men; Fuller holds to this credo today as intensely as in 1927, when he organized the first decisive postulates of his synergetic cosmology and its consequent philosophy. And the full life, which encompasses the elements without which neither freedom nor higher social expressions are possible, is a function of society’s ability to turn the energies of the universe to human advantage.
36 All we have to work with, in our span of life, is the energy system of the universe—the system which determines the dynamic structuring of the 92 elements found in nature, and the secondary, tertiary and sequitur phase structures (molecules, crystals, alloys, shelters, vehicles) into which these elemental dynamic patternings can be formed. The universe is what is given to us in experience; it is to be found as an integrated whole, not an assortment of parts. It is a Gestalt.
37 The problem of science, more particularly of a ‘‘comprehensive design science,’’ is to separate out local eddies from the universe as it is experienced, directly or conceptually; to isolate specific instances of the behavior patterns of a general, cosmic energy system, and to turn these to human use. ‘‘I am not a creator,’’ Fuller once said. ‘‘I am a swimmer and a dismisser of irrelevancies. Everything we need to work with is around us, although most of it is initially confusing. To find order in what we experience we must first inventory the total experiences, then temporarily set aside all irrelevancies. I do not invent my thoughts. I merely separate out some local patterns from a confusing whole. The act is a dismissal of pressures. Flight was the discovery bf the lift—not the push.’’
38 At the birth of the twentieth century, the architect Louis Sullivan observed that production steel, which men were insinuating within the stone faces of buildings, was permitting ‘‘stone’’ buildings to assume shapes grotesquely alien to the nature of stone. Sullivan, in Fuller’s view, pioneered a revolution of integrity. He sought to make honest and unashamed statements in materials that expressed society’s new industrial capabilities. He inspired corps of esthetic disciples and emulators. Yet in the stampede of subsequent design exploitation, both his integrity of conception and his philosophic message were lost. The exploiters sidestepped the essence of Sullivan’s phrase, ‘‘Form follows function.’’ They made the words read ‘‘The ends justify the means,’’ ergo, ‘‘Do business at any price.’’
39 In spite of Sullivan’s recognition of the industrial equation—whose myriad patterns are invisible—the building arts, until now, have been pre-empted by the non-industrial, non-priority, catch-as-catch-can crafts. And in this streamlined chaos, architects have become as increasingly marginal as journeymen, tinkers, and drivers of hansom cabs. Like patients who diagnose their own ailments and sketch for the surgeon the operation they want, clients design their own buildings, and then demand of the architect his blueprints for action. The creative architect is hamstrung. Not only do his clients tell him what kind of building they want, and how much it should cost, but community codes, building laws, and bank mortgage biases have become instruments to the tyranny. Architects have left to them little more than the privilege of being exterior-interior decorators to skeletons prefabricated by the major steel companies.
40 Yet Sullivan’s slogan held as a justification for all the late architectural stereotypes. The more glass and shiny metal used in the decorative ensemble, the more it was claimed that form was following function. The functions were not techniques for doing more with less; the functions were shine and gleam. In contrast with this distortion of the significant virtue of form in the building field, where form is conceived only as obvious structure, the industrial equation, Fuller points out, was creating decisive advantages in invisible structures. The Model T Ford is a case in point. Henry Ford’s apparent doggedness in continuing to produce the Model T over a period of years, concealed the fact that the Model T was improving functionally, while competitive cars were improving only in cushioning and external styling. Before Ford finished with the Model T, he had introduced 54 different alloys of steel into it. It was these alloys which gave the car its service durability and pioneered Ford’s success. Ford was improving his cars more rapidly than his competitors, but the improvements were invisible. Visible form could no longer follow the sub-visible functions.
41 Fuller, today, sees a new industrial world forming—one that is a decisive step forward in progression to ‘‘a second derivative and surprisingly satisfactory world era.’’ It is symbolized by the Geodesic dome of the American Society for Metals; for here the notion of doing more with less, as expressed in the trend toward invisibility, is dramatized by the dome’s open structure which is pure system integrity. And he takes it as a straw in the new wind that the dome was fabricated by the most powerful of the aircraft corporations.
42 When Sputnik rocketed successfully into orbit, Fuller maintains, it shot down the military airplane. This signal act closed the half century in which the world’s larger nations put behind the airplane weapon a subsidy adding up, in capital enterprise, to more than two trillion dollars. The new controlled, unmanned missiles made the airplane, by comparison, virtually stand still in the air; as a weapon it was finished. The immediate consequence of this military reality was that the two trillion dollar air frame and air power plant industry was roughly thrown out of its kept-mistress luxury quarters. It was constrained to seek a living on its own.
43 To Fuller, this event was not a catastrophe, but an opportunity to begin ‘‘the fundamental reorientation of the whole vital economic patterning of man.’’ This was the day he had foreseen, some 32 years earlier—the day when man’s highest knowledge and comprehensive resources could be applied directly to his living needs, instead of being assigned exclusively to negative functions.
44 With the two-trillion-dollar subsidy of high technical capabilities now tentatively available for living rather than military problems, Fuller believes that this reorientation is about to become a reality. The touchstone is the aircraft industry. In 1946, North American Aviation, together with Douglas, Boeing, Grumman, and others, had looked on Fuller’s Dymaxion house as a possible, if not probable, post-war field for their respective enterprises. But the Cold War’s cumulative half-trillion defense budgeting—which produced a jet age—temporarily shunted the industry from the building arts. It postponed the last great slum clearance project of technology.
45 But Sputnik destroyed the airplane weapon. The aircraft industry, paced by North American, is in a position to inaugurate a world-circling building and building mechanics service industry which can fly whole cities into position overnight, as great fleets sail into great harbors, fundamentally in grace with a vast environment. And as the great fleets can sail on, to continue their usefulness wherever they are needed, Fuller holds, so may the environmental facilities of man be repositioned about the earth, giving him access to the dwellings of yesterday, the productive resources of tomorrow, and a vaster reach of the universe gained without political revolution or panacea.