Word: dymaxion
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...think of two subjects that go together better than R. Buckminster Fuller and Boris Artzybasheff. "I can't remember when I enjoyed working on a TIME cover more," said Artist Artzybasheff, after he had finished painting Designer Fuller with a background that includes Fuller's radome, Dymaxion Car, tensegrity octahedron, an example of energetic-synergetic geometry, the 4D apartment house, a Dymaxion mobile laboratory, a demonstration of the omniequilateral, omnitriangulated finite system, and the 15 axes interconnecting opposite mid-points of the icosahedron's 30 edges. But all this, being very Artzybasheffesque, was topped by the opportunity...
Today Richard Buckminster Fuller, 68, of Carbondale, Ill. - whose college career never got beyond his freshman midyears-is famous for houses that fly and bathrooms without water, for cars and maps and ways of living bearing the mysterious word "Dymaxion," for things called "octet trusses," "synergetics" and "tensegrity." But he is best known of all for his massive mid-century breakthrough known as the "geodesic dome...
Fuller especially values the transportability and independence of the Dymaxion house. For many reasons--the 20th century's great progress in transportation, modern industry's need for extra large warehouses in the country, and the high taxes and utility costs in town--man can and frequently must live outside of cities. Dymaxion makes this possible...
...cities, whether it is good for man to whimsically move his house from desert to mountaintop to forest without extending his own roots anywhere, does not directly concern Fuller. He wishes only to make possible what others want: he refuses to judge the ethical value of his work. The Dymaxion houses may make Americans even more rootless than they now are, he remarks. "All I'm talking about is a degree of freedom. In the future, those who want can stay on Beacon Hill and those who want can travel...
...those who disdain a mechanistic appearance in house (the Dymaxion house has often been called a "machine for living"), Fuller answers, "There was a moment when industrialism began to advance when men were apprehensive. Such men as Emerson and Thoreau were afraid that everything would become stereotyped. In fact, what has happened in the industrial revolution has been quite the contrary. Different models develop all the time: passenger planes, bombers, small planes, large planes. The species is multiplying fabulously. There's no such thing as a stereotype...