Word: dymaxion
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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...
...just imported from France. Fuller's 4D (for Fourth Dimension) title for the house seemed drab to the promotion-minded store executives; they assigned a couple of high-powered word-sculptors to work out a new word for it. After two days of hectic brainstorming, the result was "dymaxion"-vaguely compounded of "dynamic," "maximum" and "ion." Marshall Field copyrighted it in Fuller's name, and in the years to come Bucky turned it into what amounted to a personal trademark. Today he explains that it means the "maximum gain of advantage from the minimal energy input...
...Administration. The war also brought Fuller another change: for the first time since he started his life over again in 1927, he was able to originate something that was not "anticipatory" but actually put to use: adapting mass-produced grain storage silos for military living units. Hundreds of these "Dymaxion Deployment Units" saw service in the Pacific and the Persian Gulf before restrictions tightened on steel and the project ground to a halt...
...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...