Word: fullers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years R. (for Richard) Buckminster Fuller has been the gadfly, delight and despair of the technological world. Beginning with a design for a ten-story apartment house that he hoped would be dropped from a Zeppelin on the North Pole, he designed projects ranging from a house that was hung from a duralumin mast to bathrooms with no running water (only an air hose squirting 90% air, 10% water, no soap needed). Among his other Dymaxion ("dynamic" plus "maximum service") products have been a three-wheel, rear-engined automobile and a house that can be stowed away in an aluminum...
...surprise of his many detractors, success has finally arrived for 63-year-old Bucky Fuller. His geodesic domes are popping up like mushrooms all over the surface of the globe. Essence of the geodesic dome is to frame a sphere (the greatest possible space with the least possible surface) with combinations of tetrahedrons ("the simplest finite system you can have"), making a lightweight, easily assembled structure of wide span and low cost...
...necessary when the troops moved on. (The Marine Corps nicknamed the disposable domes "Kleenex houses," called them "the first major basic improvement in mobile military shelters in the past 2,600 years.") The U.S. needed a trade fair building in Afghanistan that could be flown in by DC-4; Fuller provided one that could be assembled in 48 hours. Covered with polyester Fiberglas, geodesic domes proved just the thing for the DEW Line radomes. Says he, with the satisfaction of the man whose mousetrap has at last clicked: "The DEW Line radomes stretch from western Alaska to Baffin Island...
Emphatically not an architect ("If anything, I'm a research department for architecture"), Bucky Fuller launched his war with traditional technology when he was bounced out of Harvard (in 1917). Bucky's response was to develop his own brand of "synergetic and energetic geometry." By 1927 he was consoling himself for industry's indifference to his multiple schemes with the contention that it would take science 25 years to make his ideas feasible. He was about right. In 1952, after a quarter-century of living off lecture platforms, consultant fees and his friends, Fuller was approached...
...Fuller delights in the discomfiture of his critics. When a geodesic radome was being tested at M.I.T., he chortles, "their statistics showed it wouldn't stand up in a 15 m.p.h. wind." Fact is, radomes have stood up to blasts of 210 m.p.h...