Word: fullers
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From Van Gogh's letters have already been quarried bestsellers, psychoanalytical monographs and at least one better-than-average movie, Lust for Life (TIME, Sept. 24, 1956). But a fuller and more vivid story than any of these is revealed with the publication of The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (New York Graphic Society; $50), a handsome three-volume set that includes 194 tipped-in facsimiles of the illustrations Vincent sketched into his letters, with the heedless profusion of a man who had far more confidence in his draftsmanship than in his vocabulary. No more stark and intimate...
...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...