« R. Buckminster Fuller | Main | More on Tensegrity »
October 10, 2006
Wire Structures Save the World
I consider Buckminster Fuller's The Grunch of Giants (Gross Universal Cash Heist) and Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth to be two very accessible texts that could be read by a large audience and have the potential to significantly alter the way that people responded to the world around them. In these books was able to integrate design, politics, philosophy, sciences, engineering and humanities into a text that was accessible to the average person.
These two excerpts from Synergetics and Tensegrity, on the other hand, were highly complicated and verbose. I get the impression that they're exclusively intended for engineers and scientists. But they do give you a window into the unique, complex and multi-disciplinary thinking of Buckminster Fuller.
It's disappointing to read about the rejection of the geodesic dome by the scientific and engineering communities. Researching on the Internet, I found that aside from the everyday children's playground, a surprisingly few domes were actually built and continue to be used. Especially considering their potential to house a large number of people for a minimum costs.
As a cyclist, I'm also embarrassed to say that I've never noticed the complexity of the design of the bicycle wheel. Given a sketch book, I've always drawn the "artillery wheel", with the spokes going directly through the centre of the wheel. I'd also never considered the "tensionally spoked" bicycle wheel to be a "reversal of humanity's structural strategy".
Posted by Jeremy Rotsztain at October 10, 2006 03:01 PM