2013-04-25
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World Game by Buckminter Fuller, from Dennis Crompton’s Ephemera - Structures at the Archigram Archival Project.
2012-05-01
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Buckminster Fuller’s design for a geodesic dome to cover the Brooklyn Dodgers stadium, via Mathias Crawford (here quoting Progressive Architecture):
Those jaunty wearers of the World Series crown may also sport a geodesic dome when they play ball in Brooklyn. Research into design of a quarter-sphere dome 750 feet in diameter and high enough at center field to top a 30-story office building (as shown in schematic section, containing Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Lever House) has been started here by R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor and patent holder of Geodesic Structures, aided by a team of 25 graduate students in the Princeton School of Architecture.
2012-04-03
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Housing in towers, a 1964 proposal by Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao for Harlem in upper Manhattan.
(I’ve seen the proposal for a dome over Manhattan, but these cooling-tower like structures are new to me.)
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A Dymaxion air-ocean map, from the The Utopian Impulse exhibitio, as seen in the New York Times story, R. Buckminster Fuller’s Comeback at a San Francisco Museum.
See also: the map on display at SFMOMA.
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Two prints by Buckminster Fuller and Chuck Byrne from the series Inventions: Twelve Around One, on display at SFMOMA as part of The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area (via the Bay Citizen’s review).
(I posted my own review of the exhibition at my blog on husk.org.)
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The Triton Foundation / Buckminster Fuller proposal for a floating tetrahedral city in San Francisco Bay:
From The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller:
Such tetrahedronal floating cities would measure two miles to an edge, and can be floated in a triangularly patterned canal. This will make the whole structure earthquake-proof. The whole city can be floated out into the ocean to any point and anchored. The depth of its founda tions will go below the turbulence level of the seas so that the floating tetrahedronal is land will be, in effect, a floating triangular atoll. Its two mile long “boat” foundations will constitute landing strips for jet airplanes. Its interior two mile harbor will provide refuge for the largest and smallest ocean vessels.
From Cracked’s list of “The 6 Most Insane Cities Ever Planned”:
Triton anticipated a lower maximum population of just over 100,000 people, and was also to be the first fully organic city, complete with a desalination system to re-circulate ocean water. Schematics for Triton were sent to the United States Navy’s Bureau of Ships, to check it for “water-worthiness,” stability and organic capabilities, then off to the Bureau of Yards and Docks to see whether or not they could even build this thing, specifically at the cost they had projected. Both Bureaus gave the thumbs up, and the Navy’s cost estimate came within 10% of Buckminster’s. And that’s probably the craziest part of Triton: At every stage, it was going to work.
From the description of A Study of a Prototype Floating Community at Amazon:
Triton was a concept for an anchored floating city for 100,000 people that would be located just offshore and connected with bridges to the mainland. When President Johnson left office he took the model with him and installed it in his Presidential Library in Texas. This is the complete design report.
Now that’s what I call a utopian impulse.
2012-02-14
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Forthcoming at SFMOMA, The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area.
(I’m looking forward to a device with iOS 5 so I can straighten photos.)
2011-06-24
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From Stylepark’s article, Anyone who can build with peas and toothpicks must be a genius, The Dymaxion Car in front of 30 St Mary Axe in London. Photograph © Gregory Gibbons.
