The World of Buckminster Fuller

Recommended viewing !!

BBC iPlayer archive

MichaelG.

[This posting has been removed]

As well as the geodetic dome he was responsible for some of the longest and most convoluted sentences ever written.

He also wrote a history of the world which included a section on Mrs Buckminster Fuller choosing curtains.

He was a student party animal which got him expelled from Harvard.

An interesting man.

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Indicating, perhaps, a brain comparable with that of John 'Longitude' Harrison.

MichaelG.

I think it was he who, when a client complained that the roof of his new house was leaking, replied "of course it is, that's how you know it's a roof"...

Michael Gilligan:

Thanks for the pointer to a fascinating programme.

I have long been an RBF fan and am sure they could have made a dozen such programmes without exhausting the scope of his work.

The Dymaxion car he came up with was a spectacular flop. Looking at it, I can not figure out what the heck he was thinking......

I did think the geodesic dome was a clever design until I was involved ( in a very small way) in the attempted design of repair equipment to service the skin on the one at Ontario Place in Toronto Canada. It was not designed to be worked on, and even the weight of a couple of repair people on it could cause major issues, let alone cantilevered work staging. There was a tremendous amount of unusable waste place inside, too. Funky but not too practical.

My colleagues at Honeywell who worked on the HVAC system for the OP dome used to talk about what a nightmare it was to heat and ventilate a base-truncated sphere. One guy got visibly agitated if RBF's name was mentioned - he sat in on several meetings with RBF during the Ontario Place dome's teething troubles, which I gather were less than productive.

Pretty much sums up the Sixties.

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Was that the Cinesphere, Jeff ?

MichaelG.

Thanks for the suggestion, a very interesting programme. Sadly however, no mention of his Dymaxion map - far more attractive than the ghastly (but very PC) Gall-Peters projection.

Brian

Yes, a very neat design.

Yes, the Cinesphere. Complete with original 75 mm film mechanical drive IMAX projector.

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Thanks, Jeff

It looks an impressive facility [despite your misgivings about maintenance]

... Not sure whether Zeiss or Fuller would admit liability for the dome design though [*]

MichaelG.

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[*] Cinesphere's is a 35 metres (115 ft) wide triodetic-domed structure, akin to a geodesic dome,

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinesphere

But here's the real deal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOIkhLzftuA

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 23/06/2019 23:20:12

Re. Zeiss

I've just found this excellent short paper: **LINK**

http://www.academia.edu/11738855/From_the_First_Planetarium_to_the_Conquest_of_the_Moon

MichaelG.

The programme raised an interesting point about Buckminster-Fuller, which was he had good ideas, worked hard to get them accepted, and then usually walked away just before success. Almost as if ideas were more important than results.

Tesla(AC power), Armstrong (FM Radio), Pyke (Project Habakkuk), Goodyear(Rubber) all behaved similarly. And, though not at all in the same class as the gents listed above, me! Thinking of all those part-complete Quorns, is failure to finish a common character flaw in us techies?

Dave