From <@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU:owner-LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU> Sun Feb 5 03:20:08 1995 Received: from netaxs.com (root@netaxs.com [198.69.186.1]) by access.netaxs.com (8.6.9/8.6.9) with ESMTP id DAA08677 for ; Sun, 5 Feb 1995 03:20:08 -0500 Received: from UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu (ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu [128.205.2.1]) by netaxs.com (8.6.9/8.6.9) with SMTP id DAA02960 for ; Sun, 5 Feb 1995 03:20:05 -0500 Message-Id: <199502050820.DAA02960@netaxs.com> Received: from UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU by UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 7973; Sun, 05 Feb 95 03:19:48 EST Received: from UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV@UBVM) by UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 3777; Sun, 5 Feb 1995 03:19:44 -0500 Date: Sun, 5 Feb 1995 03:19:41 -0500 From: "L-Soft list server at UBVM (1.8a)" Subject: File: "GEODESIC LOG9310" To: "Christopher J. Fearnley" Status: RO ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 23:23:23 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: MR BRUCE A JOHNSON Subject: Other Bucky Topics I have been following the discussion of Domes and Dome buidling and found the messages posted to be informative and interesting, but I think that there is more to "Bucky" than his investion of the GeoDesic. I am interested in any views that anyone has on his published works, and some of his earlier inventions. In particular, I have always been fascinated by the Dimaxion House. I have seen a picture of a model of it in "Critical Path", and wonder if there are any standing examples of the Dimaxion house standing anywhere in the U.S., or elsewhere. What ever bacame of the 2 models of the Dimaxion car that Fuller had built. I had heard that one was purchased and used by conductor Igor Stavinsky. Does anyone know what happened to these 2 examples of "Bucky's" only car? I have read "Grunch of Giants" which is what got me hooked on "Bucky", and am currently whinding my way though "Critical Path". I have "Synergistics" but have never gotten around to tackling it to date. Any views or reviews would of these books or other Fuller books would also be welcome. Bruce Johnson ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1993 21:08:06 GMT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: Ross Keatinge Organization: Public Access Internet Services, Auckland New Zealand Subject: Old Man River, Failures etc Thanks for the interesting information on Old Man River project etc. It is unfortunately what I suspected. Assuming what you (Alex) say is correct (I've got no reason to doubt you) I can't help but wonder about some of the other 'successes' mentioned in his books. Critical Path definitely gives the impression that the City Council was all enthusiastically behind Old Man River and it was all going to happen any day now. I guess there is a fine line between positive thinking and ignoring the reality of a situation. I get the feeling that a lot of Bucky's projects had potential but never quite got off the ground. I guess the question that must be asked is were the projects like Old Man River and 'cooling towers' in Harlem just too different for people to accept at the time or were they actually a bit impractical when you get down to the nuts and bolts detail. The U.N. Geoscope in NYC sounded exciting but I guess to most people it would have been an interesting but very expensive sculpture. The most fundamental message I have got from his writings is about wealth. I cringe when I hear or read about a 'worldwide recession' and a 'depressed economy'. I know it sounds like common sense but I find it difficult to get people to realise that it is all our own doing. I work for a company which among other things does foreign exchange dealing. I'm not directly involved in but I always find it amusing when they talk about 'The Market' as if it is some alien entity which we have no control over. There has been some currency crises in recent times and I hear phases like "Everybody is watching the market very closly today", or "I hope the dollar doesn't drop any further today". I tend to see the population of the Earth as similar to a group of people living on an island with plenty of natural resources but some are starving because the people can't get their act together even though they have the technology to transport resources around the island. The latest 'Time' has a bit about the huge stockpiles of food in Europe they don't quite know what to do with. As for a question to stimulate some discussion: Could somebody please explain their understanding of procession (sp?). The concept is a bit lost on me. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ross Keatinge icosa@bbs.status.gen.nz Auckland, New Zealand. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1993 05:17:43 GMT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: Ross Keatinge Organization: Public Access Internet Services, Auckland New Zealand Subject: Re: Node design/ideas wanted I know of two dome manufacturers in Australia: 'The Dome Company' at 'Tapitallee' near Nowra NSW. They make house and garden domes 5, 7 and 10 metre diameter. I think they also produce them in kitsets so they may be able to help with hubs etc. The contact is: Rob Lusher Phone (044) 460452 The Dome Company PO Box 3043 Nth Nowra NSW 2541 Tapitallee is a rainforest retreat centre who run seminars on alternative technologies etc as well as personal growth type stuff. I gather some of their buildings are domes. I'm thinking of spending some time there. The other is: Bretcod Geodesic Domes 27 Allawah Street Blacktown NSW Phone (02) 621-7952 He makes all sorts of domes. Since his business is selling completely built domes I'm not sure how helpful he would be. I am interested in hearing about the design of the domes you have built. Tom Dosemagen (dosemagt@UWWVAX.UWW.EDU) wrote: Try calling Natural Spaces at 1-800-733-7107. They are a dome manufacturer and sell everything from complete dome packages to just the connector system. They also have a book available called All About Domes that you might be interested in. I am also interested in this. Unfortunately it is not possible to call an American 800 number from outside of the USA. Do they have a normal phone or fax number or postal address ? The original poster in Australia would have the same problem. Regards Ross ------------------------------------------------------------- Ross Keatinge icosa@bbs.status.gen.nz Auckland, New Zealand ------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1993 11:24:21 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: leo elliott <76440.1416@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: precession, et al. October 2, 1993 Charlottesville, VA Ross Keatinge raises some interesting speculations about Bucky's self-promotions and possible over-estimations of his projects' current or future feasibilities. The oldest one I can specifically recall, that seemed the most ordinary, was his "dymaxion bath" (part of the dymaxion house?), illustrated in Marks' "The Dymaxion World of Buckmister Fuller" -- supposedly this two-piece, user-assemblable bath-utility would provide all the normal bath amenities (shower, tub, toilet, sink) with the additional economy of being able to take a very cleansing shower on only about a pint of water, an idea which Bucky says he got from watching how clean the engine-room sailors would get once they came up on deck and stood in the spray of a strong sea mist for a while -- ? Not sure of any data/research ever done by the soap or the plumbing-fixture companies on this particular claim, but according to Bucky, the dymaxion bath (which would also be serviceable in a recto-house, one presumes?) got nixed once the plumbers unions found out how little labor-time it would take to install, possibly even circumventing any requirements for their professional services at all. The clearest example I recall Bucky giving of the notion of "precession" was that from the viewpoint of a waterbug or a jellyfish on the surface of the water, directly in the path of some big ship, which will send out precessional waves slightly ahead of the bow, thereby alerting the astute bug or jellyfish that something big is indeed on the way. I'm neither a sailor or a seaman (just an amateur Bucky buff), so I can't say how far in advance precessional waves go, but they do seem to exist. I would highly recommend, for those who may wish to see the genesis of some of Bucky's ideas, a review of his 1938 "Nine Chains to the Moon". I'm not sure if it was there and then, or later, where Bucky supposedly "proved" that we could survive on simply recycling (e.g. copper) most of the resources we have already mined, etc. etc., an idea later developed in "Grunch" and "Critical Path", as Ross points out. So how much of Bucky's self-promotion was hot air, and how much has been demonstrated? As I recall, some of the materials prescribed for both the dymaxion house and bath were of the order of plastics, which hadn't come into existence yet. Bucky used to say he decided, after studying the various timelags that he saw existing in various industries between the inception of an idea and its practical application (the most egregious of which, 50 years, he saw existing in the housing/construction industries), that he wanted to live his lifeplan 50 years out from the rest of humanity, thereby avoiding the carping of the critics: "I do not care that I am not understood, but I do not like to be misunderstood." (rough paraphrase.) It would seem, from the posthumous discovery of the Fullerenes, that at least some of Bucky's visions were spot on. from the present, Leo (often misunderstood) Elliott 76440,1416@Compuserve.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1993 18:06:26 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Rebecca Laine Subject: School Project To whom it may concern: My name is Christopher Laine and I am a student attending the newly established Southside Virginia Academic Governor's School. We have just begun researching geodesic domes for a school project. We will study structure, design, etc. so that we could use the domes as alternative forms of housing for densly populated areas. We are cosidering the actual construction of a geodesic dome near the conclusion of our project. Hearing from people with insight on contruction of domes and uses for domes in society today would be very beneficial. I would also enjoy hearing from anyone who is interested in our project. If anyone has recommended resources or contacts, please inform me. I am very excited in this project and I hope it will bring me into the world of Buckminster Fuller. Christopher Laine rlaine@cvgs.schools.virginia.edu ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1993 00:19:45 LCL Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Gerry Segal Subject: Re: Old Man River, Failures etc Greetings from the Big Apple (I wonder what frequency dome that is?) Ross Keatinge asked: > > As for a question to stimulate some discussion: Could somebody please > explain their understanding of procession (sp?). The concept is a bit > lost on me. I think the word your looking for is precession. My college physics books defines precession as: "a complex motion executed by a rotating body subjected to torque, by a conical locus of the axis" That's quite a mouthful. Bucky get's even more complex. In Synergetics II 533.08 He defines precession as: "the intereffect of individually operating cosmic systems upon one another." Since Universe is an aggregate of individually operative systems, all of the intersystem effects of the Universe are precessional, and the 180-degree imposed forces usually result in redirectional resultants of 90 degrees." A beautiful example is given in Synergetics I 417.00. Here two exact sets of 60 Closest-packed spheres (wedges) are rotated 90-degress and twisted(torque). An unexpected and marvelous result is a perfect 8 ball edged, 7-frequency tetrahedron that is formed. I doubt that I have been successful in helping you understand precession. But I do know that if you take the time and build the models you'll have an underlying sense of the meaning that provides the basis of understanding that the written word only hints at. Gerry Segal Director of College Systems Bank Street College of Education New York, NY ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1993 09:30:38 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Chris Fearnley Subject: Re: Precession I think the simplest first-order definition of precession is the side effects of a system in motion (generally occuring at 90 degrees to the direction of motion. Others have given deeper definitions - so I'll leave it at that. Christopher J. Fearnley cfearnl@pacs.pha.pa.us cfearnl@cpp.pha.pa.us fearnlcj@duvm.ocs.drexel.edu fearnlcj@duvm.bitnet chris.fearnley@pacsibm.org ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1993 13:59:38 GMT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: Ben Williams Organization: University of Delaware Subject: on Fuller failures Speaking of Buckminster Fuller failures, I hope someone could clear this possible misunderstanding I have: Somehow, somewhere I got the impression that Buckminster Fuller was instrumental in designing some airport in India which I later heard collapsed or failed in some way. Does anyone know anything about what I am thinking of here? I suppose I could just try to look it up in the library but I guess I don't want to spend the time and effort it would require. Ben. ps - I am (and have been since about 1970) a big fan of R.B.Fuller and I once I feel I have some free time to spare I would like to contribute more to this newsgroup. -- Ben Williams bew@brahms.udel.edu What we got here is a failure to communicate... ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1993 11:07:14 LCL Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Gerry Segal Subject: Precession Please forgive me if this message appeared before. I got a returned mail when I sent it, so I'm trying again. Greetings from the Big Apple (I wonder what frequency dome that is?) Ross Keatinge asked: > > As for a question to stimulate some discussion: Could somebody please > explain their understanding of procession (sp?). The concept is a bit > lost on me. I think the word your looking for is precession. My college physics books defines precession as: "a complex motion executed by a rotating body subjected to torque, by a conical locus of the axis" That's quite a mouthful. Bucky get's even more complex. In Synergetics II 533.08 He defines precession as: "the intereffect of individually operating cosmic systems upon one another." Since Universe is an aggregate of individually operative systems, all of the intersystem effects of the Universe are precessional, and the 180-degree imposed forces usually result in redirectional resultants of 90 degrees." A beautiful example is given in Synergetics I 417.00. Here two exact sets of 60 Closest-packed spheres (wedges) are rotated 90-degress and twisted(torque). An unexpected and marvelous result is a perfect 8 ball edged, 7-frequency tetrahedron that is formed. I doubt that I have been successful in helping you understand precession. But I do know that if you take the time and build the models you'll have an underlying sense of the meaning that provides the basis of understanding that the written word only hints at. Gerry Segal Director of College Systems Bank Street College of Education New York, NY ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1993 10:28:44 CST Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Tom Dosemagen Subject: Re: Node design/ideas wanted The address for Natural Spaces is Route #3, North Branch, MN 55056. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1993 10:36:26 CST Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Tom Dosemagen Subject: Re: School Project The uses for domes is endless. I would suggest contacting Dennis Johnson at Natural Spaces in North Branch, Minnesota. He has a book available called All About Domes that I'm sure will help you a great deal. You can contact Dennis by calling 1-800-733-7107. I would also be interested in interacting with you. I live in a 44' diameter dome that I built 13 years ago. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1993 08:24:58 CST Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Tom Dosemagen Subject: Re: Precession If you are talking about my 44' diameter dome -- it is a 4 frequency dome ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1993 21:49:24 GMT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: Alan Semon Organization: East Stroudsburg University, Pennsylvania Subject: Re: Why domes?? Stephen Velazquez (velasteve@AOL.COM) wrote: : I'm new to this list and Bucky's works and I was wondering what exactly are : the advantages of living in a dome? : Steve I cannot speak on those claims mentioned, nor do I have any references readily available concerning dome life, but I was once interested in the idea of living in a geodesic dome home and, to the best of my recollection, these are some of the advantages: 1. Heating and cooling the home become more efficient due to the fact that there are fewer (even no) corners where heat may be trapped. The overall air flow in a dome is substantially better than in a conventionally constructed home (straight walls and such). 2. Many dome home designs allow the option of using larger lumber for the dome. 2x6's or 2x8's instead of the usual 2x4's, although this is an option in ANY home, it seems to be more commonly done in dome home construction. 3. For those solar minded people, the placement of the solar collectors on the "roof" is less critical due to the curved nature of the top of the structure. 4. The inherent strength of the dome makes it suitable for either earth-bermed or even earth covered construction techniques. In the case of more common construction techniques, the structural members' dimensions usually need to be completely reworked in order to carry the extra weight. 5. Hell, they _LOOK_ pretty neat! This might be a problem in certain areas which one of those laws which say that all homes in an area _MUST_ conform to certain guidelines concerning their architecture (bummer, huh? :-)). Well, that about does it on my knowledge (of sorts) of dome home living. A good company to contact is Monterey Dome Inc. (can't remember WHERE they are located). They sell kits for constructing a dome structure. Their information packet is the source of some, though by no means ALL, of the information here. Good luck!! -- //////////////////////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ | Life is a three letter word! AD&CS Alan Semon | | LogiChem Inc. | | asemon@elwood.esu.edu | //////////////////////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1993 16:50:54 GMT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: "Carey W. Mason" Organization: Encore Computer Corp. Subject: Monterey Domes Last I heard, Monterey went bankrupt.....nice designs though. E-mail me if you would like a source for Domes that is ALIVE and WELL. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1993 16:50:22 GMT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: "ukcc.uky.edu" Organization: The University of Kentucky Subject: Re: Why domes?? In article <28sq54$ijn@jake.esu.edu> asemon@esu.edu (Alan Semon) writes: >... to the best of my recollection, these are some of >the advantages: > >1. Heating and cooling the home become more efficient due to the fact that > there are fewer (even no) corners where heat may be trapped. The overall > air flow in a dome is substantially better than in a conventionally > constructed home (straight walls and such). > ...and there is less surface area per square foot of living space = less heat loss. >2. Many dome home designs allow the option of using larger lumber for the dome. > 2x6's or 2x8's instead of the usual 2x4's, although this is an option in > ANY home, it seems to be more commonly done in dome home construction. > Although for many areas of the US, there is no financial advantage to using 2x6 construction. A dome with R-14 throughout can outperform a well insulated conventional house of comparable S/F. >... >5. Hell, they _LOOK_ pretty neat! This might be a problem in certain areas > which one of those laws which say that all homes in an area _MUST_ conform > to certain guidelines concerning their architecture (bummer, huh? :-)). > That's why we were pleased to here that our county has no restrictions on buildings on >10 acres! >A good company to contact is Monterey Dome Inc. (can't remember WHERE they are >located). They sell kits for constructing a dome structure. Their information >packet is the source of some, though by no means ALL, of the information here. > I think Monterey may be out of business -- something about serious design flaws in their roof system. However, Oregon Dome was extremely helpful to us. (800) 572-8943 -jg ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1993 19:47:06 EDT Reply-To: ae610@freenet.carleton.ca Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Brady Thompson Subject: Re: Monterey Domes I'd like an alive and well source for domes as an alternative to Monterey Domes. EMail me with your info if you can. -- Brady Thompson The longest journet ae610@freenet.carleton.ca begins with the or THOMPSB@gov.on.ca shortest step ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1993 06:57:52 EST Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: "Robert L. Lamons (Bob" Subject: Re: Other Bucky Topics In-Reply-To: <9310010707.AA29444@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu>; from "MR BRUCE A JOHNSON" at Sep 30, 93 11:23 pm I am anomored with his writings on educatin. For someone that had so much difficulty with standard educatin models he did quite well. I first read about his theory on "Education" in Operating manual for Spaceship Earth, chapeters 3,4 and 5 I believe. I have read his other books on education too. All lead to the same conclusion, that education is active and must be sought, not something that you can sit down and drink up as someone pours it out to you. We have modeled our educational theories aftger this and are now "organically" homeschooling our 5 children. That is what we like most about Bucky. -- ------------------------------------------------------- robert l lamons rlamons@tjhsst.vak12ed.edu Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology A Fairfax County Public School in Northern Virginia ------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1993 01:37:09 GMT Reply-To: KRUSE@DEMOPKG.vnet.ibm.com Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: KRUSE@DEMOPKG.VNET.IBM.COM Organization: IBM Center Marketing Service & Tech Support Subject: Dome programs Are there any programs available for calculating coordinates for dome vertices so that they can be displayed by some 3D modelling tool, even one of the VR ones like Virtus Walkthrough. APL would be my language of choice. Thanks. Joel Kruse ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1993 05:53:07 GMT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: David.Worrall@ANU.EDU.AU Organization: The Australian National University Subject: Re: Old Man River, Failures etc In article Gerry Segal writes: >Greetings from the Big Apple (I wonder what frequency dome that is?) > >Ross Keatinge asked: >> >> As for a question to stimulate some discussion: Could somebody please >> explain their understanding of procession (sp?). The concept is a bit >> lost on me. > Imagine a pebble dropped into a pond. The pebble goes to the bottom (closer to the centre of gravity of the earth!) The wave created moves outwards, at 90 degrees, precessionally, to the pebble. Cheers, D. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1993 10:16:10 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: "Hilve A. Firek" Subject: Floating cities In-Reply-To: <9309272210.AA07255@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu>; from "apang@garnet.berkeley.edu" at Sep 27, 93 12:17 pm October 12, 1993 Dear Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: Our names are Chad Stein and Tracy Stinson, and we are students at the Southside Virginia Governor's School. I am very interested in the floating city you mentioned in your message about the Old Man River project. The group that I am working in is trying to create a city of interconnected dome that can float on water. Other ideas include creating spheres that will rest halfway in the water. We realize there are many problems we must tackle. My question to you is, will a system of anchorage keep an entire city in place? We are thinking along the lines of using magnatism from the ocean floor to hold the structure in place. Would these ideas be feasible if large storms or typhoons were to occur? We need to have a system that is flexible enough so that the city could survive a fairly severe storm, yet keep it from drifting during calm waters. If you have any thoughts or suggestions about these ideas, or any background information on the planned floating city, please write back in care of our teacher, Hilve Firek, hfirek@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu. Sincerely, W. Chad Stein Tracy Stinson ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1993 10:37:24 -0700 Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Subject: Floating cities? In-Reply-To: <9310121415.AA26466@garnet.berkeley.edu> from "Hilve A. Firek" at Oct 12, 93 10:16:10 am Dear Tracy and Chad, Thanks for your message and question about floating cities. Unfortunately, I'm not an engineer, and so can't really advise you about the feasibility of ocean-floor magnetism or other mooring devices. I would recommend you look at two sources on Fuller's own work to see what he did. The first is Author: Fuller, R. Buckminster (Richard Buckminster), 1895- Title: The artifacts of R. Buckminster Fuller : a comprehensive collection of his designs and drawings / edited with descriptions by James Ward. New York : Garland, 1985, c1984. Description: 4 v. : ill., plans ; 31 cm. Notes: Includes bibliographies. Contents: v. 1. The Dymaxion experiment, 1926-1943 -- v. 2. Dymaxion deployment, 1927-1946 -- v. 3. The geodesic revolution, part 1, 1947-1959 -- v. 4. The geodesic revolution, part 2, 1960-1983. This is a huge collection of Fuller's technical papers, blueprints, etc. Its a tremendous resource. The second book I would consult is Robert Marks and Fuller, _The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller_, which has a description of Fuller's proposals for floating cities. Now I have a question of my own. Why design one of these cities? I know from doing similar projects in high school and college that one can get a lot of satisfaction out of identifying and solving the technical problems of such a project, but who is going to live in such cities? What advantages to floating cities have over regular cities? What will their economies be like? I ask this because in American culture, and ESPECIALLY that part of American culture that is interested in technology and the future, there is a tradition of imagining cities in the jungle, huge agricultural projects in the desert, massive levitating cities, etc.. You see these proposals in old books about World's Fairs, and they're still on display in EPCOT. They're expressions of technical prowess and a certain kind of audaciousness, but their purpose is never made clear. I suspect many of their designers never think about the broader purpose of these cities. What does your group envision? Good luck with your project. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Department of History University of California, Berkeley apang@garnet.berkeley.edu ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1993 14:22:24 CDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Jim Fiegenschue Subject: floating hotel I don't know how many of Bucky's ideas were directly used in the construction, but if you are interested in studying and solving some of the practical problems of floating habitations (such as anchoring, survival of storms, etc.) you might contact Sten Sjostrand, the architect who designed The Saigon Floating Hotel. The first and to my knowledge still the only floating resort hotel in the world, it was built in Singapore for about $22 million in 1987-8 US dollars. Another $5.5 million of furniture and accessories were added, plus a $2.5 million special anchor system, so this is a serious professional project. The 7-story hotel has 200 guest rooms, a lavish lobby, a swimming pool(!), a tennis court, a night club, a sauna, a gymnasium, small shops, several restaurants, two cocktail bars, a library, fully equipped conference rooms, post office, sewage treatment plants, facilities for mooring sail boats and yachts, an underwater observatory, and a marine laboratory. Originally opened for business as the Four Seasons Barrier Reef Resort in 1988 over the Australian Great Barrier Reef, it was a big draw for scuba divers. All waste- disposal machinery is sealed off completely to protect the environment. It is currently owned by the Japanese company EIE, who operate it offshore Saigon. You can possibly reach Sten Sjostrand through the Atlantis Project, which is currently raising funds to build a floating city/nation to be called Oceania. Their newsletter, called Chain Breaker, is located at 4132 S. Rainbow Blvd, Suite 387; Las Vegas, Nevada 89103. Phone: 702 897-8418. Jim Fiegenschue thot1!jim ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1993 20:50:03 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: Kirby's back Greetings "buckyophiles"! <-- term coined by Gene Fowler, the armed-robber poet-founder of the Regeniusing Project. I've been catching up on a s*load of GEODESIC, piling up in my Econet box thanks to my delinquency. Makes for fun reading, like anthologized comic strips, when you get to see a few months at a time. The Saga of Ken, poor guy, wanting to stem the flow of RoboMail (ah listserv! if you only knew...), the Old Man River chapter, the Domes Alone (how we each seem to build 'em -- not Bucky's vision) sequence. Fun fun. Today I achieved a long sought-after breakthrough. I got my TELIX to automatically log on (triggered by my Norton scheduler), download all my mail, and log off. Another RoboReader makes its debut online! Now I can at least download with regularity (hmmm). Next problem is to tackle an autoscript for uploading, at least to this listserver. We shall see... Haven't done much synergetics of late, being a freelance FoxPro programmer, married, stepdaughter and baby-in-process, with a heart hospital client ravenous for programs. But I *did* have a pleasent experience working with a man in Canada on sphere packing. He's been doing manual counts of how many spheres at each distance X from the center in an isomatric /Fcc/VE-packing. IE 12 spheres at distance 1 etc. Actually, we work in 2nd powers, cuz then we're dealing exclusively in integers. So I wrote this nifty FoxPro program the calculates all this by itself. Another Robo... Sorry to miss you in PDX last week Blaine. I lost your pn that Wednesday PM. Ransacked my dome-i-cile (actually, folks, I live in a leaky 1920s box -- the *disadvantages* of regular houses should go in the column next to the *advantages* of domes). "See" you all summore. Kirby in Portland, Oregon ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1993 22:22:36 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: 4D Lives! Greetings "buckyophiles"! My second upload in as many hours. This is my first attempt at RoboUploading. I composed this offline, saved it as TELIX.UPL, and then told my Norton Scheduler to trigger the process. If all went well, I sat sipping coffee while the logon/upload/logoff took place without my lifting a finger. Application: next time maybe I'll let the computer do it in my sleep (while I sleep that is). Being a computophile, I understand why Fuller's vision was to mass-assemble domiciles like we mass-assemble computers. They come as clones (hey, the boxes do too, if you hadn't noticed), with lots of "expansion slots", like customize your own from aftermarket catalogs of products. We'd have not just 110V sockets around the walls but data plugs, video plugs. God, Mary Daly would smirk for my being such a typically male plugophile! (cite: Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary). People who like "This Old House" and the old way of pfutzing around, doing carpentry and caulking etc. can still keep their boxes. I'd rather be buying more RAM for my solar-powered dish-downloader, or buying the latest EnergyWise software upgrade to better control my energy use (turns off lights when motion sensors detect no motion for 10 mins!). I want to get into that supercompact Japanese everything-folds-into -everything origami kind of aesthetic, where ads me with the latest no-waste, recyclable, ecosmart items that also automate, cybernate and cut down on my need to cerebrate about what I after all could automate. As Bucky was fond of pointing out, Universe is 99.99% automatic, beyond our conscious control. Technophobes who shout about humans wanting to speed up and robotize everything forget that nature's default/preferred speed is the speed of light (faster than a speeding bullet), and sophisticated electronics began with worms, nanotechnology with fullerenes. Nature is technosmart beyond our wildest imagined abilities! -- Kirby from his 1920s Portland box via his new CyperSpacey RoboUploader ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1993 16:05:50 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: bill kovarik Subject: Re: Floating cities? In-Reply-To: <9310131456.AA15882@ruacad.ac.runet.edu>; from "Alex Soojung-Kim Pang" at Oct 12, 93 10:37 am [Stuff Deleted] ... Why design one of these cities? I know from > doing similar projects in high school and college that one can get a lot of > satisfaction out of identifying and solving the technical problems of such a > project, but who is going to live in such cities? What advantages to floating > cities have over regular cities? What will their economies be like? I ask > this because in American culture, and ESPECIALLY that part of American culture > that is interested in technology and the future, there is a tradition of > imagining cities in the jungle, huge agricultural projects in the desert, > massive levitating cities, etc.. You see these proposals in old books about > World's Fairs, and they're still on display in EPCOT. They're expressions > of technical prowess and a certain kind of audaciousness, but their purpose > is never made clear. I suspect many of their designers never think about > the broader purpose of these cities. What does your group envision? > > Good luck with your project. > > Alex Soojung-Kim Pang > Department of History > University of California, Berkeley > apang@garnet.berkeley.edu > Im a science writer and journalism teacher, and hence not an expert, but I have long been interested in Fuller's floating city concept. Let me take Dr. Pang's excellent analysis one or two steps further. The enthusiasm for big engineering projects was a product of a simpler age, to be sure. There's a book called "Engineers Dreams" which depicts a floating city as a mid-Atlantic airport plan from the 1940s. Sometime in the 1970s the University of Hawaii designed a floating city, and you can get the book on interlibrary loan. I know the Virginia Tech architecture school library has it, if you cant find it anywhere else. Both the airport and the Hawaii ideas dealt with structural engineering problems primarily, and of course the question is why on earth such things should be built. There are important reasons to consider floating cities as resources for the not too distant future, I believe. A very important need is for factories for processing renewable energy resources which would be too expensive or too ecologically disruptive to collect on land. Of course, the most problematic aspect of renewable energy is its dispersed nature. It must be collected and concentrated, and the process of doing that can raise costs to a non- competitive level with fossil energy. > For many decades, biochemical engineers have looked to marine biomass resources as being possible to cultivate in enormous quantities without creating ecological disruptions. As early as 1918 the Pasteur Institute was engaged in the study of renewable liquid fuels like methyl and ethyl alcohol from kelp. They were able to produce about 10 gallons of fuel alcohol per ton using an acid hydrolysis method. This is very old technology; better methods are available today. In the late 1970s and early 80s tremendous new attention focused on renewable resources, and marine biomass was the subject of a good deal of study. One of the most important was the Marine Biomass Energy Conversion Technology Research Committee of the Japan Ocean Industries Association. In one study they found that a 50 kg / m2 per year was the average productivity of both Sargassum and Laminaria type kelp. I dont know if they investigated the various energy production scenarios or what their final figures are, but you could probably find out pretty quickly. If we converted kelp to renewable liquid energy at the rate of 10 gallons per ton, what do we get? Lets assume one ton (1,000 kg) is grown on 20 square meters and produces 10 gallons. To make a million gallons we need an area of 200 square kilometers. To make a billion gallons would take a 2,000 square mile area, and to replace just the gasoline used in the U.S. (100 billion gallons a year) with alcohol from marine biomass would take a 40,000 square kilometer area -- around the size of Ireland and Cuba. Of course, more efficient processes and enhanced production could decrease the necessary size, but there would be little problem finding space in the ocean for an extra 40,000 kilometers somewhere. You would hope that the final cost of this liquid fuel was within a tolerable range, lets say $1.20 (US prices) to $5.00 per gallon (European fuel prices). OK, what about the waste products. When the kelp is hydrolized we get this goopy green leftover glop -- some of it could go to other chemical processes and some could be returned to the sea, along with treated sewage from the city, to fertilize the kelp beds for future harvests. How do you support the rest of the city? Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) for electricity and fish farming and hydroponics for food, other light manufacturing, some mining of deep sea minerals -- those are possibilities. What is impossible to make at sea? Probably heavy industrial processes, such as steel mills, aluminum refining, textiles, etc. Who would live there? Given the need for dignified employment in many developing nations, I would think that you could find millions of people willing to become "kelpers." If developing nations would divert financial resources out of the petroleum sector and into sustainable development, it could vastly raise the standard of living of some of the poorest people on earth and solve a large portion of the environmental crisis at the same time. You can see (squint hard, now) some of the visions of Huxley or Fuller or even Dwayne Andreas in play here, and we can see the outline of a real solution to the world energy / environmental crisis in the development of floating cities that produce renewable energy and food. I hope this stimulates some discussion and that the students in Southside Virginia will let me know if I can help in any way. Im just over the Blue Ridge. Bill Kovarik Assistant Professor Dept. of Media Studies Radford University Radford, Va. 24141 wkovarik@ruacad.ac.runet.edu ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1993 17:11:45 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: 4D Lives! > Greetings! > Good to see you active again. I'm active (more) regularly now because I > have my own computer now!! I was just thinking Geodesic has been active of > late - maybe I should upload all interesting threads from FIX to see if some > interesting discussion results. Chris -- Thanks for the email. Congrats on the new pooter! A pentium I presume :-) Dunno what of mine I managed to upload -- you say good to see me active. I *thought* my two multi-paragraph submissions were a success, but the next morning I had a bunch of LISTSERV rejection notes stuffed in my box (sniff), and my texts returned for lack of TO: and CC: (unhelpful pointers, that). Problem is I had deleted all my FROMs so I had nothing to Reply to. Must have put in a wrong address. I'm trying this one to simply GEODESIC@UVBM, as I see some others doing. Once again, I'm using my (edited) TELIX autoscript... I emailed Mr. Gary Conway on CompuServ (hi Gary, still with us?) about how to SIGNOFF or UNSUBSCRIBE (either should work). But given my tangles with the list server, I may not be the best one to be offering guidance. Anyway, did my "brilliant" uploads make it through?? :-/ -- Kirby ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1993 21:43:50 -0500 Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: "Tyko Kihlstedt, Art Department Tyko Kihlstedt" Subject: Floating Cities & Kelp farming Watch out, Bill Kovarik. Some whqale may read your bit on hydrolizing kelp and swallow you next time you are at the beach: if not that, Gene marine will make a chapter on you in his next book on the myopic messing of the environment by "clever" engineering solutions. But don't stop having fun. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1993 20:57:23 EST Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: scimatec5@UOFT02.UTOLEDO.EDU Organization: University of Toledo, Computer Services Subject: Re: Floating Cities One possiblity in "floating cities" that I recently came across is the "Mining" Magnesium. Allegedly it can be obtained from sea water. Volvo developed a car back in the eightees (unfortunately they only developed it, it never went into production) that was made of a significant amounts of magnesium for its weight and because it avoided damaging mining practices. It's called the Volvo LCP 2000. Allegedly it gets anywhere from 56 to 81 (tops, 100) mpg, and, being a diesel, will run on nearly anything. For more info write Bob Austin of Volvo of America Corporation, Rockleigh, New Jersey, 07647; or call (201) 768-7300. Steve Mather ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1993 03:37:47 GMT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: Ross Keatinge Organization: Public Access Internet Services, Auckland New Zealand Subject: Recommened book Thanks for the explainations about precession. I have just starting reading 'A Fuller Explanation' by Amy C. Edmondson. I have only read the first few chapters and browsed through the rest but already it has clarified a lot for me. I can highly recommend it to anyone wanting to understand Synergetics better. It is available from the Buckminster Fuller Institute in L.A. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1993 23:14:25 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: 4D Lives! More on precession: "Precession" in synergetics shows up as the relationship between two sides of the same generalized principle coin. Gravity begets radiation begets gravity. Tension begets compression begets tension. Pull on two ends of a rope, and its strands are squeezed even more tightly together. Where two very general aspects of nature always and only co-exist, and their relationship is generally precessional. Synergetics is unlike traditional physics in its insistence on gravity as a circumferential pulling together (and thereby implosive), versus a radial explosiveness emanating from the center -- a 90 degree relationship. The Sun is a giant squeeze ball. Strands of thought are likewise cirumferentially implosive, nonlinear hypertext countervailing against vs the information explosion. By extension, "precession" refers to nature's way of getting the job done at 90 degrees to human selfishness and ignorance. We "do the right things for the wrong reasons." The graduating from Class II to Class I evolution which Fuller anticipates involves our starting to do the right things for the right reasons, like you don't need the Cold War to have the space program to have higher living standard spin-off technologies (goodies yielding at 90-degrees to ignorance & fear). We don't have time for that kind of bumbling anymore. -- Kirby ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1993 10:54:10 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Reba Henderson Subject: Geodesic List? Just trying to find out if this list actually exists. Tried to subscribe via LISTSERV but received a message that Geodesic-L does not exist. -- Diane Henderson <> ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 15:34:01 GMT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: Nathan Haley Organization: University of Missouri-Rolla, Missouri's Technological University Subject: smart domes? has anyone considered merging smart home techn. with domes? let's talk! ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 15:37:27 CST Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Tom Dosemagen Subject: Re: smart domes? If a smart house is one that is controlled by a computer system etc. wouldn't it be the same application for a dome that is used in conventional "box" type building. I live in a dome and would be interested in making it smarter. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 21:01:19 LCL Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Gerry Segal Subject: Re: The New York Times Bob Stubenrauch of Canton Ohio wrote a letter in todays "New York Times" that may be of interest to the list: "To the Editor: The awesome earthquake in India with its tremendous loss of life brought back memories of two weeks with Buckminster Fuller, the engineer and inventor, 40 years ago. I was working for a custom photo lab in New York. Mr. Fuller brought in a notebook, every page filled with his crabbed notes and wonderful sketches of his ideas. For two weeks I printed photo reproductions of that notebook, while Mr. Fuller chatted at my side in the darkroom. One of his dazzling concepts was for housing the poor people of India. He had planned a huge factoryand airport complex for that purpose. In the factory were assembly lines producing lightweight geodesic domes, the walls covered in a heavy transparent plastic. Each dome had a ring mount at the peak, and as it came off the line a waiting helicopter would hook up and fly off with the dome swinging below. The sketches showed a sky full of these choppers in formation, flying off to a prepared site to set down an instant town. Fuller's estimated cost per unit (this was very low-wage India of the early 50s) was $40. It is a sad irony that ancient traditions, like the dangerous use of unsupported clay or stone blocks, continue, when visionary concepts like Fuller's could have saved thousands of lives if implemented for housing. It was accepted, and hundreds of domes built, for our early-warning radar outpost in Alaska, the DEW line of cold-war days. New technology is always first embraced by the military, a sad commentary on the priorities of governments." Mr. Stubenrauch was right. The structural tension-compression equillibrium of the domes would have saved massive amounts of life. We communicate in this electronic environment on an electronic highwayay that also grew from the loins of the Defense Department ARPANET. Maybe we can use this and other lists to help create the development of innovative ideas without using the "rearview mirror" approach of the military. We have to do it to get through what Bucky called Humankind's "Final Exam." Gerry Segal Director of College Systems Bank Street College of Education New York, NY ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1993 01:38:22 EST Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: MDBH000 Subject: Re: The New York Times In-Reply-To: In reply to your message of MON 18 OCT 1993 21:10:02 EST Dear Jerry, In reply to your comments about the Times article, I support your views expressed in your last paragraph. Telecommunications and the apllication of Fuller's ideas and constructions could have saved many lives in India The use of any NET can spread important information and link people and Fuller concretized the philosophical implications of worldnet in stable efficient architechtural designs. How can we best spread his ideas? I am willing to help. Bryan Highbloom musictherapist Jewish General Hospital Montreal, Quebec ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 23:52:22 -0700 Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Subject: Fuller and emergency shelters I read the _New York Times_ letter with interest, since it was the first citation I'd seen of Fuller's thinking on using domes as emergency shelters. And certainly Mr. Stubenrauch is right to raise the question of whether military "first use" of high technology speaks well of the values of the society supporting that military. However, while Fuller may have had sketches in his notebook showing domes airlifted to the Third World, and in the early 1960s did a couple short courses in architecture schools on the use of indigenous materials (especially bamboo) in dome-building, it is important to remember that the dome's use by the military happened not in spite of Fuller, but because of him. In fact, in reviewing Fuller's research in the 1950s, I find that he never presented students with the challenge of using the dome to solve Third World housing problems. He had a carefully-managed network of small consulting firms, architecture schools in which he held visiting lectureships, and a good-sized group of student volunteers (he was, in fact, an able if unusual manager who was deeply concerned with questions of securing patrons, exerting control over intellectual property rights, etc.) in this period, and they spent most of their time working on military and civilian defense applications of the dome. The initial studies for the DEW line domes, for example, were done by Fuller and students (mainly students) at MIT; studies for the Marine Corps were conducted at MIT, Tulane, NC State, and Virginia Tech. Other students designed automated cotton mills in geodesic domes, and worked under Fuller on designing private and public structures that could withstand atomic bomb blasts. Studies of how the dome could be put to more humanitarian uses, in contrast, seem to have received almost no formal attention from Fuller or his students. This is not to say that Fuller was not interested in the dome being used in the Third World; but his vision, at least as described to his military patrons, was rather more complex and perhaps more sinister than Mr. Stubenrauch reports. Fuller articulated this vision in letters now held in the Marine Corps Historical Center archives; in them, he complimented the Corps for their interest in using domes in forward logistics plans (in which domes, filled with aircraft repair equipment, would be rushed to contested areas in the Third World at the first sign of Communist mischief, shortening logistics lines and allowing stronger support for air wings), and that they had discovered the key to winning to the Cold War. To quote: "The Marine Corps [has created] and unexpectedly double-barreled gun: one barrel for the hot war, one barrel for the cool war. The hot war barrel of the Geodesic structures weapon will function in the manner we have outlines above [e.g. in providing logistics and repair facilities for aircraft]..... The cool barrel of the Geodesic structures weapon- inadvertently adopted by the Marine Corpos- is the barrel which can now hit directly, instantly, and effectively at the heart of every peace-time economic pattern the world around.... "The logic governing the possibility of our winning the cool war runs as follows: controlled environment is the comprehensive package which contains and permits the uniquely high vantage functionings of industrialization. And it is towards industrialization that peoples of the world now direct the war-detouring hopes of swift emancipation from all the fundamental physical disadvantages and lethan deficiencies.... And, every function of further world- around industrialization is dependent upon the accelerated realization of comprehensively deployable environment controls.... "The swift delivery half-way around the world... of all manner of controlled environment structures... is a first requirement of all integrated agricultural and industrial economics- from farm buildings to factories, to governments, to homes.... If world man can witness the economically realized production of controlled environments capable of converting to man's unprecedented advantage the most hostile environment events of converting to man's unprecedented advantage the most hostile environmental events... then world man's intuitive response will be to focus his hopes of swiftest emancipation from 'what ails him' toward the heart of the American economy and the democratic processes which provide the sunergetic strength of the U.S.A." Fuller's other writings and speeches from this period deliver (broadly) the same message: that domes, filled with power stations, hospitals, factories, etc., preassembled in the United States and airlifted to underdeveloped countries, would yield overnight industrialization and the reconstitution of these nations into American-style societies and economies. This vision is a far cry from the emergency shelters; it is also the one Fuller invested more in, and in which he was more interested. The domes weren't empty, either in a literal or political sense. Cheers, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang U.C. Berkeley ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1993 16:00:06 LCL Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Gerry Segal Subject: Re: Fuller and emergency shelters I really enjoyed Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's comments on the letter that appeared in the New York Times regarding shelters in India's earthquake. Mr. Pang's research seems quite thorough and added to my understanding of Fuller's life. Sadly, his revelation that Fuller's "vision ...was rather more complex and perhaps more sinister than Mr. Stubenrauch reports." did not come as a surprise to me. Some of R.B.Fuller's actions especially regarding the invention of tensegrity structures and his involvement with Werner Erhardt, EST and World Hunger project do not say much about the man. It's his ideas, and through his ideas his hope for people that become important. I.B. Singer, the Nobel Laureate writer once asked if he would like to meet and talk with Leo Tolstoy said That while he read every word of Tolstoy he wouldn't cross the street to talk with him. His human failings might destroy the ideas he placed in his mind. The truth is that if those domes were mass produced and were or weren't empty, the cold war is over and lives would have been saved. Gerry Segal Director of College Systems Bank Street College of Education New York, NY ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1993 14:57:03 -0700 Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Subject: Evaluating Fuller In-Reply-To: <9310192013.AA04867@garnet.berkeley.edu> from "Gerry Segal" at Oct 19, 93 04:00:06 pm Gerry Segal points to what I think is an important question in evaluating Fuller's life and the value of his work. Having concentrated much of my attention on Fuller's inventive activity, I tend to evaluate him in terms of his work with and for the Marines, Strategic Air Command, Department of Commerce, etc.; and a study of this side of his life reveals a Fuller who was a vigorous Cold War technocrat, relatively unconcerned with the things for which he is now remembered-- his philosophical work, his geometry, etc.. I think there is value in trying to evaluate him on the basis of his ideas, since in the last 20+ years of his life he was essentially a public philosopher, not so much an inventor. But this raises another thorny problem, that of trying to measure the impact of those ideas, particularly from about the mid-1960s on. The fact that Fuller could both have the _Whole Earth Catalog_ dedicated to him, AND at the same time be condemned by Theodore Roszak (author of _Making of the Counterculture_) as the Ultimate Technocrat (and therefore an intellectual conspirator in a system that has produced the evils of materialism, ecological despoilation, explotative labor systems, etc.) points to a fundamental problem of reading and interpretation: what do Fuller's ideas "really" mean? What should we make of, and how should we evaluate, interpretations of his ideas? For example, in collecting accounts of Fuller's speeches in the late 1960s and 1970s (published in underground newspapers, mainstream magazines, and professional and trade journals), I've found that there developed a set of tropes describing Fuller's impact on his audience. It went something like this: "Fuller gave a four-hour marathon lecture that left his audience exhausted but exhilarated, dazzled by his vision and enthusiasm. Few members of the audience could follow exactly what he said, but it was the tone and Fuller's presentation that really mattered." Statements like these, it seems to me, make problematic claims about the value of his ideas, even as they stand as a testimony to his powers of self-presentation and ability to inspire audiences. Many people obviously came away from these talks feeling that they had seen something profound; but few, I am coming to believe, actually came away with any kind of grounding in Fuller's intellectual system. There was a huge difference between the read Fuller and the performed Fuller; that difference is the key to understanding how he could be honored by Stewart Brand and villified by Theodore Roszak; and it raises deep questions about the value of his ideas and the importance of his life and work in the long run. These are questions I'm puzzling through, and which I intend to address in my book on Fuller and the dome; I'm not yet sure if he ultimately deserves a larger place in history, a smaller one, or the place he has now. Yours, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang U.C. Berkeley ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1993 23:43:13 EDT Reply-To: lance@freelance.com Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Lance Fletcher Subject: Re: Fuller and emergency shelters Gerry Segal writes: > Some of R.B.Fuller's actions especially regarding the invention >of tensegrity structures and his involvement with Werner Erhardt, EST >and World Hunger project do not say much about the man. I would be interested in some elaboration of this statement: 1. What are tensegrity structures and what did Fuller do with regard to their invention? 2. What was the nature of Fuller's involvement with Werner Erhardt? 3. What is EST? 4. What is World Hunger project? 5. What is the nature of these things or the nature of Fuller's involvement with them that reflects negatively on him? Lance Fletcher The Free Lance Academy (a Platonic BBS) 201-963-6019 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1993 15:42:00 CDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: "HEDRICK, DANIEL LEE" Organization: Texas A&M University, Academic Computing Services Subject: Howdy! Please forgive my newbie-osity but is there a FAQ for this group, and if so where can I find it? I am a student of architecture at Texas A&M and I find Fuller, Geodesics, and other "Fullerian" architecture very fascinating. The postings that I have read in this group have been very fascinating and educating... Thanx in advance, Daniel Hedrick DLH5069@venus.tamu.edu Texas A&M Uni College of Architecture ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 12:52:28 -0500 Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Gary Pattillo Subject: Re: Fuller and emergency shelters In-Reply-To: <199310200134.AA27913@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu> On Tue, 19 Oct 1993, Gerry Segal wrote: > [...stuff omitted...] > > Some of R.B.Fuller's actions especially regarding the invention > of tensegrity structures and his involvement with Werner Erhardt, EST > and World Hunger project do not say much about the man. > > [...] Hmm... I was not aware of these involvements. Does anyone have any info about this? What exactly was his involvement? And what was (is) the World Hunger project? Thanks, Gary Pattillo 0/ P O BOX 7052 <| - Stayin' Alive! AUSTIN TX 78713 / > garyp@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 11:28:33 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: 4D Lives! >I would be interested in some elaboration of this statement: > >1. What are tensegrity structures and what did Fuller do with regard to >their invention? > >2. What was the nature of Fuller's involvement with Werner Erhardt? > >3. What is EST? > >4. What is World Hunger project? > >5. What is the nature of these things or the nature of Fuller's involvement >with them that reflects negatively on him? > > >Lance Fletcher >The Free Lance Academy (a Platonic BBS) 201-963-6019 1. Tensegrity structures employ tension primarily and compression secondarily. In pure tensegrity, compression members (i.e. metal rods) do not touch one another but provide rigidity within a network of tensed cables. Not only domes, but towers (and many sculptures) have successfully employed tensegrity principles. For Fuller, tensegrities manifested his philosophy: that nature uses tension primarily and compression secondarily (whereas humans often misguidedly do the reverse). Although he developed geodesic structures for the Marine Corps and Strategic Air Command, none of these were "tensegrities" exactly. Tensegritoy, available from most museum giftshops and teacher supply catalogs, admirably teaches about tensegrity. 2. Around 1980, Werner Erhard rediscovered Fuller and found Fuller's lifelong commitments (to serve "omnihumanity") were illustrative of his own "making the world work for everyone" motto. Fuller appeared jointly with Erhard in Madison Square Gardens, where Erhard delivered emotional praise and Fuller spoke for several hours about the need to promote tetrahedra over cubes as a way of saving humanity (I was not present -- as an est graduate, I was getting the newsletter and read about it, and this sparked my renewed interest in Fuller and sent me off to read Critical Path)... Fuller's grandson, Jaime, did the est Training and for some time there was overlap in interest and volunteers. Asked what Fuller thought of Erhard on the Larry King show, Fuller said he thought he was "a good boy" or something to that effect (contrary to Erhard's own assertions that he was "bad" -- in the Michael Jackson sense perhaps). 3. EST was supposed to be in lower case, meaning "to be" in latin. But for legal reasons (you can't name a corporation using italicized, lower case latin), it was also an acronym for Erhard Seminars Training. The Training took place over 2 weekends. 250 or so trainees would commit to sticking it through to the end after being briefed on what was to take place and after being given opportunities to leave. They were also not to chew gum, snack or leave for the bathroom except at scheduled breaks ("bathroom at will" people sat in the back row, for anyone with medical conditions requiring exceptions to the norm). The first weekend especially was a hard-hitting oral delivery that many labeled a "tearing down" and which earned est trainers the title of "verbal marines." Trainings were not advertised but graduates were strongly encouraged to "share their experience" of the training. At its peak, EST was active in many cities both statewide and overseas. Many books came out on the subject, and a biography. Erhard later got into racing cars (Formula One) to discover "what works" in organizations. Although many were strongly critical of Erhard's work, I think knee-jerk responses, either pro or con, are inappropriate vis-a-vis a complex and of course not unflawed enterprise. Walter Kaufmann, a well-known Princeton philosophy prof, was one of my teachers at the time, and he spoke highly of the est Training, which he had done the previous summer. He made it sound quite interesting so I enrolled. 4. The World Hunger Project was developed to promote the idea that World Hunger was a problem that could be solved, that only the political will to solve the problem was absent (i.e. food shortages were not the root problem). Erhard helped found the organization and Fuller was on the Board (of Advisors or Directors I'm not sure). The WHP was controversial because it was primarily a marketing and public relations enterprise aimed at changing attitudes i.e. awakening peoples desire to trully end death by starvation as a significant problem on the planet ("an idea whose time has come"). Because the money went to propagandize this cause, vs to actual relief workers or food shipments, it was branded by many as a sham and as further proof that Erhard was a con artist. Many have never forgiven Fuller for getting mixed up with Erhard's work, but as a "do your own thinking" type, Fuller was never one to let others' opinions be the determining factor. 5. The charge that Fuller is a "cold warrior" stems from his work with/for the US government. Geodesic domes had a strategic value from the beginning. On the other hand, more than most academics, and certainly most architects and engineers, Fuller has done much to villify capitalism, or LAWCAP as he called it ("lawyer capitalism"). The dust jacket of his book Grunch of Giants proclaims it as "more subversive of the property and profit values of the capitalist system than anything dreamed of since Karl Marx." Yes, Ronald Reagan awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Yes, around the same time Fuller declared the "USA we have known is now bankrupt and extinct." A curious mixture of pro-entrepeneurialism and individual initiative, and anti-corporatism. Too curious for some. I think Fuller's critics are often in the business of gathering second hand sources and citing other critics (e.g. Roszak) vs. tackling the subject material directly. Second hand criticisms are often cursory and do not reflect serious scholarship. On the other hand, indictments of this or that aspect of Fuller's work by people who really know their stuff are worth airing and I look forward to any such debates online. I have some criticisms of my own to share, if and when these seem relevant. -- Kirby ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 18:17:02 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: 4D Lives! > There was a huge difference between the read Fuller and the performed > Fuller; that difference is the key to understanding how he could be > honored by Stewart Brand and villified by Theodore Roszak; and it > raises deep questions about the value of his ideas and the importance > of his life and work in the long run. Alex -- I cannot initially agree with your thesis, although I might see your points better with further elaboration. True, Fuller was well-nigh incomprehensible to a large percentage of his listeners, partly because he threw out words like "tetrahedron" with high frequency (a glaze-over word), but mostly because he used what people called his "boardroom drawl" -- he slurred his words together pretty seriously. Nevertheless, what came out of his mouth, transcribed, does not appear so divergent from what he wrote (I have 40 hours of transcribed audiotape in my collection to compare with his books). I really don't think differences in the spoken vs. printed Fuller accounts for the Whole Earth vs. Roszak dichotomy. Like any lifelong writer, Fuller recapitulates and recontextualizes his earlier writings in later texts, trying to give his readers a sense of what *he* thinks is relevant. His early work for the Dept of Commerce & Forbes Magazine, he later tells us, was important because it got people to measure wealth in terms of energy use per capita, vs tonnage of raw materials per capita. His emphasis back then, as later, was on "doing more with less" -- the Dymaxion House being the paradigm example. Time to get away from the idea that higher living standards involves consuming more "stuff" per capita -- or even more energy, ultimately. My personal feeling is that Roszak is fundamentally suspicious of Fuller's assertion that "artifacts" make a bigger difference than political movements. To Roszak's ears, Fuller is promoting a "quick fix" through technology, offering as a solution what appears to have gotten us into such deep waters in the first place. The Whole Earth folks, on the other hand, are not technophobic but trend more towards the Cyberpunkish end of the spectrum, these days embracing VR and the internet as part of their preferred future. Both are reading/hearing the same text and reacting according to their predelictions. Both currents were part of the counter-culture, so it is not surprising that the counter-culture was schizophrenic about Fuller. Fuller himself was a New England Transcendentalist, in the mold of Emerson and his great aunt, Margaret Fuller. He was a mystic. In Fuller's universe, technology is synonymous with the physical. Nature is the supreme architect and technophile, her creatures being far and away more sophisticated than anything humans have themselves consciously invented. For Fuller, the technology vs nature dichotomy did not exist and he was dismayed that the counter-culture might throw out the technology baby with the evil-uses-of-same bath water. In sum, I think, as you do, that Fuller was controversial, but not because his listeners and his readers were getting (or not getting) seriously different pictures of the man. -- Kirby ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 20:33:57 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: leo elliott <76440.1416@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: evaluating Fuller Thanks to Alex and to Kirby for some interesting commentary on RBF. The task of trying to retrospectively assess the esteem with which Fuller was actually held, compared to that "persecuted prophet" perspective which permeates his texts, is difficult. Certainly, if one is to believe the tale of his 1927 Lake Michigan encounter (where he "heard the voice"), one could say he was at some "critical points" along his own personal critical path. Personally, I can not imagine a tragedy more severe than the loss of a child to disease at an early age, sufficient to prompt such suicidal approaches. (IOW, the aura surrounding his early life, to me, seems genuine enough; one of the first "wild men" of Maine, who happened to be masquerading as a Yankee technocrat!) What I have often wondered about is how did Anne Hewlett put up with this guy?! -- As much as I think I know about Fuller, as little do I know about her; what would be especially intriguing is to recreate some of their "post-conversion" experiences, during the two or so years RBF claimed he did not speak to another human save his wife. ("I do not care that I am not understood, as long as I am not misunderstood.") To take Fuller at his word, that he wanted to live, by design, fifty years ahead of his time (that being the longest time-lag, existing in the housing industry, between the inception of an idea and its practical application), one might hypothesize that Fuller was simply good at self-promoting his novel technologies, which often appeared as self-promotion of his intellect, especially since some of his technologies were being designed for materials, or social systems, which had yet to come to pass. This business of self-promotion would certainly make him a fit with Werner Erhard, from what I have been able to make of the man and his movement. (btw, I am a more recent graduate of the kinder, gentler est, now the Forum, run by Landmark Ed. out of Alexandria, VA; last I heard Werner was off in Russia, drumming up new business, and letting his reputation get settled here in the states). I have an old Crawdaddy magazine account of the great encounter between the two magnates of consciousness, and the somewhat skeptical writer definitely presents Erhard as one who is trying to cop a hit off Fuller's prestige; hard to imagine, but if the account is correct, Erhard backs down from Fuller when Fuller disagrees with the est-imation that brain=mind. I find it also interesting that, even now, the Forum-est, like Scientology, is billed as a "technology" (vs. what?, a psychotherapy?, a pyramid-marketing scheme?). However I would take issue with Alex' statement that "There was a huge difference between the read Fuller and the performed Fuller" -- I think that it is possible to see a great deal of similarity. While I only saw Fuller live one time in my life, which conforms to Alex' trope of "exhausted but exhilirated, dazzled by his vision and enthusiasm", I have several days of tapes, which, perhaps because they are more controllable than a stage presentation, permit a closer look at the visionary language and how he constructed these scenarios, and also permit of less exhaustion, coming as the tape casette does, in controllable dosage. However, my point is that serious concentration on some of Fuller's texts has at times led to exhaustion as well; I am reminded of a picture in Applewhite's "Cosmic Fishing" supposedly depicting a galley proof of a page from one of Fuller's books, supposedly ready for typesetting, in which Fuller practically rewrote the entire text in the margins. His seemingly off-the-wall ("precessional") spinoffs in his oral deliveries are similar, imo, to the tangential approach Fuller used in many of his texts, to illustrate some common theme or idea. Whilst it may appear, to the casual observer, as stream-of-consciousness writing OR speaking (and mind you, I'm not saying it wasn't -- in fact, I've often wondered, in my more mystical moments, if RBF wasn't chanelling some Ancient of Days up there on stage! ;)) -- despite the appearance of stream-of-consciousness, I've found a great sense of awe, at times, at being brought back, completely from left field, to the starting point of the argument. The great Ah-haaa... This probably is simply a further elaboration of one of Alex' tropes here, but so be it. I find it interesting that he seems to have generated so little residual skepticism amongst the skeptic community (perhaps I have missed some things?) and that his reputation as the humanitarian-philosopher inventor does indeed seem to be going gently into the night. Of course, the Fullerenes could do wonders for his prophet status as well. Random access, Leo Elliott Charlottesville, VA 76440.1416@Compuserve.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1993 08:49:09 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: 4D Lives! More adventures in This Old House: Intro Advocates of Fuller's Design Science Revolution sometimes work hard to spell out the advantages of domes. Not that Fuller's high tech housing industry was necessarily tied to domes exclusively. The Dymaxion House prototype, for instance, was more octagonal, suspended from a central "utility mast" -- a house on a pole. I've wondered about wheel-chair access to those, but later realized you could suspend the frame just inches above the ground (the skirt is anchored, so no twisting or shuddering as the chair comes off the ramp and over the threshold). I suppose you could even raise and lower the frame on some models, if this seemed a useful option (flood plains?)... BUT... What about the *disadvantages* of the present set of options? Sitting here in This Old House, with squirrels gnawing away in the attic, coming in and out through a hole next to the gutter, with lights in the back rooms gone, the wiring splices knocked loose or chewed through, and with no alternative but to tear up the walls and ceiling to regain the lights, or accept a less aesthetic exterior conduit to relight the bathroom (my choice), I can't help feeling that, in the age of the 747 fuselage, that all this goofiness might be avoidable. To me at least, endless puttering and trips to Builders' Square is not my idea of heaven (and I only do the 'little' jobs -- we rent this place). And I'm one of the *lucky* ones! I've got indoor plumbing and heat! No way we can supply the world's billions with these assets using the sadly obsolete construction methods of yesteryear, perpetuated with cosmetic improvements decade after decade. The USA living standard cannot be replicated globally, nor should it be, as inappropriate, wasteful and Dark Aged as it is! May the Chinese do it better! A story on the radio the other day said metal is becoming more popular among construction workers in this age of dwindling forests and climbing lumber prices. For one thing, you can screw instead of nail. Imagine, pro-metal propaganda on the radio -- in Oregon! The lumber industry is fighting back, saying mines are at least as damaging to the environment as logging. But Fuller's point was that the majority of the metals we need are already mined, and can be recycled over and over (the dwellings will be designed with recycling in mind, kind of like the Germans have been doing with some models of BMW). The old housing stock won't disappear -- decades of remodeling await the avid remodelers. But I wish those of us who are being pushed to the periphery by high housing costs had more to look forward to than mobile home courts. I'm always passing these mobile homes on the backs of trucks on the freeway -- Caution Wide Load. Why do helicopter deliveries from the local dealer to less paved over and bulldozed environs sound so far out and "futuristic"? Fuller's little energy-harvesting, grid-autonomous units, constellated in remote little campus-communities, would make ideal living and learning environments -- good places for children. -- Kirby ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1993 21:03:05 GMT Reply-To: emw@ima.com Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: Ed Wilkinson Organization: International Messaging Associates Subject: whos is/was this guy BF? Please excuse my ignorance, but who is/was Buckminster Fuller? I've heard he had some interesting ideas a while back, but that's all I know. Is there a FAQ somewhere maybe? Please reply via email. Thanks, Ed -- Ed Wilkinson emw@ima.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1993 08:35:31 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: leo elliott <76440.1416@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: why far out? In short answer to Kirby's question: "Why do helicopter deliveries... sound so far out and 'futuristic'?" I think the most telling answer is implied in a word contained in Kirby's next sentence: "Fuller's little energy-harvesting, grid-autonomous units, constellated in remote little campus-communities..." the key word being "grid-autonomous." As per "Grunch of Giants", pushers do not like it when users decide they want to "grow their own", be it homes, domes, education, or local support systems. Supposedly the dymaxion bathroom, mentioned here previously, received rave reviews until the plumbers unions of the time found out that it would be completely user-installable, thus depriving them of their "standard fees." I would suspect that it has been this whole notion of de-centralized energy systems (centrifugal energy flow/centripetal info flow) which has, over the years, aside from Fuller's personal suasions and disuasions, been the most threatening (to the "giants") aspect of his overall program -- live anywhere you want, do what you want, all paid for by the dole, which itself will be more than paid for by the return on investment of those marvelous discoveries and inventions made by the less-than-1% who would produce the most wonderful synergy-revealing artifacts. Leo (very-much-connected-to-the-grid) Elliott 76440.1416@Compuserve.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1993 17:15:45 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: 4D Lives! Leo Elliott writes: > I would suspect that it has been this whole notion of de-centralized energy > systems... which has... been the most threatening (to the "giants") aspect > of [Fuller's] overall program Perhaps, perhaps. But think of the business interests in *favor* too: a huge aftermarket in user-installables (similar to computer component add-ons). Cellular phone and fax demands, satellite TV, the education and info-tainment dialup video needs of remotely deployed home-schoolers, a growing sector of under/unemployed defense workers with aerospace savvy... And the utility grids will *still* have LA, Paris and Tokyo to power. Its not like a sprinkling of grid-autonomous dust is going to spell 'lights out' in the sprawling megalopolis already covering the planet. Moreover, Fuller was hardly "anti-grid" what with his bi-hemispheric vision of same... Recall that "the industry industry missed" (July 1932, Fortune magazine) was initially very appealing to industrialists in the pre-war 30s, including such as GE -- was briefly subject of what we'd nowadays call "media hype". The unions (along with the banks and county zoning boards) might have killed it, but the duck was lame to begin with -- or at least this is what Fuller says in retrospect: "Fortune made the mistake of assuming 'the industry industry missed' had at last come of age... Evolution was clearly intent on postponing the inception of the livingry service industry until humanity had graduated from its pre-twentieth centry condition as a planet of remote nations... all of which waited upon the completeion of a world-around network of... telephones ... and jumbo jet airplanes." (G of G, pp xvii-iii). -- Kirby ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1993 23:06:39 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: leo elliott <76440.1416@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: motivations, et al. Kirby's pointing to the large aftermarket for user-installable add-ons, as in computers, is an appropriate ex-post-facto economic argument; however, as in computers, or telephones, one does well to realize that the large aftermarket available for those wishing to detach from the grid becomes available only as a result of a prior giant (IBM, AT&T) having "paved the way" in the form of getting users connected, and aware of the possibilities of connectivity, in the first place. Not to defend the Giants, by any means, nor to imply, as Kirby points out, that Fuller was by any means an "anti-gridder." Certainly his notions of the world-wide electric grid, and the economies to be achieved from shifting peak loads from night-time producing regions to day-time using regions, indicate to me rather a man obsessed with the idea that the purpose of the ship was to serve its crew (as directed by its captain(s)(?)). Somewhere in my notes is a quote from Bucky about there being "one best mechanical way to do things." (Hence the dome, the tetrahedonal geometry, his artifactual efforts to replicate nature's most efficient material economy.) And Bucky was certainly as aware as anyone of the fact that the forces which governed the pushing and the pulling which went on in this material economic domain were far from efficient, and not very natural. Was he naive to think that, once these natural patterns were displayed that they would be welcomed and adopted? Probably, but "daring to be naive" and "taking the initiative" were among the few advantages that the lowly individual had vs. the Giants. Of course, it could also be that there has been developing some unforeseen synergy amongst the Giants as well, or rather, some small, furry, commercial-mammalians behaving in whole-system ways totally unpredicated upon their prior behaviors as component systems of the GRUNCH Bucky was writing about in 1983. -- Perhaps there are those with more current info on the commercial and utility law status of the windmill-generators who attempted to pump their surplus back into the grid? Leo Elliott Charlottesville, VA ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1993 01:08:26 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Chris Fearnley Subject: Re: Fuller and emergency shelters In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 19 Oct 1993 16:00:06 LCL from On Tue, 19 Oct 1993 16:00:06 LCL Gerry Segal said: [ Stuff deleted.] > > Some of R.B.Fuller's actions especially regarding the invention >of tensegrity structures and his involvement with Werner Erhardt, EST >and World Hunger project do not say much about the man. > I do not believe that Fuller did anything wrong regarding the invention of tensegrity structures - although I have heard this unsubstantiated claim before. Here is what I have pieced together about this invention from talking to a student at Black mountain college and doing a literature search on Kenneth Snelson. First of all Fuller began talking and writing about the mutually coexistent properties of tension and compression in 1927 (see his first book _4D Time Lock_). He even complained of having no good model to explain these principles. In 1948 at Black mountain college Fuller gave lectures, seminars, etc., One of his students, Kenneth Snelson became interested in Fuller's ideas and during the winter of 1948/49 built the first model of Fuller's tensegrity structures. Fuller acknowledged Snelson for his breakthrough and Snelson acknowledged the influence of his teacher. After the initial breakthrough Fuller's patents on tensegrity were expansions of his general synergetics principles whereas Snelson (of a more artistic slant) explored the medium of tensegrities. Snelson patented his work. From what I have been able to discern both men developed the concept of tensegrity in unique and independent ways. I suspect that Snelson's artist-type friends felt incorectly that Fuller got famous off the great artists work. That may be why you suggest that Fuller's actions about the invention of tensegrity are questionable. For me I honor both men for what is truly remarkable work! > Also, I don't understand why Fuller's involvemnet with Warner Erhardt, EST and World Hunger project detract from Fuller, the man. Although I'm not aware of the controversies these involvements generated, I see nothing wrong with being involved with people/projects that don't have the greatest reputations. Perhaps Fuller was just a great guy who saw vertue in everyone. I too sufer from this affliction even going so far as to suggest that maybe bad guys are good because they remind us of what is bad (which humans tend to forget too easily). > Gerry Segal > Director of College Systems > Bank Street College of Education > New York, NY Christopher J. Fearnley cfearnl@pacs.pha.pa.us cfearnl@cpp.pha.pa.us fearnlcj@duvm.ocs.drexel.edu fearnlcj@duvm.bitnet chris.fearnley@pacsibm.org ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1993 11:24:00 LCL Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Gerry Segal Subject: Re: Fuller and emergency shelters Chris Fearnley said: > I do not believe that Fuller did anything wrong regarding the > invention of tensegrity structures - although I have heard this > unsubstantiated claim before...For me I honor both men for what is > truly remarkable work! Mr. Fearnley seems to think that Fuller recognized the contribution of Ken Snelson to his discovery of tensegrity which I agree is a truly remarkable work and that the two had arrived at a harmonious accord. Nothing could be further from that view. It is not Mr. Snelson's "artists friends" who object to Fuller's taking credit for the discovery but the artist himself. I did a rather extensive interview with him for an article I wrote in "Science Digest" Magazine in 1984. It is clear that as Mr. Fearnley states,Ken Snelson has the patent on the invention. It is also clear that no mention is made of Mr. Snelson in Synergetics I and II clearly Fuller's seminal work. There is more than one entire chapter devoted to tensegrity in these books. Not to mention Snelson is more then an oversite, it is blatent self-promotion at the expense of another's hard work, and as I state in my initial note doesn't say much about the man. > Also, I don't understand why Fuller's involvemnet with Warner > Erhardt, EST and World Hunger project detract from Fuller, the > man.... Even Erhardt's supporters on this net claim he didn't give a penny to help world hunger in the name of world hunger. Fuller's concern about the inhabitants of "spaceship earth" didn't go very far here. I'm not sure if the events I discuss or others have any real weight against the ideas of a man's life. Sometimes though getting close to the human being can detract from what they have truly offered mankind. I believe this is the case with R.B. Fuller. Gerry Segal Director of College Systems Bank Street College of Education New York, NY ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1993 10:00:23 -0400 Reply-To: percy@onward.FTP.COM Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: "A Page in the Life of ..." Subject: 4D Lives! In-Reply-To: 4D Solutions's message of Fri, 22 Oct 1993 08:49:09 PDT <9310222352.AA17718@cs.brandeis.edu> From: 4D Solutions More adventures in This Old House: The lumber industry is fighting back, saying mines are at least as damaging to the environment as logging. But Fuller's point was that the majority of the metals we need are already mined, and can be recycled over and over -- Kirby If we ever reach space, there is big chunks of metal floating out there. No wood, just metal. Why can't we clean up the solar system and build houses at the same time? The problem of recycling it, is we seem to keep getting more and more people ... Dave K -- It's not just Congress! Even Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney now admits to bouncing something like 21 checks. Did you seem him on the news the the other night? He says that because he ONLY overdrew his account by $10,000....he shouldn't be lumped in with those who were TRULY abusing the system. I know $10,000 seems like a lot of money....but when you're Secretary of Defense, you can't even buy a TOILET SEAT for that kind of money! -- Jay Leno ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1993 20:57:26 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: 4D Lives! Mr Segal's point that Fuller's ideas may have been great, but he might not have liked Fuller the man-in-person, is a given I'd say. As for Fuller's ultimate place in history, that's more interesting. But even *more* interesting, in my own mind, is the question of whether we can actually *do* anything about humanity's predicament ala Fuller's master plan. A foot soldier in the trenches isn't worried about how the general will go down in history -- he wonders if the general is thinking clearly or boozing it up while he gets shot at. OK, so now Fuller is gone (tenn hut! salute), but the battle rages on... > note: excerpts are from Mr Segal's posting > It is not Mr. Snelson's "artist friends" who object to Fuller's > taking credit for the discovery but the artist himself. I did a > rather extensive interview with him for an article I wrote in > "Science Digest" Magazine in 1984. > ...Not to mention Snelson is more then an oversite, it is > blatent self-promotion at the expense of another's > hard work, and as I state in my initial note doesn't say > much about the man. Ah, interesting -- I'd missed the while point of the tensegrity conversation earlier. And guess what, the Synergetics Dictionary, full of obscure citiations to just about everything Fuller ever said or published, has no entry under Snelson. We go from Snake to Snow. Certainly the omission of Snelson appears deliberate, as Mr. Segal says, not some oversight. Die-hard Fuller apologists may suspect the master was playing hard ball with his former student -- learn to self-promote, kid, like I did, cuz no one else will do it for you. But without being that die-hard, I would agree that, yes, Fuller was unabashedly "self promoting." He didn't believe in paying others to promote on his behalf either -- no publicists or PR firms. Even his efforts at self-promoting were wholly his own! The whole point of the patents, by Fuller's own admission, was not to make him rich but to prove "what the little individual could do in service of omnihumanity." Hence his game was to highlight all his achievements as evidence and say "I rest my case." Given the premise of his life, I can see why he'd leave it to others to question the individuality of his contribution. Did he really invent the dome even? Or, has this group already been through that discussion? > Even Erhardt's supporters on this net claim he didn't give a > penny to help world hunger in the name of world hunger. Fuller's > concern about the inhabitants of "spaceship earth" didn't go very far > here. You can promote "the arts" without giving pennies to "starving artists." Posters around town, clever TV spots... In the case of hunger, other, more professional and experienced organizations fund-raise specifically for the hungry, and deliver the goods. If Erhard's operation directly competed with CARE and Save the Children for cash donations, I think he'd have been (rightly) taken to task there too. The goal here was to do something new, not more of the same. I can see where Fuller, convinced as he was that Malthusian knee-jerking was still behind a lot of guilt-assuaging, band-aid "solutions" to global problems, would be interested in mounting a propaganda campaign aimed specifically at questioning underlying assumptions -- getting at that "reflex-conditioning" Fuller was so worried would be our final undoing. The campaign failed of course. Hunger is still as deadly as ever and no great transformation in attitude appears to have occurred. So, yes, Fuller fell short of steering Spaceship Earth to safe harbors. But he wasn't the only passenger on board, either. One problem I had with the Hunger Project is it gave out a lot of statistics by nation -- since that's how the UN (the principal source) compiles 'em. I understand World Game's Global Recall software works similarly. Since I'm into subverting the importance of national boundaries as the be-all-and-end-all conceptual categories in which to package and measure humanity's suffering, I wish the Dymaxion Projection had been a little more front-and-center in those little living room teach-ins the Hunger Project put together. But my thanks to all those volunteers in the trenches nonetheless. . ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1993 21:40:11 -0700 Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Subject: Fuller and his students In-Reply-To: <9310260409.AA09550@garnet.berkeley.edu> from "4D Solutions" at Oct 25, 93 08:57:26 pm >>>Die-hard Fuller apologists may suspect the master was playing hard ball with his former student -- learn to self-promote, kid, like I did, cuz no one else will do it for you. This seems like a bit of a stretch, even for the best apologists-- "I'm stealing from you for your own good, it will make you stronger." I would like to propose an alternative, that Fuller's relationship with Snelson can be seen as an example of the problematic relations Fuller had with students in this period, problematic because of claims Fuller made as sponsor and inspiration of their work, and disputes over the ownership of ideas and artifacts. It comes as no surprise to readers of this list that Fuller was always concerned to maintain control over his intellectual property rights. Aside from the financial strain losing control of inventions brings to inventors, there are deeper worries about losing other links between you and your creation-- how it is used, who it is associated with, etc.. Fuller required students to sign statements in which they swore to "protect my proprietary rights," as he told an architecture professor. "In return for their pledges," he continued, "I agree to provide them with unrestrained, unguarded disclosures of my evolving thougths concerning unique experiences and emerging inventions." So far not a bad bargain. But Fuller made very large claims about the relative contributions he made to a student's work, and who ultimately owned the fruits of a student's labor. At Washington University in 1955, for example, after students complained that they had not been given sufficient credit for their work in developing a prototype dome, Fuller fired back to the Architecture School Dean: "It must be remembered that the Dome was manufactured... ONLY because I had an experience-fertilized teleological design backlog.... It is true that every student was responsible for some phase of ORIGINAL design conceptioning, but none of them must make the mistake of thinking... that they have been responsible for teleologic processes as yet beyond the limits of their experience and capacity.... The thesis students only designed the sub-complex forwarding requirements of my preconceived comprehensive solution." Now, once this is decoded, it contains a truly remarkable claim. What I think Fuller is saying-- and this is the interpretation drawn by several Architecture School professors-- is that because he developed the mathematics by which domes were designed, and he IMAGINED the work that students would do under him, that *students had no claim whatsoever to authorship or anything they did under Fuller's direction.* The message was not "learn to self-promote, kid," but rather "because I imagined all this before I came here-- and because you're not old enough to have done any of this on your own-- I own this work, and you don't. The fact that YOU actually did the work is of not the slightest consequence." This is hardly the only example of arguments Fuller had with students and colleagues over the division of spoils and attribution of authorship in collaborative projects; thoughout, Fuller maintained that HIS participation was necessary for work to be done, and that this was sufficient to establish exclusive ownership of prototypes and ideas. He ultimately broke with the NC State School of Design, which had been a generous provider of support and apparently gracious host to him, over precisely such issues. In E.M. Forster's _Maurice_, a young Oxonian (Viscount Risley) declares, "Words ARE deeds." For Fuller, if my take on him is right, imagining was doing, and moreover, it was ownership. Best, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Department of History, UC Berkeley apang@garnet.berkeley.edu ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1993 00:49:22 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Chris Fearnley Subject: Re: Fuller and emergency shelters In-Reply-To: Message of Sun, 24 Oct 1993 11:24:00 LCL from On Sun, 24 Oct 1993 11:24:00 LCL Gerry Segal said: >Chris Fearnley said: > >> I do not believe that Fuller did anything wrong regarding the >> invention of tensegrity structures - although I have heard this >> unsubstantiated claim before...For me I honor both men for what is >> truly remarkable work! > > Mr. Fearnley seems to think that Fuller recognized the >contribution of Ken Snelson to his discovery of tensegrity which I >agree is a truly remarkable work and that the two had arrived at a >harmonious accord. Nothing could be further from that view. > > It is not Mr. Snelson's "artists friends" who object to Fuller's >taking credit for the discovery but the artist himself. I did a >rather extensive interview with him for an article I wrote in >"Science Digest" Magazine in 1984. It is clear that as Mr. Fearnley >states,Ken Snelson has the patent on the invention. It is also clear >that no mention is made of Mr. Snelson in Synergetics I and II clearly >Fuller's seminal work. There is more than one entire chapter devoted >to tensegrity in these books. Not to mention Snelson is more then an >oversite, it is blatent self-promotion at the expense of another's >hard work, and as I state in my initial note doesn't say much about >the man. First, it is clear that Fuller discovered the principle of tensegrity. He introduced the concept to Snelson. What Snelson did that is so wonderful is he found a way for humans to engineer tensegrity. So it's nitpicking but in most cases Fuller shouldn't NEED to cite Snelson. Snelson developed his work along artistic channels, so his work in tensegrity is (INMHO) more spectacular than Fuller's. [Fuller only did geodesic and other spherical tensegrities (which he patented); Snelson never bothered with such trivialities - it built tensegrity towers that appear to go off to infinity and etc.,] I read some Snelson quotes that suggested that he respected Fuller, felt they needed to go their separate ways because their approaches were so different, but I never got the impression that Snelson felt slighted by fuller in any way. Did Snelson in the interview make a big deal out of this or are we blowing it out of proportion? Perhaps Snelson was just making a joke satirically poking fun at how engineers get more credit than artists? One of my great difficulties regarding Fuller is the virtually complete lack of citations. I think this stems from his talking approach. I have experimented with using citations in my speaking. It creates a bland disjointed presentation. It is much more efficient to to gloss over citations while speaking. Perhaps we can forgive Fuller's lack of academic discipline. Perhaps Fuller felt the ideas are more important than the the history of the ideas. I don't believe that Fuller ever takes credit for Snelson's work, he just doesn't promote Snelson's work. But when Fuller gave a lecture in which he wanted to give the history of the invention of tensegrity, he DID [There is a book about Snelson at the SUNY-Binhamton library that quotes Fuller giving proper credit. Unfortunately, I am no longer in Binghamton, forget the books title and couldn't find it here in Philly last time I looked.] cite Snelson's role. I am not sure how to evaluate a man. In fact, if given a choice I would rather avoid the task. But I do not feel that the case against Fuller the man is so clearcut as you have suggested. I would like to know how others feel about citations. I never completed a PhD and so have not developed the discipline of rigorous academic citations. Until this latest exchange I was leaning towards Fuller's approach to citations, but I wouldn't want people to consider me a pompous self-promoter for ommiting them. I just think that ideas are more important than keeping a detailed history. Isn't that what historians are for? > > [stuff deleted] > > Gerry Segal > Director of College Systems > Bank Street College of Education > New York, NY Christopher J. Fearnley cfearnl@pacs.pha.pa.us cfearnl@cpp.pha.pa.us fearnlcj@duvm.ocs.drexel.edu fearnlcj@duvm.bitnet chris.fearnley@pacsibm.org ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1993 01:44:09 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Chris Fearnley Subject: Re: Fuller and his students In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 25 Oct 1993 21:40:11 -0700 from Mr. A. Pang's post shows that Fuller had some bizzare concepts of ownership. It's understandable given his struggle from rejecting the concept of ownership yet needing to work in a world with ownership. Yet I would have wished that Fuller took the bull by the horns and lived up to his ideals of "ownership is onerous." Still such abuses are common fare in engineering and science labs around the world - or so I hear. In conclusion: Fuller was just one little man. Suscesible to the foibles of anyone of his era, yet "improved" [or so we "exaulted" ones think] in many ways over our forebears. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1993 13:30:40 -0700 Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Subject: Mea culpa For those of you who didn't already catch the error, the scene I referred to in my earlier posting (from E.M. Forster's _Maurice_) did not take place at Oxford but at Cambridge, and Lord Risley was a Trinity B.A., not an undergraduate. My apologies for the error. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Department of History, UC Berkeley ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1993 15:42:51 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: 4D Lives! If we ever reach space, there is big chunks of metal floating out there. No wood, just metal. Why can't we clean up the solar system and build houses at the same time? -- David K. But lets be sure its really junk before we reel it in. Other contributors to this conference are still trying to upload software to some of those old metal hunks... Cite: posting by Gijs Fehmers, e-mail: tnnigf@urc.tue.nl > Hello, this is a posting about a real geodesic matter and it has > nothing to do with those Buck things. This is the only group > that has anything to do with geodesy. > I am a Ph.D. student working on an ionospheric-geodetic project. > I am working with NNSS (Navy Navigational Satellite System) receivers > that give me a headache. The equipment consists of 8 geodetic NNSS > (2 CMA-751 and 6 CMA-761) receivers, all built by the Canadian > Marconi Company. Good luck Gijs! Sorry we haven't been of much help. -- Kirby ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1993 15:50:42 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: 4D Lives! > Here is what I have pieced together about this invention from > talking to a student at Black mountain college and doing a literature > search on Kenneth Snelson. [Chris Fearnley] You know some Blank Mountaineers Chris? Some of 'em came west to Portland and founded the Catlin Gabel school. A tensegrity icosahedron graces their lawn, made of big pieces of wood and tenses rope. One guy I talked to used to do spaghetti with Fuller in Chicago. Seems that the Black Mountain experience was transformative for a lot of folk. I often work just yards away, at St. Vincents hospital, hunkered down over a computer in the "monitor room" between two operating rooms. -- Kirby ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1993 14:01:08 PDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: 4D Solutions Subject: 4D Lives! >>>Die-hard Fuller apologists may suspect the master was playing hard ball with his former student -- learn to self-promote, kid, like I did, cuz no one else will do it for you. [Kirby] > This seems like a bit of a stretch, even for the best apologists-- >"I'm stealing from you for your own good, it will make you stronger." I >would like to propose an alternative, that Fuller's relationship with >Snelson can be seen as an example of the problematic relations Fuller had >with students in this period, problematic because of claims Fuller made >as sponsor and inspiration of their work, and disputes over the ownership >of ideas and artifacts. [Alex] Yes, this time I'm inclined to agree with your thesis Alex. My apologist was being far-fetched. And thanks for that posting. Adds a dimension with real scholarship about Fuller. I'm inclined to think Fuller was miffed that Snelson beat him to the punch at the patent office and fought back by "cutting him out of his will" so to speak. Other remarks and conversations I've had tell me that Fuller could get *really pissed* when he felt his contribution was being subverted in some way -- like when that German guy came out with a book entitled "Synergetics" -- Applewhite said Fuller was of a mind to sue the guy's pants off [my paraphrase]). My feeling is that Fuller wanted to be the Father of Great Gifts to Humanity (and I personally acknowledge him for being precisely that) but in no way an anonymous benefactor. In Fuller's vision, intellectual property conventions might well dissipate over the long haul (a lot of what he meant by "creating artificial scarcity" in the chapter "Legally Piggily" of Critical Path I read as an implicit indictment of modern-day intellectual property conventions), but he wanted his "ownership" of his contribution to be writ large in the pages of history. Most of us came to know Fuller when he was already famous ("best known American genius" or however the cliche goes), but for years he struggled in relative obscurity, developing that Ralph Nader mentality that says "how can I sleep when the Corporations are working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all around the globe?" Given the way Disney, Inc. effaces Fuller's contribution to Epcot, the way that Philadelpha museum [above postings] uses his map without attribution, the way Synergetics is ignored, the way individuals in general are removed from the picture to make them feel appropriately helpless in the face of Corporate all-powerfulness, I can understand where Fuller's conditioned reflexes come from. He is downright *furious* in some dimension. Students, guiltless and innocent, felt the onslaught of this guy's life's mission to buck the tide of history, which is about (felt Fuller) making ownership of critical assets the sole privilege of literally soulless legal fictions called Corporations. That Fuller's jealous guarding and hoarding of credit-to-himself for what he felt was proof of the glory of God makes him even more the caricature -- at bottom was not a selfish drivenness to make money, but an ethical principle. To my way of thinking, none of this makes him more pathetic or ugly, but only shows how starved we as individuals are for acknowledgement, how imprisoned we feel as cogs in the machine. Without getting too maudlin, I think Werner Erhard felt precisely this in Fuller, his deep hunger for acknowledgement, and I am grateful to Erhard for offering wholehearted gratitude to Fuller at Madison Square Gardens. Sounds like Snelson, too, is/was a starved individual. Our Malthusian world thrives on starvation. Fat in body, skeletal in spirit. Happy Halloween! -- Kirby ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1993 11:15:26 EST Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: DAMICO@GELMAN.CIRC.GWU.EDU Subject: Re: 4D Lives! > Cite: posting by Gijs Fehmers, e-mail: tnnigf@urc.tue.nl > > > Hello, this is a posting about a real geodesic matter and it has > > nothing to do with those Buck things. This is the only group > > that has anything to do with geodesy. > > > I am a Ph.D. student working on an ionospheric-geodetic project. > > I am working with NNSS (Navy Navigational Satellite System) receivers > > that give me a headache. The equipment consists of 8 geodetic NNSS > > (2 CMA-751 and 6 CMA-761) receivers, all built by the Canadian > > Marconi Company. Like Kirby I wish you good fortune. I would like to suggest, however, that you reexamine your presumption that what you do has nothing to do with "those Buck things". I ask you to examine the Dymaxion Map projection and Fuller's synergetic geometry you might find numerous principles which could be applied to your particular area of "the branch of applied mathematics that deals with the measurement of ... the exact position of geographical points, and the curvature, shape and dimensions of the earth." Geodesic domes and spheres built by Fuller were intended as macroscopic models of the principles he was examining (discovering?). Take a look. You may be pleasantly surprised. -- Trimtab -- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1993 07:25:33 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Chris Fearnley Subject: Re: 4D Lives! In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 26 Oct 1993 15:50:42 PDT from On Tue, 26 Oct 1993 15:50:42 PDT 4D Solutions said: >> Here is what I have pieced together about this invention from >> talking to a student at Black mountain college and doing a literature >> search on Kenneth Snelson. [Chris Fearnley] > >You know some Blank Mountaineers Chris? Some of 'em came west to Portland >and founded the Catlin Gabel school. A tensegrity icosahedron graces their >lawn, made of big pieces of wood and tenses rope. One guy I talked to used >to do spaghetti with Fuller in Chicago. Seems that the Black Mountain >experience was transformative for a lot of folk. > >I often work just yards away, at St. Vincents hospital, hunkered down over >a computer in the "monitor room" between two operating rooms. > The only man I met who worked with Fuller at Black Mountain College, Thomas Leonard, was interested in architecture. He helped put together several of Fuller's large tensegrity spheres. He admitted that the students didn't know what they were doing - just following Fuller's instructions. It seems that in 1949 after Snelson demonstrated the possibility of human application of Fuller's already beloved tensegrities, his [Fuller's] mind became fertile and he applied all his geodesic principles to the tensegrities. That's why he developed T. spheres and octahedra and tetra. Leaving the T. towers and other art forms to the independent Snelson. >-- Kirby Christopher J. Fearnley cfearnl@pacs.pha.pa.us cfearnl@cpp.pha.pa.us fearnlcj@duvm.ocs.drexel.edu fearnlcj@duvm.bitnet chris.fearnley@pacsibm.org ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1993 10:12:46 EDT Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: "Hilve A. Firek" Subject: solar energy Does anyone have any information on the use of solar panels in domes? Thanks. Kerri Brochard Student, SSVAGS -- **************************************************************************** Hilve Firek hfirek@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu Southside Virginia Governor's School for Global Economics and Technology Route 1, Box 15, Keysville, VA 23947 1-800-866-0616 (in Virginia only), (804) 395-2055, FAX (804) 736-0719 "Engage." --Captain Jean Luc Picard * U.S.S. Enterprise _______________ * * * * * (_NCC1701D______) * * * * // * * * * // * * * * * * * -------- * * * * *** * * (() () ()) -------- **************************************************************************** ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1993 16:14:17 CST Reply-To: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works From: Tom Dosemagen Subject: Re: solar energy I have a dome and tried to find solar panels to be installed on the dome. I had no luck finding such a beast so I installed 320 square feet of panels on the ground close to the dome and ran all connections under ground into the basement. I live in south central Wisconsin and my experience with solar is not the greatest. My system works fine, but in order for the system to work the sun has to shine. That doesn't happen alot here until late February or early March. My advise to people in our paart of country is to take the money you were going to spend on solar and invest it. Then take your interest money and pay for conventional heat. My dome is 44 feet in diameter and with a 90% efficient furnace and my total heating bill for one season is right around $350.00. My exterior walls are framed with 2x6's. With thicker around $350.00. My exterior walls are framed with 2x6's. With thicker dome walls I'm sure that I could lower my heating costs by quite a bit. Sorry about all of the screw ups in this message. I'm just a lousy typist. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1993 19:57:19 GMT Reply-To: KRUSE@DEMOPKG.vnet.ibm.com Sender: List for the discussion of Buckminster Fuller's works Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU From: KRUSE@DEMOPKG.VNET.IBM.COM Organization: IBM Center Marketing Service & Tech Support Subject: Re: solar energy In <00974B35.F3615060.8885@uwwvax.uww.edu>, Tom Dosemagen writes: >I have a dome .... >From those who own or have experience with domes, I'd be interested in hearing things like: What kind you have How long you've had it Why you chose that brand What you don't like now What you would do differently if doing it again Did you build it yourself or have it built Recommendations etc., etc. Thanks! Joel Kruse