R. Buckminster Fuller, in full Richard Buckminster Fuller, (born July 12, 1895, Milton, Massachusetts, U.S.—died July 1, 1983, Los Angeles, California), American engineer, architect, and futurist who developed the geodesic dome—the one giant dome that may be set instantly on the bottom as a whole construction and the one sensible type of constructing that has no limiting dimensions (i.e., past which the structural power should be inadequate). Among essentially the most noteworthy geodesic domes is the United States pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal. Also a poet and a thinker, Fuller was famous for unorthodox concepts on international points.
Fuller was descended from a protracted line of New England Nonconformists, essentially the most well-known of whom was his great-aunt, Margaret Fuller, the critic, trainer, girl of letters and cofounder of The Dial, organ of the Transcendentalist motion. Fuller was twice expelled from Harvard University and by no means accomplished his formal schooling. He noticed service within the U.S. Navy throughout World War I as commander of a crash-boat flotilla. In 1917 he married Anne Hewlett, daughter of James Monroe Hewlett, a widely known architect and muralist. Hewlett had invented a modular building system utilizing a compressed fibre block, and after the warfare Fuller and Hewlett fashioned a building firm that used this materials (later often known as Soundex, a Celotex product) in modules for home building. In this operation Fuller himself supervised the erection of a number of hundred homes.
The building firm encountered monetary difficulties in 1927, and Fuller, a minority stockholder, was compelled out. He discovered himself stranded in Chicago, with out revenue, alienated, dismayed, confused. At this level in his life, Fuller resolved to commit his remaining years to a nonprofit seek for design patterns that might maximize the social makes use of of the world’s power sources and evolving industrial advanced. The innovations, discoveries, and financial methods that adopted have been interim elements associated to that finish.
In 1927, in the midst of the event of his complete technique, he invented and demonstrated a factory-assembled, air-deliverable home, later referred to as the Dymaxion home, which had its personal utilities. He designed in 1928, and manufactured in 1933, the primary prototype of his three-wheeled omnidirectional automobile, the Dymaxion automotive. This car, the primary streamlined automotive, might cross open fields like a jeep, speed up to 120 miles (190 km) per hour, make a 180-degree flip in its personal size, carry 12 passengers, and common 28 miles per gallon (12 km per litre) of gasoline. In 1943, on the request of the industrialist Henry Kaiser, Fuller developed a brand new model of the Dymaxion automotive that was deliberate to be powered by three separate air-cooled engines, every coupled to its personal wheel by a variable fluid drive. The projected 1943 Dymaxion, like its predecessor, was by no means commercially produced.
Assuming that there's in nature a vectorial, or directionally oriented, system of forces that gives most power with minimal constructions, as is the case within the nested tetrahedron lattices of natural compounds and of metals, Fuller developed a vectorial system of geometry that he referred to as “Energetic-Synergetic geometry.” The primary unit of this method is the tetrahedron (a pyramid form with 4 sides, together with the bottom), which, together with octahedrons (eight-sided shapes), varieties essentially the most financial space-filling constructions. The architectural consequence of using this geometry by Fuller was the geodesic dome, a body the full power of which will increase in logarithmic ratio to its measurement. Many hundreds of geodesic domes have been erected in varied components of the world, essentially the most publicized of which was the United States exhibition dome at Expo 67 in Montreal. One homes the tropical exhibit space of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Another, the Union Tank Car Company’s dome, was in-built 1958 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and, on the time of its building, was the biggest clear-span construction in existence, 384 toes (117 metres) in diameter and 116 toes (35 metres) in top.
Other innovations and developments by Fuller included a system of cartography that presents all of the land areas of the world with out important distortion; die-stamped prefabricated bogs; tetrahedronal floating cities; underwater geodesic-domed farms; and expendable paper domes. Fuller didn't regard himself as an inventor or an architect, nevertheless. All of his developments, in his view, have been unintended or interim incidents in a technique that geared toward a radical answer of world issues by discovering the means to do extra with much less.
Comprehensive and anticipatory design initiative alone, he held—unique of politics and political concept—can remedy the issues of human shelter, diet, transportation, and air pollution; and it may possibly remedy these with a fraction of the supplies now inefficiently used. Moreover, power, ever extra obtainable, directed by cumulative info saved in computer systems, is able to synthesizing uncooked supplies, of machining and packaging commodities, and of supplying the bodily wants of the full international inhabitants.
Fuller was a analysis professor at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) from 1959 to 1968. In 1968 he was named college professor, in 1972 distinguished college professor, and in 1975 college professor emeritus. Queen Elizabeth II awarded Fuller the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. He additionally obtained the 1968 Gold Medal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Fuller—architect, engineer, inventor, thinker, creator, cartographer, geometrician, futurist, trainer, and poet—established a fame as some of the unique thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century. He conceived of man as a passenger in a cosmic spaceship—a passenger whose solely wealth consists in power and data. Energy has two phases—associative (as atomic and molecule constructions) and dissociative (as radiation)—and, based on the first legislation of thermodynamics, the power of the universe can't be decreased. Information, alternatively, is negatively entropic; as data, know-how, “know-how,” it continuously will increase. Research engenders analysis, and every technological advance multiplies the productive wealth of the world neighborhood. Consequently, “Spaceship Earth” is a regenerative system whose power is progressively turned to human benefit and whose wealth will increase by geometric increments.
Fuller’s ebook Nine Chains to the Moon (1938) is a top level view of his common technological technique for maximizing the social purposes of power sources. He additional developed this and different themes in such works as No More Secondhand God (1962), Utopia or Oblivion (1969), Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), Earth, Inc. (1973), and Critical Path (1981).