All posts tagged: Buckminster

Buckminster Fuller Creates an Animated Visualization of Human Population Growth from 1000 B.C.E. to 1965

Sit back, relax, put on some music (I’ve found Chopin’s Nocturne in B major well-suited), and watch the video above, a silent data visualization by visionary architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, “the James Brown of industrial design.” The short film from 1965 combines two of Fuller’s leading concerns: the exponential spread of the human population over finite masses of land and the need to revise our global perspective via the “Dymaxion map,” in order “to visualize the whole planet with greater accuracy,” as the Buckminster Fuller Institute writes, so that “we humans will be better equipped to address challenges as we face our common future aboard Spaceship Earth.” Though you may know it best as the name of a geodesic sphere at Disney’s Epcot Center, the term Spaceship Earth originally came from Fuller, who used it to remind us of our interconnectedness and interdependence as we share resources on the only vehicle we know of that can sustain us in the cosmos. “We are all astronauts,” he wrote in his 1969 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, …

Buckminster Fuller, the architect who wanted to redesign the world (and inspired a nanosized one)

Published by skeptic

On November 14 1985, a letter announcing the discovery of a superstable species of carbon appeared in the science journal Nature. Even the letter’s title, C₆₀: Buckminsterfullerene, caused a stir among the journal’s scholarly readers. Molecules are usually named with sterile precision. This one was named after the American architect and futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller (Bucky to his friends), whose geodesic domes had become icons of modern design in the 1950s and 60s. Fuller’s spherical domes were designed to be lightweight yet strong, with each triangular element distributing stress evenly across a curved framework. C₆₀ was the atomic analogue of these domes, built not from steel struts but carbon atoms – each joined by strong bonds with three of its neighbours to create a tiny spherical cage. This new allotrope of carbon was so stable and symmetric that it redrew the map of molecular architecture. It kicked off a scientific sprint that led, barely a decade later, to the 1996 Nobel prize in chemistry for English scientist Harold Kroto and his American colleagues Robert Curl …

A Brief Introduction to Buckminster Fuller and His Techno-Optimistic Ideas

Published by José Betancourt

Buckminster Fuller was, in many ways, a twenty-first century man: an achievement in itself, considering he was born in the nineteenth century and died in the twentieth. In fact, it may actually count as his defining achievement. For all the inventions presented as revolutionary that never really caught on — the Dymaxion house and car, the geodesic dome — as well as the countless pages of eccentrically theoretical writing and even more countless hours of talk, it can be difficult for us now, here in the actual twenty-first century, to pin down the civilizational impact he so earnestly longed to make. But to the extent that he embodied the faith, born of the combination of industrial might and existential dread that colored the postwar American zeitgeist, that technology can rationally re-shape the world, we’re all his intellectual children. In the video above, Joe Scott provides an introduction to Fuller and his world in about ten minutes. After a much-referenced Damascene conversion, the once-dissolute Fuller spent most of his life “trying to solve the world’s problems,” Scott says, …

Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vigorous” and “Alert”

Published by José Betancourt

One potential drawback of genius, it seems, is restlessness, a mind perpetually on the move. Of course, this is what makes many celebrated thinkers and artists so productive. That and the extra hours some gain by sacrificing sleep. Voltaire reportedly drank up to 50 cups of coffee a day, and seems to have suffered no particularly ill effects. Balzac did the same, and died at 51. The caffeine may have had something to do with it. Both Socrates and Samuel Johnson believed that sleep is wasted time, and “so for years has thought grey-haired Richard Buckminster Fuller,” wrote Time magazine in 1943, “futurific inventor of the Dymaxion house, the Dymaxion car and the Dymaxion globe.” Engineer and visionary Fuller intended his “Dymaxion” brand to revolutionize every aspect of human life, or—in the now-slightly-dated parlance of our obsession with all things hacking—he engineered a series of radical “lifehacks.” Given his views on sleep, that seemingly essential activity also received a Dymaxion upgrade, the trademarked name combining “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “tension.” “Two hours of sleep a day,” …

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All posts tagged: Buckminster

Buckminster Fuller Creates an Animated Visualization of Human Population Growth from 1000 B.C.E. to 1965

Buckminster Fuller, the architect who wanted to redesign the world (and inspired a nanosized one)

A Brief Introduction to Buckminster Fuller and His Techno-Optimistic Ideas

Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vigorous” and “Alert”