1. R. Buckminster Fuller

2. Early Life
• Richard Buckminster Fuller was born on July 12, 1895
in Milton, Massachusetts, U.S. and died on July 1, 1983
in Los Angeles.
• He was a U.S. engineer and architect who developed
the Geodesic Dome, the only large dome that can be
set directly on the ground as a complete structure, and
the only practical kind of building that has no limiting
dimensions (i.e., beyond which the structural strength
must be insufficient).
• He was also a poet and a philosopher, he was noted for
unorthodox ideas on global issues.

3. Education
• He attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts,
and after that began studying at Harvard
University, where he was affiliated with Adams
House.
• He was expelled from Harvard twice: first for
spending all his money partying with a vaudeville
troupe, and then, after having been readmitted,
for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest.’’
• Many years later he received a Sc.D. from Bates
College in Lewiston, Maine.

4. Best-Known Work
• For the next half-century, Fuller developed
many ideas, designs and inventions,
particularly regarding practical, inexpensive
shelter and transportation.
• He documented his life, philosophy and ideas
scrupulously by a daily diary (later called
the Dymaxion Chronofile), and by twentyeight publications.

5. Concepts and Buildings
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His concepts and buildings include:
Dymaxion house (1928)
Aerodynamic Dymaxion car (1933)
Prefabricated compact bathroom cell (1937)
Dymaxion Deployment Unit (1940)
Dymaxion Map of the world (1946)
Tensegrity structures (1949)
Geodesic dome for Ford Motor Company (1953)
The World Game (1961) and the World Game Institute
(1972)
Montreal Biosphère (1967), United States pavilion at Expo
67

6. Design Philosophy and Principles
• His designs focused around being more
efficient and lower cost.
• Design principle:
“Ephemeralization” which translates to
…Doing More With Less

7. Practical Achievements
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Fuller introduced a number of concepts, and helped develop others. However, more than
500,000 geodesic domes have been built around the world and many are in use. According to
the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the largest geodesic-dome structures are:
Seagaia Ocean Dome: Miyazaki, Japan, 216 m (710 ft)
Multi-Purpose Arena: Nagoya, Japan, 187 m (614 ft)
Tacoma Dome: Tacoma, Washington, USA, 162 m (530 ft)
Superior Dome: Northern Michigan Univ. Marquette, Michigan, USA, 160 m (525 ft)
Walkup Skydome: Northern Arizona Univ. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA, 153 m (502 ft)
Poliedro de Caracas: Caracas, Venezuela, 145 m (475 ft)
Round Valley High School Stadium: Springerville-Eagar, Arizona, USA, 134 m (440 ft)
Former Spruce Goose Hangar: Long Beach, California, USA, 126 m (415 ft).
Formosa Plastics Storage Facility: Mai Liao, Taiwan, 123 m (402 ft).
Union Tank Car Maintenance Facility: Baton Rouge, Louisiana USA, 117 m (384 ft), destroyed
in November 2007.
Lehigh Portland Cement Storage Facility: Union Bridge, Maryland USA, 114 m (374 ft).
The Eden Project, Cornwall, United Kingdom

8. Geodesic Domes
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Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the summers of
1948 and 1949, serving as its Summer Institute director in 1949. There, with the
support of a group of professors and students, he began reinventing a project that
would make him famous: the geodesic dome. Although the geodesic dome had
been created some 30 years earlier by Dr. Walther Bauersfeld, Fuller was awarded
United States patents. He is credited for popularizing this type of structure.
One of his early models was first constructed in 1945 at Bennington College in
Vermont, where he frequently lectured.
In 1949, he erected his first geodesic dome building that could sustain its own
weight with no practical limits. It was 4.3 meters (14 ft) in diameter and
constructed of aluminum aircraft tubing and a vinyl-plastic skin.
The U.S. government recognized the importance of his work, and employed his
firm Geodesics, Inc. in Raleigh, North Carolina to make small domes for the
marines. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the
world.
His first "continuous tension – discontinuous compression" geodesic dome (full
sphere in this case) was constructed at the University of Oregon Architecture
School in 1959 with the help of students.

9. • A geodesic dome is a spherical or partial-spherical shell structure or lattice
shell based on a network of great circles (geodesics) on the surface of a
sphere.
• The geodesics intersect to form triangular elements that have local
triangular rigidity and also distribute the stress across the structure. When
completed to form a complete sphere, it is a geodesic sphere.
• A dome is enclosed, unlike open geodesic structures such as playground
climbers.
• Typically a geodesic dome design begins with an icosahedron inscribed in
a hypothetical sphere, tiling each triangular face with smaller triangles,
then projecting the vertices of each tile to the sphere.
• The endpoints of the links of the completed sphere are the projected
endpoints on the sphere's surface. If this is done exactly, sub-triangle edge
lengths take on many different values, requiring links of many sizes. To
minimize this, simplifications are made. The result is a compromise of
triangles with their vertices lying approximately on the sphere. The edges
of the triangles form approximate geodesic paths over the surface of the
dome.
• Geodesic designs can be used to form any curved, enclosed space.
Standard designs tend to be used because unusual configurations may
require complex, expensive custom design of each strut, vertex and panel.

10. Montreal Biosphère

11. • The Biosphère is a museum
in Montreal dedicated to the environment.
• It is located at Parc Jean-Drapeau, on Île SainteHélène in the former pavilion of the United States
for the 1967 World Fair Expo 67.
• It features exhibitions and activities which are
entertaining and educational to better
understand major environmental issues related
to water, air, climate change, the sustainable
development and responsible consumption.
• The Biosphère changed its name in 2007 to
become an environment museum.

13. • It's a place where you can amble through a
rainforest, the Arctic Circle, rolling woodlands, or
along the raw Atlantic oceanfront.
• Inside the Montreal Biosphere, the four
ecosystems house thousands of animal and plant
species.
• The Gulf of St. Lawrence has an underwater
observatory where you can watch cod feeding
alongside lobsters and sea urchins in the tidal
pools.
• The appearance of the Laurentian Forest varies
widely with the seasons.

14. Interior View

15. • The America Pavilion for the 1967 Expo in
Montreal was as high as a 20-storey building.
• The building originally formed an enclosed
structure of steel and acrylic cells, 76 metres
(250 ft) in diameter and 62 metres (200 ft) high.
• During the Exposition, it contained 6 inner floors
housing American artefacts.
• The architects for the interior exhibition space
were from Golden Metak Productions.
• Visitors had access to 4 large theme platforms
divided into 7 levels.
• The building included a 37m long escalator, the
longest ever built at the time.
• The Minirail monorail ran through the pavilion.

16. Side View

17. • In 1990, Environment Canada purchased the site
to turn it into an interactive museum, showcasing
and exploring the water ecosystems of the Great
Lakes-Saint Lawrence River regions.
• The new museum was completed in 1995 and is
currently in operation.
• A complex system of shades was used to control
the internal temperature.
• Appearances in movies
The structure is used prominently in the
original Battlestar Galactica television series
episode, "Greetings from Earth". Scenes
for Robert Altman's post-apocalyptic ice age
film Quintet were shot on site as well.

18. The structure was
covered by a
transparent outer shell
composed of tinted
acrylic panels, which
later burned in a 1976
fire, shutting down the
building for fourteen
years.

20. Dymaxion
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The word Dymaxion is a brand name that Fuller used for several of his inventions.
It is a portmanteau (a combination of two or more words and their definitions,
into one new word) of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension.
A brand name was needed for the display of Fuller's first architectural model, later
to be known as the Dymaxion house, at the Marshall Field's department store in
Chicago.
In order to invent a word, a wordsmith hired by Marshall Field's spent two days
listening to Fuller and trying to get a feel for the type of language he used. He then
played with syllables from typical Fuller words, until he and Fuller agreed on the
word "Dymaxion".
Fuller was excited about the word and used it for many of his inventions during the
decades to follow, including the Dymaxion house, the Dymaxion car, and
the Dymaxion World Map.
He also renamed his elaborate journal, in which he sought to document his life as
an experiment with the greatest possible detail, as theDymaxion Chronofile.

21. Other Designs
Dymaxion Car:
seats 11, provided high mileage
and ran on 3 wheels
Dymaxion Map:
•Accurate view of the world
•Accurate to 2%

22. Dymaxion House

23. • The Dymaxion House was developed by Fuller to
address several perceived shortcomings with existing
homebuilding techniques.
• It was completed in 1929 after two years of
development, and later redesigned in 1945.
• Fuller wanted to mass produce a bathroom and a
house. His first "Dymaxion" design was based on the
design of a grain bin.
• The Siberian grain-silo house was the first system in
which Fuller noted the "dome effect." Many
installations have reported that a dome induces a local
vertical heat-driven vortex that sucks cooler air
downward into a dome if the dome is vented properly
(a single overhead vent, and peripheral vents).
• Fuller adapted the later units of the grain-silo house to
use this effect.

24. • The final design of the Dymaxion house used a central vertical stainlesssteel strut on a single foundation.
• Structures similar to the spokes of a bicycle-wheel hung down from this
supporting the roof, while beams radiated out supported the floor.
• Wedge-shaped fans of sheet metal aluminum formed the roof, ceiling and
floor. Each structure was assembled at ground level and then winched up
the strut.
• It was a prototype proposed to use a packaging toilet, water storage and a
convection-driven ventilator built into the roof.
• It was designed for the stormy areas of the world: temperate oceanic
islands, and the Great Plains of North America, South
America and Eurasia.
• In most modern houses, laundry, showers and commodes are the major
water uses, with drinking, cooking and dish-washing consuming less than
20 liters per day.
• The Dymaxion house was intended to reduce water use by a greywater
system, a packaging commode, and a "fogger" to replace showers. The
fogger was based on efficient compressed-air and water degreasers, but
with much smaller water particles to make it comfortable.

25. • Two Dymaxion houses were prototyped – one indoor (the
"Barwise" house) and one outdoor (the "Danbury" house).
• No Dymaxion house built according to Fuller's intentions was ever
constructed and lived in.
• Since there was no evidence of the crucial internal rain-gutter
system, some elements of the rain collecting system were omitted
from the restored exhibit.
• The roof was designed to wick water inside and drip into the raingutter and then to the cistern, rather than have a difficult-to-fit,
perfectly waterproof roof.
• There was to be a waterless packaging toilet that deftly shrinkwrapped the waste for pickup for later composting.
• During the prototyping process, the idea for the packaging toilet
was replaced immediately by a conventional septic system because
the packaging plastic was not available.
• Other features worked as advertised, notably the heating, and the
passive air conditioning system, based on the "dome effect."

26. Section
Dymaxion Bathroom

27. Wichita House (1944-1946)

28. • Fuller saw new potential to revisit ideas he had investigated with
the Dymaxion House in the booming postwar American economy in
1944.
• With the necessary money and support in place, he moved into the
Beech Aircraft Factory in Wichita, Kansas, where he would research
an updated Dymaxion and introduce it to the public. Because of the
earlier financial failure, Fuller had to convince his investors that
what he was researching was, in fact, not a prefabricated house.
• Fuller was able to claim that the house was not, in fact,
prefabricated by toying with a rigid trade definition that identified
prefabrication as the "fabrication of semifinished products such as
panels and parts that are used at the site as a subassembly.“
• The Wichita House was delivered as a whole. Fuller's system
therefore marks a bifurcating moment when two strains of veritably
prefabricated construction become evident:
the panel system of flat parts (known largely today as "flat pack")
and the newer modular system of prefinished pieces.

30. • Formally the house was refined from the hexagonal, faceted face of
the Dymaxion to a hemispherical form with a monocoque dome
and a ventilator at its cap.
• Rather than being suspended a full story in the air, the Wichita
House sat just a few inches off the ground.
• The central mast no longer contained an elevator and laundry
facilities, retaining only its function as a utility core.
• Fuller's monocoque drop-in Dymaxion bathroom, which he had
patented, was added to the layout.
• The gentle curves created a more satisfying interior flow: the
palette of finishes on the inside were more refined and better
constructed.
• Like the Dymaxion, the Wichita was intended to be a "dwelling
machine," and Fuller pursued this notion in lectures and writing,
suggesting that industrial design and architecture had never been
more compatible.
• Fuller and his team had to leave the Wichita plant in 1947. Like the
Dymaxion, the Wichita House would enter the annals of replicable
utopian homes that would never see the light of day.

31. Ground Floor
Plan

32. • Jay Baldwin, who worked with Fuller, described the
Wichita house, which has a single pole as it's structural
support. "Bucky thought that tearing up the land was a
ridiculous thing to do".
• The aerodynamic shape was designed to reduce wind
resistance- it was hurricane proof.
• Convection currents inside kept it cool. It used very
little material-"nature works with minimal energy" and
the entire house "weighed less than two volvos’’.
• While building an entire house out of aluminum looks
less environmentally correct today, in the immediate
postwar era there were empty aircraft factories and a
lot of aluminum from airplanes to be recycled.