John Mitchinson - The Book of the Dead

You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. You and all men are here for the sake of other men.

It was at this point that Fuller realized he had faith—faith in what he called “the anticipatory intellectual wisdom which we may call God.” This inspired the conception of his “lifelong experiment,” which was “to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise.” Specifically, his mission was to plan the survival of humanity. He started compiling his “Chronofile,” a vast scrapbook that included a daily diary, recording all his ideas, copies of all his incoming and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, notes and sketches, even his dry-cleaning bills. In it, he called himself Guinea Pig B (B for Bucky). By the end of his “lifelong experiment,” this “lab notebook” took up 270 feet of shelving. Fuller claimed, with some justification, that he had the most-documented life of any human being in history.

After his mystical experience, he locked himself away for a whole year to read and think. He emerged convinced that the secret to saving the world was better design. His axiom was “maximum advantage from minimal energy,” a principle he observed throughout the natural world in the structure of plants and animals. He started with housing: He already had some experience in construction and knew that cheap, efficient “machines for living” (as he called them) were needed all over the world. Ignoring thousands of years of building tradition, he went back to first principles. What if he based house design on the human frame, or a tree, hanging everything off a trunk or backbone—a system that used gravity instead of fighting it? And what if he made it from the lightest materials, like those already being used in aircraft manufacture? The result, a prototype for which was built in 1929, was the first entirely self-sufficient, portable house. Looking like an aluminum yurt, it was suspended on a central pole, ran on a diesel generator, and recycled its own water so it didn’t need plumbing. And it was light enough to be airlifted anywhere it was needed. It was called the Dymaxion house, from a contraction of “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “tension.” It slept four and was priced at $1,500 (about $40,000 today), which meant it could be marketed as “a house that costs no more than a car.” Although it never went into mass production, it put Fuller’s name—and Dymaxion’s—on the map.

Over the next two decades, Fuller created Dymaxion cars and Dymaxion bathrooms and, especially, the Dymaxion globe. This was an atlas of the world projected onto an icosahedron (a solid geometrical figure with twenty sides, each of which is an equilateral triangle) rather than a sphere. It had no up or down, south or north, and it could be unfolded into a flat map of the world. Unfolded one way it showed how the world’s land masses join together; the other way did the same thing for the oceans. Laid out flat either way, it was a much more accurate representation of the world than traditional atlases, but being composed of twenty triangles, it was startlingly unfamiliar to look at.

Few of these conceptual innovations made Fuller any money, but he persevered, taking part-time jobs to keep his wife (and his second daughter, Allegra) clothed and fed. In order to be taken seriously, he gave up smoking and drinking and started eating carefully. “I found that if I was talking about my inventions and drinking, people just wrote them off as so much nonsense,” he explained. His diet consisted exclusively of prunes, tea, steak, and Jell-O. He experimented with a technique for sleeping as little as possible, to squeeze more out of his day. “Dymaxion sleep,” as he inevitably called it, involved training himself to take a thirty-second nap at the first sign of tiredness. He tried it for two years, averaging only two hours’ sleep a day, but had to stop because his colleagues at work couldn’t keep up.

Then, in 1948, came the great leap forward that changed it all. Fuller had been teaching at Black Mountain College, a liberal arts foundation in North Carolina that acted as a summer camp for the elite of American avant-garde culture. Other faculty members included the composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, and abstract Impressionist painter Willem de Kooning.

Always trying to “do more with less,” Fuller had gone on thinking about the lightest and strongest possible building. The simplest way of enclosing space is a regular pyramid, or tetrahedron, each side of which is an equilateral triangle. (It is also much stronger than anything with rectangular sides.) The most efficient way to enclose space is a sphere, because it uses the least possible surface area of any three-dimensional shape. In the back of his mind were the yurt-shaped roof of his Dymaxion house and the twenty equilateral triangles on the surface of the Dymaxion globe. Then came his eureka moment. What if he built a sphere out of triangular planes? Wouldn’t that have the spatial capacity of a sphere and the strength of a pyramid? And so it was that one summer evening at Black Mountain, Fuller and his students took a pile of wooden slats and built the world’s first geodesic dome.

It was an approximation of a sphere made out of triangular planes and then cut in half—and it was the perfect structure: the largest possible volume of interior space with the least amount of surface area, offering huge savings on materials and cost. The ratios were simple and beautiful: Double the dome’s diameter, and its footprint on the ground quadrupled while its volume grew eight times larger. It was also extremely stable, and because air could circulate freely inside, it was up to 30 percent more efficient to heat than a conventional rectangular building. Fuller called it geodesic because a geodesic line is the shortest distance between any two points on a sphere (from the Greek, geodaisia , meaning “dividing the earth”). Most remarkable of all was this: proportionally speaking, the larger the dome, the cheaper, lighter, and stronger it became.

The first commercial application of Fuller’s design came in 1953. The Ford Motor Company commissioned a geodesic dome to cover the central courtyard of its Rotunda building in Dearborn, Michigan. The U.S. military followed with a second order, and soon the world went dome crazy. His immediate success turned Buckminster Fuller into a household name and even made him some money. He took out the patent in 1954, but always refused to set up as the exclusive manufacturer. When asked why, he said:

Whatever I do, once done, I leave it alone. Society comes along in due course and needs what I have done. By then, I’d better be on to something else. It is absolutely fundamental for me to work and design myself out of business.

There are now more than half a million geodesic structures across the world, including the Eden Project in Cornwall and the Houston Astrodome in Texas.

Fuller’s inspiration for the dome was the way in which the protons, neutrons, and electrons of the atom fit together to create matter. In fact, he came to believe that the natural geometry of the whole universe is based on arrays of interlocking tetrahedra. He already had seen how the light-but-strong structure was used all over nature: in the cornea of the eye, in the shape of some viruses, and even in the configuration of the testicles. In 1985 his discovery was to receive the ultimate endorsement when a team of scientists in Houston, Texas, discovered a new class of carbon molecule (C 60) shaped exactly like a geodesic sphere. Its discovery won them the Nobel Prize and they named the molecule buckminsterfullerene (or the “buckyball”). It is the third known form of pure carbon in nature, after diamond and graphite.