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Lecture12--BuckminsterFuller1.pptPilot for Spaceship Earth: Buckminster Fuller
Chinese ”Belt and Road” Projects
Pilot for Spaceship Earth: Buckminster Fuller
- He was an architect, designer, engineer, and inventor.
- An Exemplar of how one person can still make a difference in an increasingly bureaucratic and impersonal world.
- From a distinguished family in Boston.
- Born Cross-eyed and near-sighted.
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Burning Man
- Expelled for lack of academic responsibilities twice from Harvard.
- Far more at home in the real world of work.
- His time in the Navy gave him purpose and direction.
- “We’re the only living creatures meant to be ‘generalists.’ We’re the only ones who can live and travel on land, on the water, and in the air. If nature intended man to be a specialist, she would have made him so She would have him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it.”
Mid-1920s: The Stockade Building System Co.
- A new kind of building block made of loose straw soaked in cement.
- Tough but light, two holes were located at the end of each block.
- One could pour cement down the holes to give the structure a concrete frame.
- A whole system of construction followed.
Fuller became President of the company, designing mass production machinery and devising ways to sell the bricks. - 5 factories and two valuable patents, one for framing the blocks, the other for machinery that molded them.
- Fired by the Board of Directors in late 1927.
- Sitting on the shores of Lake Michigan, ready to take his own life, thinking his wife and new born child would be better without him.
- He then had a spiritual experience:
“Here I was, a failure.
I decided I was operating with a fundamental fallacy
That man was supposed to be a failure
And therefore had to prove his right to live.
Each man then said.,
“I must show I can earn my living, and let other people go die.”
I decided the fallacy was that man in fact, designed to be an extraordinary success.
His characteristics were just magnificent;
What was needed was to discover the comprehensive patterns operating in the universe
The Universe is a success
How could Metaphysical man, using his mind, master the physical?
Clearly the possibility of a good life for any man
Depends upon the possibility of realizing it for all men.
Buckminster Fuller:
- “You cannot change things by fighting existing reality: To change things you must build a new model to make the existing model obsolete.” – Star Parker, DDN, 4/20/17, A12.
Geodesic Dome – developed in 1940s
- More than any other achievement, this invention fulfilled his 1927 vow to “discover the principles operative in the universe and turn them over to my fellow man.”
- It combined the inherent stability of triangles with the maximal volume-to-surface area ration of spheres – a straightforward application of geometric principles.
- A geodesic dome can span virtually unlimited distances with no interior supporting elements. It uses about 3% of the material needed for a conventional structure of comparable size. It is based on the icosahedron, the most spherical of all regular polyhedra, with 20 equilateral triangular faces.
Spaceship Earth at Epcot
Icosahedron and Circumscribed Sphere
Biomimicry
- The icosahedron form shows up repeatedly in nature:
- Protein shells of certain viruses
- Radiolaria – macroscopic sea creatures
- Human cornea
Dymaxion Projection Map 1943
Radomes -- 1952
4,500 mile DEW Line
Dome structures withstood 150-200 mph wind forces.
1953 Ford Rotunda Dome, Dearborn, MI
1957 Kaiser Aluminum Dome, Honolulu
- The geodesic dome led to Fuller lecturing at universities all over the world. The dome became an educational tool.
- It is wrong to label Fuller as an inventor, however. His inventions are best viewed as models built to demonstrate his thinking.
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Needle Tower by Kenneth Snelson (1968); Tensegrity is the exhibited strength that results "when push and pull have a win-win relationship with each other". Tension is continuous and compression discontinuous, such that continuous pull is balanced by equivalently discontinuous pushing forces.
Buckminster Fuller explained that these fundamental phenomena were not opposites, but complements that could always be found together. Tensegrity is the name for a synergy between co-existing pairs of fundamental physical laws; of push and pull, and compression and tension, or repulsion and attraction.
It should be noted that Webster's dictionary has simplified the collective meaning as "all things working together". And, while this may be seen as an "over-simplification" in lieu of the technical underpinnings the accompany this concept, the phrase is legitimate in the sense of this concept's universal applicability. The phrase aptly covers the "spirit" of the two words used in the creation of this "neologism", in that the breadth & depth in its inherent meaning (semantic carriage)is extensive and multi-disciplinary.
In example, the formation of functioning architectures in one particular area of cybernetics research - sometimes referred to as "systems intellect" (the paradigmatic landscapes of the meta-cognitive level), makes use of octahedral matrices for the creation of focuses. The simplest form of tensegrity is that of the octahedron (first discovered by Theodore Pope). These matrices help to expeditiously capture the ever-changing/dynamic "contextual backdrop". So, the formation of these functioning architectures which, theoretically, allows for a kind of "auto-epistemological" approach to the creation of "sentience" in the cybernetic environment, is then dependent upon conceptually-based "primitives" held in tension - compression or complementary relationships. These architectures also allow for the ready implementation of any acquired acumen that has been "codified" as an "expert system" (the algorithmic & heuristic content found therein) relative to the perceived contextual backdrop. This would imply then that even human thought & reconnoitering dialogs have "tensegrital (adj)" underpinnings.
If one pushes a ping-pong ball on a smooth table with the point of a sharp pencil, the ball would always roll away from the direction of the push, first rolling one way then the other. Push is divergent. On the other hand, attaching a string to the ping pong ball with tape and pulling it creates convergence. No matter how other forces might influence the ball to roll away from you, the string would always bring it to you more and more directly. Pull is convergent. Similarly, pulling a trailer uphill with a car, the trailer will converge toward the same course behind the car. If the trailer begins to sway, increasing pull by increasing acceleration can dampen the swaying motion. Driving downhill however will cause the trailer to push, and the trailer will show tendencies to sway from side to side.
The rubber skin of the balloon can be seen as continuously pulling (against the air inside) while the individual molecules of air are discontinuously pushing against the inside of the balloon keeping it inflated. All external forces striking the external surface are immediately and continuously distributed over the entire system, meaning the balloon is very strong despite its thin material. Similarly, thin plastic membranes such as plastic bags are often stronger when loaded rather than unloaded..
Tensegrity
Tensegrity is the exhibited strength that results "when push and pull have a win-win relationship with each other". Tension is continuous and compression discontinuous, such that continuous pull is balanced by equivalently discontinuous pushing forces.
- In sum, we should read Fuller for the increased respect he gives us for human potential, and for the lesson that there are no boundaries to the human mind.
Fuller in a unique way embodied our national trait of questioning the status quo. Time called him a throwback to the classic American individualist mold which produced Thomas Edison and Henry David Thoreau.
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Burning Man
*
Needle Tower by Kenneth Snelson (1968); Tensegrity is the exhibited strength that results "when push and pull have a win-win relationship with each other". Tension is continuous and compression discontinuous, such that continuous pull is balanced by equivalently discontinuous pushing forces.
Buckminster Fuller explained that these fundamental phenomena were not opposites, but complements that could always be found together. Tensegrity is the name for a synergy between co-existing pairs of fundamental physical laws; of push and pull, and compression and tension, or repulsion and attraction.
It should be noted that Webster's dictionary has simplified the collective meaning as "all things working together". And, while this may be seen as an "over-simplification" in lieu of the technical underpinnings the accompany this concept, the phrase is legitimate in the sense of this concept's universal applicability. The phrase aptly covers the "spirit" of the two words used in the creation of this "neologism", in that the breadth & depth in its inherent meaning (semantic carriage)is extensive and multi-disciplinary.
In example, the formation of functioning architectures in one particular area of cybernetics research - sometimes referred to as "systems intellect" (the paradigmatic landscapes of the meta-cognitive level), makes use of octahedral matrices for the creation of focuses. The simplest form of tensegrity is that of the octahedron (first discovered by Theodore Pope). These matrices help to expeditiously capture the ever-changing/dynamic "contextual backdrop". So, the formation of these functioning architectures which, theoretically, allows for a kind of "auto-epistemological" approach to the creation of "sentience" in the cybernetic environment, is then dependent upon conceptually-based "primitives" held in tension - compression or complementary relationships. These architectures also allow for the ready implementation of any acquired acumen that has been "codified" as an "expert system" (the algorithmic & heuristic content found therein) relative to the perceived contextual backdrop. This would imply then that even human thought & reconnoitering dialogs have "tensegrital (adj)" underpinnings.
If one pushes a ping-pong ball on a smooth table with the point of a sharp pencil, the ball would always roll away from the direction of the push, first rolling one way then the other. Push is divergent. On the other hand, attaching a string to the ping pong ball with tape and pulling it creates convergence. No matter how other forces might influence the ball to roll away from you, the string would always bring it to you more and more directly. Pull is convergent. Similarly, pulling a trailer uphill with a car, the trailer will converge toward the same course behind the car. If the trailer begins to sway, increasing pull by increasing acceleration can dampen the swaying motion. Driving downhill however will cause the trailer to push, and the trailer will show tendencies to sway from side to side.
The rubber skin of the balloon can be seen as continuously pulling (against the air inside) while the individual molecules of air are discontinuously pushing against the inside of the balloon keeping it inflated. All external forces striking the external surface are immediately and continuously distributed over the entire system, meaning the balloon is very strong despite its thin material. Similarly, thin plastic membranes such as plastic bags are often stronger when loaded rather than unloaded..
