Bucky's Dome


Book Description

Recognized as one of the great design and architectural thinkers of the twentieth century, R. Buckminster Fuller's name is synonymous with the geodesic dome. But throughout his long life and career, Fuller would only ever call one geodesic dome "home," and that was the house he built in 1960 on a corner lot in the small Midwestern town of Carbondale, Illinois. Erected in just one day, Carbondale's famous "Bucky Dome" was an architectural innovation that is now recognized as a local, state and national historic site. The Dome was the residence of Fuller and his wife, Anne, for over a decade and it endures until this day. This book recounts the building of the Fuller's remarkable home, the Midwestern lives of its two famous owners, and the home's history of subsequent owners and renters. And it covers the nearly twenty-year process involving architects, carpenters, preservationists and volunteers in their efforts to restore the Dome to its original individualistic and revolutionary state.




BuckyWorks


Book Description

Buckminster Fuller - ein echt amerikanisches Genie - war weithin bekannt als Architekt, Ingenieur, Mathematiker, Autor und Erfinder. In diesem Buch sind Fullers wichtigste Ideen und Erfindungen in Form von Worten und Bildern zusammengetragen. Lassen auch Sie sich inspirieren, über alternative Lebensweisen nachzudenken! (02/98)




Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth


Book Description

One of Fuller’s most popular works, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, is a brilliant synthesis of his world view. In this very accessible volume, Fuller investigates the great challenges facing humanity. How will humanity survive? How does automation influence individualization? How can we utilize our resources more effectively to realize our potential to end poverty in this generation? He questions the concept of specialization, calls for a design revolution of innovation, and offers advice on how to guide “spaceship earth” toward a sustainable future. Description by Lars Muller Publishers, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller




Charas, the Improbable Dome Builders


Book Description

"Pioneer Works Press, in partnership with The Song Cave, is pleased to present the release of CHARAS: The Improbable Dome Builders, by Syeus Mottel (2017), a fascinating account of six ex-gang members who broke ground to construct a geodesic dome on a vacant lot in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge after a 1970 meeting with the celebrated and revolutionary architect R. Buckminster Fuller, also known as Bucky. Originally published in 1973, this republication speaks to the issues at the heart of the CHARAS project as gentrification seems to multiply faster than communities can work to preserve themselves against it. The book acts as a record to highlight ways people have united to activate empty spaces before gentrification. As a group, CHARAS was interested in physically altering the housing conditions in their immediate neighborhood, the Lower East Side. Influenced by Bucky's teachings, the young men of CHARAS began a period of devoted study to solid geometry, spherical trigonometry, and the principles of dome building. Following this period, CHARAS developed a program that encouraged community autonomy and the reclaiming public space. More than simply a documentation of the project, the book offers stories, profiles, interviews, and images, and the group's process from their intensive study to the obstacles they faced while physically constructing domes."--pioneerworks.org




Becoming Bucky Fuller


Book Description

Concerned with the origins and development of the Dymaxion House project as well as Fuller's public persona, the author uses Buckminster Fuller's archives, particularly the multivolume "Chronofile" to construct a history parallel to the accepted sequence of events.




A Fuller Explanation


Book Description

In a broad sense Design Science is the grammar of a language of images rather than of words. Modern communication techniques enable us to transmit and reconstitute images without the need of knowing a specific verbal sequential language such as the Morse code or Hungarian. International traffic signs use international image symbols which are not specific to any particular verbal language. An image language differs from a verbal one in that the latter uses a linear string of symbols, whereas the former is multidimensional. Architectural renderings commonly show projections onto three mutually perpendicular planes, or consist of cross sections at differ ent altitudes representing a stack of floor plans. Such renderings make it difficult to imagine buildings containing ramps and other features which disguise the separation between floors; consequently, they limit the creativity of the architect. Analogously, we tend to analyze natural structures as if nature had used similar stacked renderings, rather than, for instance, a system of packed spheres, with the result that we fail to perceive the system of organization determining the form of such structures.




Your Private Sky


Book Description

This title, which complements the volume Your Private Sky: The Art of Design Science (see page 44), gives an authentic insight into the development of Fuller's architectonic, technical, & anthropological concepts. Fuller was the epitome of the poet as engineer, the thinker as designer, the artist as researcher. He left behind a voluminous quantity of writing, including texts of visionary importance & penetrating linguistic force, as well as of urgent topicality. The book documents various aspects of Fuller's widely respected texts. These testaments were intended to be shared with the whole world, or, as Fuller coined it in 1950, with "Spaceship Earth."###3-7643-6072-0




Geodesic Domes


Book Description

Each of the models in this book is both beautiful and interesting to make. Each also plays its part as a hands-on introduction to geodesic domes. With the aid of its models, this book explains the underlying theory for designing geodesic domes and shows how a sphere can be divided and subdivided symmetrically in order to create dramatic buildings which are light and strong and also have no need of internal support.




Critical Path


Book Description

The masterwork of a brilliant career, and an important document of the crisis now facing mankind. Today we find ourselves in the midst of the greatest crisis in the history of the human race. Technology has placed in our hands almost unlimited power at the very moment when we have run up against the limits of our resources aboard Spaceship Earth, as the crises of the late twentieth century—political, economic, environmental, and ethical—determine whether or not humanity survives. In this masterful summing up of an entire lifetime’s thought and concern, R. Buckminster Fuller addresses these crucial issues in his most significant, accessible, and urgent work. Critical Path traces the origins and evolution of humanity’s social, political, and economic systems from the obscure mists of prehistory, through the development of the great political empires, to the vast international corporate and political systems that control our destiny today to show how we got to our present situation and what options are available to man. With his customary brilliance, extraordinary energy, and unlimited devotion, Bucky Fuller shows how mankind can survive, and how each individual can respond to the unprecedented threat we face today. The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future.




Nine Chains to the Moon


Book Description

New edition of Buckminster Fuller’s first work published in 1938, which was promoted by Albert Einstein. In 43 chapters the constructor, visionary, inventor, designer, creator of language, and spectacular performer rolls out the art of independent thought. Fuller lays out an enormous horizon and Nine Chains to the Moon is equivalent to a navigation across the world we live in: "What Is a House?", "Death and Life", "Longing Crosses the Sea", "Dollarability", "We Call it Earth", "Stomach Rhythms", "Ephemeralization"—from the microscopic to the automobile, to the house, to urbanity, to the image of the cosmos in constant movement. The title, said Fuller, is meant to stimulate open thinking: the 1938 world population, one person on the shoulders of another, will reach from the earth to the moon nine times!