Design Science: The geodesic dome is probably what Buckminster Fuller means to most people. This book, by Irish scholar Michael John Gorman, is important because it places the dome within a body of work and lifelong research of this unusual man, with a mind curious to understand the principles of structure found in nature.
Gorman weaves in details of Fuller's personal life, highlighting events which fuelled his creative energy.
Buckminster Fuller was not an architect. At the age of 79 he received a licence to practice as an architect as a token gesture. When he was 23 he spent time in a naval academy which proved to be a prime source of his technical knowledge and of his appreciation of advanced technologies and naval architecture.
Obsessed by mass housing, in 1928 Fuller produced a manifesto, called 4D Timelock, on a radically new approach to housing - one year after Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture had been published in English, which obviously influenced him. He had serious criticisms of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and the International Style, believing that they were using industrial lines as a veneer on buildings that remained hand-made, producing only an aesthetic of machine production, while he researched the integration of industrialisation and mass housing possibilities.
Fascinated by "lightness", as opposed to gravity, Fuller imagined the delivery of mass-produced housing to any place on earth by air. A 1928 drawing describes a radical suggestion for the distribution of his mass-produced housing. A Zeppelin would drop a bomb on the desired site, producing a large crater. The same Zeppelin would then drop a 10-deck tower neatly into the crater, to be fixed to the ground by pouring cement!
In 1935, he began to investigate improvements to the world map, the Mercator Projection, created in 1569, which by its nature, distorts aspects of the earth. He created a technique of transferring circles and coordinates from a globe to a flat surface, represented by 6 squares and 8 equilateral triangles. Gorman highlights the significance of the way Fuller conceived of this map, which deeply influenced his structural experiments after that time. In the parts of the book, which deal in depth with specific characteristics of mathematical forms, it would be a real pleasure for a reader, not familiar with all the terms, to have a kit of pull-out, self-assemble models, to share in that sense of play and exploration which permeates the book.
Fuller's approach to mathematics was experimental. His methods enabled him to make discoveries quicker than more formal mathematical methods. Cardboard, toothpicks, rubber bands, steel bands, ping-pong balls and marbles were extremely important in, what Gorman calls, "Fuller's geometrical toolbox". Between 1943 and 1954, he developed his most famous architectural structure: the geodesic dome.
In 1956 the Office of International Trade Fairs invited Fuller to create a prefabricated building for the trade fair in Kabul. The designs for the 100-foot diameter dome were produced in one week and the dome was flown from America to Afghanistan in one DC-4 plane. The dome parts were colour-coded, so that untrained workmen with any native language could erect it. Within 48 hours, the dome was erected by local Afghan workmen, who were instantly acclaimed as the most skilled builders. The dome was an extraordinary success, the King of Afghanistan even requested it as a gift. The geodesic dome was launched on a glittering career as a trade-fair pavilion.
Fuller's research included numerous military applications. Some of the military images could come straight out of a Hotspur annual 1955!
A student, Kenneth Snelson, working with Fuller in 1948, discovered "a static structure stranger than anything he could have imagined". Snelson's wooden X-piece model was the first example of a modular "tensegrity" system. "Tensegrity" was Fuller's word for structures which combined "tension" and "integrity". Fuller was convinced that "tensegrity" was nature's great structural secret. Gorman notes Fuller underplaying the significance of Snelson's discovery. All his life, Fuller was deeply concerned with protecting his intellectual property and patented many of "his" discoveries, requiring universities and students who worked with him, to formally sign away any claims they might have on breakthroughs. The two "tensegrity" models, held in Stanford University, are beautiful discovered forms.
The "tensegrity" model later informed biological cell research, predicting phenomenon not possible with other models. In 1996, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Kroto, Smalley and Curl for the discovery of a football-shaped Carbon-60 molecule. It was named Buckminsterfullerene.
Fuller's 1960 photomontage of the two-mile diameter dome over part of Manhattan is still a powerful image. Gorman maintains that Fuller only touched on city planning, being only lukewarm about a "megalopolis" city of the future and only believed in the city as a unit of analysis.
Gorman's deeply researched book reveals insights into the life of a man, fascinated by industrialisation and mass production, whose range of inventions included a three-wheeled car, prefabricated bathroom units, a beautifully elegant rowing boat, structural octet trusses, a floating tetrahedral city for a million people, sky-floating cities anchored to mountaintops. This book expands the brain, tracing Fuller's explorations into the secrets of nature. Imagination was his greatest gift.
Yvonne Farrell is an architect. She has taught and lectured on architecture in Ireland, Europe, the Middle East and Asia and is a founding director of Grafton Architects.
Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility. By Michael John Gorman ,Skira, 207pp. £34