Bucky was wrong in a fundamental way: It's not about inventing things. Inventions have nothing to do with whether or not the world will 'work for everyone.' It's about ethics for one thing, but there is a more serious dilemma at the very heart of the question of making the world work for everyone, which is the question of 'sameness' particularly in the realm of thought. If every homeless person is to be housed, a lot of people will need to consider this a priority. First its and ethical problem: Should we house the homeless?

Where I have a different point of view from Bucky is that the whole use of the word "problem" is too confining to me as a designer. I do not consider that architecture should be involved with problem-solving at all. What it should be involved with is conditions of social betterment that hitherto were thought impossible. Problem-solving - if you can define a problem then you probably think there's some solution involved. So I find problem-solving far too limiting a concept and tend not to agree with Bucky.

See www.physics.princeton.edu/ trothman/domes.html

The article refers to the Zeiss Optical Company building a geodesic dome after WW1, included is a German patent dated 1922.

Does any body know the details of this ?

Did Bucky invent the geodesic dome ?

Why hasn't Bucky's World Game been turned into a video game?

Or has it?

In his books, Fuller regularly references his "charts of global trends" as evidence for points he makes. Are these the World Game Documents?

Have these charts been kept up to date since Fuller's death?

Is there anywhere one could check the calculations behind these charts to see for ourselves that it is all correct (rather than just taking Bucky's word for it)?

I think the answer is yes. But it is not a popular idea because the experts simply do not, themselves, make the conceptual connections. Furthermore, they do not accredit me for taking the ball and running with it. Some get a lot from a mere glimpse of an idea when presented by a genius like Bucky Fuller. We are willing to go the whole way with it.

Bucky preferred to call the "Platonic solids" the Platonic polyhedra.Indeed, Plato and Archimedes described these shapes in terms of how many sides,and of what shapes these sides were made.

But,I don't picture the Greeks glueing trianglular planes or even sticks together.It seems obvious to me that Plato and Archimedes, and their sources the Pythagoreans ,and their probable sources the Babylonians, made their discoveries using SPHERES. But I can't seem to find any discussion about this in any primary or secondary sources.

Has anyone out there read Wendell Berry's essays that criticize Bucky's ideas? I just found them. They are insightful, penetrating, uncanny in their parallelism to Bucky's ideas and writings.

I read them in Standing By Words (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005; originally 1983). The two essays that discuss Bucky's ideas are:
Standing By Words (1979)
Poetry and Place (1982)

I think that Berry has only a superficial understanding of Bucky's work and ideas, but his criticiam is aimed at the core of his philosophy.

Has anyone read and thought about Berry's argument?

HERE IS SOME BACKGROUND INFO on a real world project, in Europe, to develop sustainable habitat.

There are all kinds of barriers to this. How would Bucky have got around them? What do other people say?

EXTRACTS FROM INTERVIEW
Domenico Provenzano, the initiator, and now developer of France's first large-scale, multi-housing sustainable construction and development project -- ECOHABITAT -- replies in interview to questions and comments he has received since starting the project.
. . . . . . . . . . .

Years ago there were kits availble for growing your own spirulina at home. cant find them anymore but i inderstand that this can be done with minimal materials and that spirulina use sun to transform basic materials into high quality abdundant 70 percent protein spirulna. that this can be harvested easily and can provide families with abundant protein, thereby cheaply dealing with the protein malunutrition in the world today. and at a cheap and lovally controlled level. rathe than one fianced by multinatural corporations, which only come at high cost.

any knowedge, experioence, or thoughts about practicality of this?

Having scanned the web on numerous occasions for information on micro wind generators that might be suitable for a small scale domestic installation (an option I have in mind for our home in Brittany, France) I have come across two 'technologies' that are very beautiful:

http://www.windside.com/
http://www.windwandler.de/

which made me think of bucky's words concerning "not looking for beauty in tackling a problem, but if the result is not beautiful I know I'm wrong ...."

My first reaction was that if they have such 'basically beautiful fundamental forms' the technology MUST BE GOOD, but if that were really the case, why are such technologies (the Windside goes back almost 30 years)so little known ?

To the Buckminster Fuller Institute - Online-Forum
November 21, 2005

Co-Creators Wanted for Building DomeVillage Intentional Community

Hi; my name is Karin Lacy; I am a Lightworker and Spiritual Elder.

A time of great shifting has begun on Earth - on Spaceship Earth - where people yearn to find and reunite with their original spiritual families and tribes. This phenomenon has been foretold as the Great Grassroots Movement, and it is unfolding now. I read somewhere that the owner of the "Pizza Hut" food chain is building an entire city in Florida from the fortune he made, with university and everything - but only for Catholics. The author of the article pointed it out as a sign of separation, but I understood it as the owner's desire and initiative to gather "his tribe" of like-minded souls. He obviously is manifesting his vision of creating a large community of same-wavelength people - and he created the means to pay for it all by himself. My hat off to this extraordinary human creator! He will become a role model for many awakening billionaires who will be looking for ways to funnel their personal wealth 'back into the system'.

Is there specific information available on the use geodesic architecture for the design of highway bridges?

Was Bucky right when he wrote that the Synergetics coordinate system is very important?

You could make a coordinate system from the whole to the parts, based
on the closest packing of spheres, instead of building up from axioms
or reference vectors: rack up a triangle of pool balls on a pool table
and put a smaller triangle of balls on top of the big triangle of balls
and then a smaller triangle on that one, etc., to make a tetrahedron of
pool balls with five balls on each of the six edges, thirty five balls
altogether. Bisect the edges by removing pool balls to make an

Jay Baldwin, in his book entitled "Bucky Works," addresses questions about the validity of Fuller's ideas, asking: "does Synergetics describe the coordinates of Universe?" He goes on to say that there has been a deafening silence in the academic world regarding Fuller's most seminal ideas...

"Fullerphiles suggest that the silence is induced by fear. If Bucky is right about nature using a 60-degree coiordinate system, the Cartesian 90-degree XYZ coordinate system is mistaken or incomplete, however useful it may be [...] another explanation is that overspecialization has bred a science community devoid of scholars with expertise sufficiently broad to mount a credible critique of Bucky's comprehensive metaphysics [...]


Fullerphobes dismiss him as a psuedoscientist, a more damning label than being deemed incompetent; [suggesting] he was not worth the trouble disproving..."


What do you think?