John Arden Hiigli
It is said that an encounter with an extraordinary object can transform a person. That was certainly true for me when I first encountered a geodesic dome in the mid 1960s. It was certainly true in the mid 70s when Synergetics came out and I discovered the Isotropic Vector Matrix. Discovering my first dome in a lush public park in Wisconsin was an exquisite esthetic experience that transformed me in the sense that I experienced grandeur and peaceful stillness at the same time.
R. Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College by Nancy Newhall ca. 1948
Color Transparency
Closest Packing of Spheres by Buckminster Fuller, 1980
BuckminsterFuller’s geometry shows that any sphere tangentialIy and symmetrically surrounded by spheres of the same radius will always produce an array of twelve balls around one ball. This phenomenon defines what he calls the Vector Equilibrium. The transparent spheres of this sculpture give it an ethereal quality reminiscent of a child’s bubble blowing while lucidly presenting the concept. Faintly visible equators illustrate the tangency of adjacent balls and the red nuclear sphere clarifies the radial symmetry of the structure. Twenty-four rods delineate the edges of the polyhedron uniquely determined by the nuclear packing of spheres. Its shape is unaffected by additional layers of balls. Two layers surround the nucleus which classifies this structure as “two-frequency,” a term that refers to the subdivisions along each edge.
via: artnet
Operating manual for spaceship earth by Buckminster Fuller
Operating manual for spaceship earth is a short book by R. Buckminster Fuller, first published in 1968, following an address with a similar title given to the 50th annual convention of the American Planners Association in the Shoreham Hotel, Washington D.C., on 16 October 1967
The book relates Earth to a spaceship flying through space. The spaceship has a finite amount of resources and cannot be resupplied.
Fuller would later partner with the Walt Disney Company to consult on an attraction at EPCOT Center called Spaceship Earth, which opened with the park in 1982.
mdl4:
The Montreal Biosphere’s outer covering caught fire in 1976
INVENTING KINDERGARTEN
Most of us today experienced kindergarten as a loose assortment of playful activities – a kind of preparatory ground for school proper. But in its original incarnation kindergarten was a formalized system that drew its inspiration from the science of crystallography. During its early years in the nineteenth century, kindergarten was based around a system of abstract exercises that aimed to instill in young children an understanding of the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation. This revolutionary system was developed by the German scientist Friedrich Froebel whose vision of childhood education changed the course of our culture laying the grounds for modernist art, architecture and design. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller are all documented attendees of kindergarten. Other “form-givers” of the modern era – including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Georges Braque – were educated in an environment permeated with Frobelian influence.
Froebel believed that education of the very young would enable the flowering of human potential. “By education,” he declared, “the divine essence of man should be unfolded, brought out, lifted into consciousness.” Froebel’s insights would expand the minds not just of children, but also of their teachers. Denied access to universities, women of intellect were also yearning for mental stimulation and Froebel’s system provided an outlet of expression for hundreds of thousands of women around the world who flocked to become kindergarten teachers. Among them was Anna Wright, mother of the future architect. From the world of early kindergarten it is largely the teacher’s output that has been preserved and in this remarkable body of work we witness the stirrings of a new era. Mostly created in the late nineteenth century, the objects on displayed in this exhibition prefigure the aesthetic upheavals of the following century. As kindergarten scholar and collector Norman Brosterman has proposed, in the work undertaken by “kindergartners” we may locate the seed-bed of modern art.
Inventing Kindergarten surveys rare objects and artifacts from the
collection of Norman Brosterman, Froebel scholar and author of the book
Inventing Kindergarten.
found: here
4D House from the portfolio Inventions: Twelve Around One Buckminster Fuller, 1981 via artnet.com
Building Construction Dymaxion Deployment Unit from the portfolio Inventions: Twelve Around One Buckminster Fuller, 1981 via artnet.com
Dymaxion Dwelling Machine Wichita House from the portfolio Inventions: Twelve Around One
Buckminster Fuller
via artnet.com
Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, Wichita House, project, Study for air circulation: plan and sections
R. Buckminster Fuller
via moma.org
