The high-tech ideas of Bucky Fuller | Hacker News Reader

The high-tech ideas of Bucky Fuller

aeon.co

49 pointsantigizmo15 comments

> "Fuller told The New Yorker in 1966. Appealing to people to remedy their behaviour was a folly, because they’d simply never do it. Far wiser, Fuller thought, to build technology that circumvents the flaws in human behaviour – that is, ‘to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions’. Instead of human-led design, he sought design-led humans"

You have to applaud Fuller for this insight which many similarly brilliant minds don't seem to grasp. Perhaps he can be included in this group;

1) Geodesic domes are a mathematically brilliant design but hopelessly impractical for many structures. Try fitting furniture in a curved house and dealing with a shape that either causes you to bump your head when you get to the edges or is so high in the center that you have an unnecessary volume to heat/cool.

2) The dymaxion car was similarly brilliant but completely missed the real reason that people buy cars: as a status symbol that looks cool, which the dymaxion did not.

The guy was a genius in my opinion but the failure of his incredible ideas to take off on a large scale shows that perhaps they appeal to my mind more for their idealism than practicality.

NOTE: Am currently reading Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth

>The dymaxion car was similarly brilliant but completely missed the real reason that people buy cars: as a status symbol that looks cool, which the dymaxion did not.

The dymaxion was considered cool. But it was going to be expensive, and it earned a reputation as a death trap after a fatal crash at a marketing event.

Did not know about the crash.

Good luck reading what he wrote. His ideas were sold better by others. His writing is almost impenetrable. And ditto to everything parent said. Been studying him on and off for 40 years and in many ways he was his own worst enemy.

I think you need to be fully immersed in his whole body of work and frame of mind before you can understand what he’s saying.

Sort of like Hegel or something.

From outside it’s impenetrable, but once you start to figure out what he’s getting at a lot of it clicks together.

I think his thinking was muddled. Smart people can explain things clearly: Paul McCartney, Richard Sherman, Feynman, Hawking, Bill Gates, et al.

> ...the real reason that people buy cars: as a status symbol that looks cool...

You know that's not true, don't you?

My car - an old Kia Rondo - doesn't look cool at all. And it's hardly any kind of status symbol.

But it gets me places where I need to go, and it lets me take stuff that I need to take. That's the real reason I bought it.

and besides just your personal anecdote, there are observably WAY more uncool non-status symbol cars on the road than there are cool status ones.

> Try fitting furniture in a curved house

some really cool houses I've seen in magazines and books don't have furniture arranged along walls -- the furniture is arranged in ways that create their own 'walls' within the space.

> completely missed the real reason that people buy cars: as a status symbol that looks cool, which the dymaxion did not.

I think the dymaxion would have looked cool and futuristic at the current time it was produced.

My brother lives in a geodesic dome, and it doesn't have these problems. The furniture fits in just fine. The high part in the center is occupied by a loft, with the master bedroom.

Geodesic domes are still a great technology. What went wrong was that the "natural materials" people got into them. Fuller wanted to build dome components in factories, where you could make aluminum and Fiberglas parts to tight tolerances. The hippie types tried to use "natural materials", such as wood and shingles. Their domes leaked. Abandoned steel, aluminum, and Fiberglas domes of the 1950s Distant Early Warning line are still in good shape.

My brother's renting a geodesic dome made of wood and roofed with shingles. No leakage problems in evidence so far.

A friend of mine is from Carbondale, Illinois - Fuller's home town. From what I understand it's a deadbeat midwestern hellhole now. He once told me a story about breaking into Buckminster Fuller's now-abandoned dome house and smoking weed in there.

tl;dr: the dream is over

The dream is alive. Look at http://hexayurt.com - massive adoption at Burning Man and huge potential (slowly being realized) for developing world use.

Times will change. Fuller's time is yet to come.

The upsides of a hexayurt are many. Done well, they're possibly the best housing on playa - definitely competitive with RVs, if you bring your own AC. Mine's lasted five years, and all I've had to do was replace the door panel (a door to the floor - resulting in a U shaped panel - is not the best plan).

But! These are, in my experience, the hard parts and downsides - not that they're insurmountable, or even all that difficult, but worth mentioning:

1) Doors are hard. No, really.

2) Storage & Transportation. (8ft by 4ft+ by 8in+)

3) Can't lean on the walls

4) Short doors get annoying, fast.

Anecdotally, I'm definitely seeing more hexayurts out there each year, particularly the small stretch designs (which are fantastic, btdubs)

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