Buckminster Fuller's Universe | Hacker News Reader

Buckminster Fuller's Universe

jackcheng.com

32 pointsbrm13 comments

I have a fascination with Bucky's works and the book recommended in the post is by far the best starting point.

Some things about his life that are interesting:

  * He got kicked out of Harvard. Twice.
  * He lived a 'normal' life until his late twenties. He thought his life was a failure 
    and was considering ending it when he changed his outlook.
  * He tried to produce a catalogue of all Earths resources believing we would take
    better care of the environment if we know how quickly we were consuming resources
  * He wanted to build a giant model of the Earth outside the UN with live projections of
    all current wars, resource distributions, population density, etc (aka a real world google earth)

If I remember well, his change of outlook was to recognize that every project he undertook for his own interest had failed. He then decided to work only in the interest of everyone (or something like that), without even asking himself how he would pay his bills. Apparently, he managed to pay his bills from then on.

I saw a wonderful documentary about Buckminster Fuller that included a story of how his kindergarten teacher was perplexed one day. She gave the children blocks to play with and told them to make a house, and he kept making his with triangles! If I remember correctly, she was so concerned something might be wrong with him that she spoke to his parents.

Some people are just born that way.

I thought this was going to be full of quirky insight into Bucky's life, and I was right!

This is a great article with some pretty sage advice. I'm definitely going to be buying the book referenced in the article.

I'm not such a big fan of Buckminster. Are geodesic domes really that important? I'm sure you could compile a decent sized list of what topics are related to geodesics, and I'm sure Fuller was really smart, notable, and oh-so-quirky.

But I'd rather devote time to learning about people who worked on stuff that had a larger scale impact. Henry Ford, Edison, Tesla, Feynmann, Einstein, etc.

The nice thing about buildings is that they last. Software is not like that. A framework for a programming problem may not be valuable in 20 years, or even 5 years later.

On the flip side the good thing about software is that it is quick to contruct.

If I have an idea for an app I can whip up a prototype in a weekend. I can turn it into a business and full working app with users.

With a building I can't have an idea for an awesome skyscraper then knock it together in my back garden by myself.

First, your OS probably is running some 20 year old code. Second, code can live on in the new structures and ideas it presents, rather than in their direct manifestation. We are building to higher and higher levels of abstraction.

There are so many ugly buildings I wish would not last.

There is so much ugly undocumented software not getting scrapped because no one knows what it does exactly. Sometimes it's even built on top of frameworks no one finds valuable anymore.

the affordable self-sufficient housing units make use of the tepee design. a tiny fire in the middle of a tepee keeps one cozy in winter (MA, USA) with most of the smoke going out the top. materials are pretty cheap, too (few thousand, depending on quality and versatility interested in; a strong storm can topple one if not done right)

On the way back from a summer in Alaska, I met a couple that was squatting on some land in northern British Columbia -- so far north that the fastest way to get there was through the Yukon. The woman spent their first winter there in a teepee and had their first child in it. The man descirbed the subsequent events as: Then she picked me up by the shirt and said, "YOU WILL BUILD ME A CABIN!"

That was a really nice looking cabin!

(The town was Atlin, for those of you who want to look it up.)

The dymaxion house was not exactly a tepee design. He recognized that most interesting materials are stronger under tension than compression -- steel, for example. This is part of the power of the geodesic (tension spreads throughout the structure, yielding global tension and localized compression). The houses were designed with a load-bearing center shaft, and the structure pulled from it. At least in the designs I've seen -- and in the aluminum building shown in the article (look at the "foundation").

But similar to a tepee, the top would also open (and rotate) for ventilation purposes -- domes and round structures have useful air circulation patterns.

By making vents in the bottom of the structure it was found to be self-cooling in the summer too as the hot air rose and left vie the top sucking in fresh moving air.

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