Dymaxion is a term coined by architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller and associated with much of his work, prominently his Dymaxion house and Dymaxion car. A portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension, [1] Dymaxion sums up the goal of his study, "maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input". [2]
A name was needed for the display of Fuller's first architectural model, later to be known as the Dymaxion house, at the Marshall Field's department store in Chicago. To create the name, wordsmith Waldo Warren was hired by Marshall Field's [3] and spent two days listening to Fuller, getting a feel for his idiosyncratic use of language—later playing with the syllables typical of Fuller's speech until he and Fuller agreed on the word Dymaxion.
Fuller used the word for many of his inventions during the decades to follow, including the Dymaxion house, the Dymaxion deployment unit, the Dymaxion car, and the Dymaxion world map. Dymaxion also came to describe a polyphasic sleep schedule he followed, consisting of four 30-minute naps throughout the day.
Fuller eventually renamed his elaborate journal—a highly specific, highly detailed self-documentation of his life—as the Dymaxion Chronofile .
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion", "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
A geodesic dome is a hemispherical thin-shell structure (lattice-shell) based on a geodesic polyhedron. The rigid triangular elements of the dome distribute stress throughout the structure, making geodesic domes able to withstand very heavy loads for their size.
The Dymaxion house was developed by inventor and architect Buckminster Fuller to address several perceived shortcomings with existing homebuilding techniques. Fuller designed several versions of the house at different times—all of them factory manufactured kits, assembled on site, intended to be suitable for any site or environment and to use resources efficiently. A key design consideration was ease of shipment and assembly.
The Dymaxion map projection, also called the Fuller projection, is a kind of polyhedral map projection of the Earth's surface onto the unfolded net of an icosahedron. The resulting map is heavily interrupted in order to reduce shape and size distortion compared to other world maps, but the interruptions are chosen to lie in the ocean.
The Dymaxion car was designed by American inventor Buckminster Fuller during the Great Depression and featured prominently at Chicago's 1933/1934 World's Fair. Fuller built three experimental prototypes with naval architect Starling Burgess – using donated money as well as a family inheritance – to explore not an automobile per se, but the 'ground-taxiing phase' of a vehicle that might one day be designed to fly, land and drive – an "Omni-Medium Transport". Fuller associated the word Dymaxion with much of his work, a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension, to summarize his goal to do more with less.
World Game, sometimes called the World Peace Game, is an educational simulation developed by Buckminster Fuller in 1961 to help create solutions to overpopulation and the uneven distribution of global resources. This alternative to war games uses Fuller's Dymaxion map and requires a group of players to cooperatively solve a set of metaphorical scenarios, thus challenging the dominant nation-state perspective with a more holistic "total world" view. The idea was to "make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone," thus increasing the quality of life for all people.
Drop City was a counterculture artists' community that formed near the town of Trinidad in southern Colorado in 1960. Abandoned by 1979, Drop City became known as the first rural "hippie commune".
The Dymaxion Chronofile is Buckminster Fuller's attempt to document his life as completely as possible. He created a very large scrapbook in which he documented his life from 1917 to 1983. Fuller describes his Chronofile as "[contribution] to the scientific documentation of the emergent realization of the era of accelerating-acceleration of progressive ephemeralization". The scrapbook contains copies of all correspondence, bills, notes, sketches, and clippings from newspapers. In 1960, the documents were presented by Fuller to Southern Illinois University's Morris Library where it was housed in their rare book archives. In 1999, the documents were moved to Stanford University. They are currently archived at Stanford University and are occasionally exhibited. Southern Illinois University still archive a collection of Fuller's 3D physical models. They were last displayed in the Hall of Presidents in 2023. The total collection is estimated to be 270 feet worth of paper. This is said to be the most documented human life in history.
Timothy Fuller was a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts.
Marie Marchand, known as Romany Marie, was a Greenwich Village restaurateur who played a key role in bohemianism from the early 1900s through the late 1950s in Manhattan.
William Starling Burgess was an American yacht designer, aviation pioneer, and naval architect. He was awarded the highest prize in aviation, the Collier Trophy in 1915, just two years after Orville Wright won it. In 1933 he partnered with Buckminster Fuller to design and build the radical Dymaxion Car. Between 1930 and 1937 he created three America's Cup winning J-Class yachts, Enterprise, Rainbow and Ranger.
A rear-engine, front-wheel-drive layout is one in which the engine is between or behind the rear wheels, and drives the front wheels via a driveshaft, the complete reverse of a conventional front-engine, rear-wheel-drive vehicle layout.
A Dymaxion deployment unit (DDU) or Dymaxion House, is a structure designed in 1940 by Buckminster Fuller consisting of a 20-foot circular hut constructed of corrugated steel looking much like a yurt or the top of a metal silo. The interior was insulated and finished with wallboard, portholes and a door. The dome-like ceiling has a hole in the top and a cap for ventilation.
Synergetics is the empirical study of systems in transformation, with an emphasis on whole system behaviors unpredicted by the behavior of any components in isolation. R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) named and pioneered the field. His two-volume work Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, in collaboration with E. J. Applewhite, distills a lifetime of research into book form.
The Geoscope was a proposal by Buckminster Fuller around 1960 to create a 200-foot-diameter (61 m) globe that would be covered in colored lights so that it could function as a large spherical display. It was envisioned that the Geoscope would be connected to computers which would allow it to display both historical and current data, and enable people to visualize large scale patterns around the world. Several projects by his students to build a "miniature Earth", starting with a 20-foot version at Cornell University in 1952, were precursors of the Geoscope proposal. Before proposing the Geoscope, Fuller had invented the Dymaxion map, a novel map projection for the whole Earth.
Noel Murphy is an American stand-up comedian and a film director. He managed the New York Comedy Club from a failing venue to one of the top showcase clubs in New York City. He currently lives in California.
The Last Dymaxion: Buckminster Fuller’s Dream Restored is a 2012 documentary film directed by Noel Murphy. about Buckminster Fuller's 1933 Dymaxion car as well as Fuller himself.
The Fly's Eye Dome was a structure designed in 1965 by R. Buckminster Fuller. Inspired by the eye of a fly, Fuller designed the dome as his idea of the affordable, portable home of the future, with windows and openings in the dome to hold solar panels and systems for water collection, thus allowing the dome to be self sufficient. Before his death in 1983, he hand-built three prototypes of the design:
In map projections, an interruption is any place where the globe has been split. All map projections are interrupted at at least one point. Typical world maps are interrupted along an entire meridian. In that typical case, the interruption forms an east/west boundary, even though the globe has no boundaries.
Dymaxion is a term coined by Buckminster Fuller to describe his work.
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