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Artifacts of R. Buckminster Fuller, Vol. 3: The Geodesic Revolution, Part 1, 1947–1959

Volume Three of James Ward's four-volume Garland catalog of R. Buckminster Fuller's designs and drawings, subtitled 'The Geodesic Revolution, Part 1, 1947–1959.' It documents, with Ward's descriptions, the birth of the geodesic dome from the icosahedron's great-circle studies through maquettes, academic experiments, military radomes and hangars, paperboard and plydome systems, and the landmark Ford Rotunda dome.

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Artifacts of R. Buckminster Fuller, Vol. 3: The Geodesic Revolution, Part 1, 1947–1959

The third volume of The Artifacts of R. Buckminster Fuller — "A Comprehensive Collection of His Designs and Drawings in Four Volumes," edited with descriptions by James Ward (Garland Publishing, 1985). This volume, The Geodesic Revolution, Part 1, 1947–1959, is a primary-source catalog of Fuller's drawings, blueprints, models, and patents tracing the geodesic dome from pure geometric abstraction to built architecture, paired with Ward's explanatory captions and short essays.

About the volume

The Artifacts of R. Buckminster Fuller is a Garland series in four volumes, edited with descriptions by James Ward (then a visiting professor at Trinity College, Hartford; Ph.D. in the history of art from NYU's Institute of Fine Arts). The four volumes are:

  • Volume One — The Dymaxion Experiment, 1926–1943
  • Volume Two — Dymaxion Deployment, 1927–1946
  • Volume Three — The Geodesic Revolution, Part 1, 1947–1959
  • Volume Four — The Geodesic Revolution, Part 2, 1960–1983

Volume Three (ISBN 0-8240-5084-3; copyright 1984 by the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller) reproduces Fuller's source drawings and models with Ward's facing descriptions. It is organized chronologically by project, each entry pairing reproduced artifacts (sketches, blueprints, copyright and patent drawings, photographs of maquettes and built domes) with a short interpretive description by Ward.

The geometric origins, 1947–1950

Ward grounds the geodesic dome in Fuller's parallel invention of the Dymaxion World Map (begun 1943, ca. 1946). The earliest preparatory studies — the icosahedron's thirty-one great circles, made and copyrighted in 1947 — were at first "total abstractions" that Fuller only later adapted to his method of transcribing the spherical earth onto a flat surface. The interrelation of dome and map recurs throughout: in the Great Circle Mapping Device Booklet of the late 1940s; in the twenty-five and thirty-one great circle Dymaxion geodesic structures of 1949, which Ward calls "the structural transition between the intellectual geometry of the sphere and its concrete manifestation"; and in the twenty-foot wooden-slat globe built with metal land-mass appliqués at Cornell University in 1952. The great circles represent the vector equilibrium and the icosahedron, Fuller's chief structural models.

The materialization of this geometry is documented in Fuller's 1950 sketchbook "Noah's Ark II," which Ward presents as the first studies of the hardware and materials — the three-way geodesic grid, six-diamond structure, three-way eight-space grid, zigzag assemblies and "A"/"B" zigzag strips — that "would inform a host of projects over the next quarter century." Early maquettes from Black Mountain College, N.C. (1949), including the pentagon-necklace structure, pneumatic hex-pent involute, and an autonomous dome developed for the U.S. Air Force, open the volume.

From geometry to hardware, 1951–1952

Ward marks 1951 as decisive: the two most important copyrights are the general structure of the typical geodesic dome and the specific design of a cast aluminum vertex (hub). The new aluminum hub held the flanges on the ends of a strut "like a spring clamp," permanently tightened only after all struts were in place — replacing the slow, error-prone wooden armatures of stacked pentagons and making domes both lighter and far larger. Projects of this period include the speculative 90 Percent Automatic Cotton Mill ("the quintessence of Fuller's industrial design strategy"), the transparent Skybreak enclosures (notably the Aspen, Colorado theater skybreak), early M.I.T. hangar studies that began Fuller's long affiliation with the U.S. Marine Corps, and the geodesic skybreaks drawn by J. Rauma at M.I.T. derived from a model exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952.

The breakthrough: Ford Rotunda dome, 1952–1953

The aluminum-and-polyester dome spanning the ninety-three-foot rotunda of the Ford Motor Company Courtesy Building in Dearborn, Michigan, weighed only eight and a half tons. Ward identifies it as the work that "changed the course of modern architecture" — the first major corporate sponsorship of an architectural principle, made iconic by a photograph published in Life magazine, and a "harbinger of the corporate patronage of modern architecture." Its triangular aluminum subassemblies form fifteen tetrahedra per truss, clad in polyester resin.

Academic experiments and the octet truss, 1953

A cluster of university exercises tested feasibility: the experimental greenhouse at North Carolina State College, the color-coded wooden dome at the University of Minnesota, the University of Oregon dome (distinguished by its exterior geodesic ladder and pentagonal door), and a discontinuous-compression sphere at Princeton. The octahedron-tetrahedron (octet) truss, a concurrent invention, appeared in the proposed service garage for the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company in Hyannis, Massachusetts.

Cold War work: radomes and military hangars, 1953–1956

The radome ("radar protection" dome) was developed by Fuller and his M.I.T. students in December 1953 as Project Lincoln — Fuller's first Cold War defense design. Manufactured by Bell Laboratories and Western Electric for the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line, radomes are geodesic domes of rigid fiberglass hexagonal and pentagonal panels, gasketed and bolted with no metal or wooden superstructure. The volume tracks their iterative refinement across 1954–1956: shifting from triangular to hexagonal/pentagonal panels with V-shaped reinforcing flanges, blunted "circular fiberglass hub" nodes for greater compressive strength, molded polyester hubs and ring gaskets, and warehouse-scale adaptations with porthole-like yeux-de-boeufs fenestration. In parallel, the fifty-foot magnesium hangars for the U.S. Marine Corps were light enough to be airlifted by the helicopters they housed — a sight Ward reads as "prescient of Fuller's later design for superbuoyant spherical cities."

Toward production: paperboard, plydome, and dwellings, 1955–1959

Driven by Fuller's priority of economy, the volume documents inexpensive mass-production systems: the forty-foot paperboard dome (a large structure built entirely of vinyl-coatable corrugated fiberboard, "as ubiquitous as the standard packing crate"), the Plydome plywood studies, and the catenary geodesic tent, which hangs hyperbolic-paraboloid panels from the vertices of a standard aluminum dome. Domestic designs matured in the Homestyle Center dome house and exhibition house at Grand Rapids, Michigan (1955–1956) — the first fully articulated geodesic dome dwelling, with octet-truss-supported living platforms and ecological ventilation. Trade and commercial projects include the 100-foot Bangkok Trade Fair dome (with Duncan Stuart's geodesic-globe sculpture), the unbuilt Yomiuri Giants ball park ("Tokyo 750"), the 384-foot Union Tank Car dome in Baton Rouge (the largest permanent dome since Ford), and the Savogran office building. The volume closes near 1959 with three patents (paperboard dome, plydome, catenary geodesic tent), the MOMA octahedron-tetrahedron truss and Tensegrity Mast installation in Philip Johnson's sculpture garden, and the Synergetics-designed dome for the American Society for Metals in Cleveland.

Ward's organization and significance

Ward arranges the artifacts as a chronological project catalog rather than a narrative, letting Fuller's drawings carry the argument while his descriptions supply geometry, materials, sponsors, and outcomes (including which schemes remained maquettes or proposals). The volume's significance, in Ward's framing, is to document the decade in which Fuller's purely geometric great-circle abstractions became buildable architecture — through the invention of the aluminum vertex, the validation of corporate (Ford) and military (radome/hangar) patronage, and a sustained drive toward inexpensive, mass-producible shelter. As a primary source it preserves the blueprints, copyrights, patents, models, and photographs underlying the "geodesic revolution," many of them otherwise held only in the Fuller archive.

See Also

Sources

buckminster-fullerartifactsdesignjames-wardgeodesic-domeradomesgreat-circles