Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1.1A certain amount of work in the general area of this report was carried out by the Graduate School of the Department of Design, Southern Illinois University, during the Fall Term, 1962. The Department of Design, as a whole, provided generous help with various equipment items and facilities.
1.2 We should also acknowledge the assistance of the Data Processing Center and the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University.
1.3 Particular mention must be made of the invaluable research assistance afforded by:
1.4 Miss Betty Beleny, of New York City, New York Mr. John Dixon, of Washington, D.C. Mr. Wm. Man Parkhurst, of New York City, New York
1.5 We would like, also, to thank Mr. R. Buckminster Fuller’s personal secretary, Mrs. Naomi Smith for her patient help in the final stages.
1.6 In general, references are given for charts and tables where these have been wholly extracted from a few sources. Where no reference is given, material has been compiled from a number of sources. The World Resources Inventory Office, S.I.U., will gladly supply detailed reference sources on request.
1.7 Maps used in this report are based on the Dymaxion Air Ocean World Projection of R.B. Fuller. This projection shows the world land mass as one island, in the air:ocean, with minimal distortion of true geographic scale.
PREFACE
1.8This report originates with the proposal made by R. Buckminster Fuller to the International Union of Architects (I.U.A.) at their VIIth Congress in London, England in July, 1961. He proposed then that the architectural schools around the world be encouraged by the I.U.A. to invest the next ten years in a continuing problem of how to make the total world’s resources which now serve only 40% serve 100% of humanity through competent design despite a continuing decrease of metal resources per capita.
1.9 The formal text of this proposal, as finally agreed upon by the I.U.A. Executive, which acts on behalf of its sixty-five member countries, is given immediately following this preface. In essence, it suggests that world architectural schools should initiate, as part of their curricular work, a beginning survey of the total resources now available to man on a global scale, a first stocktaking of what man has to do and what he has to do it with! Such a stocktaking would be their preliminary phase of an overall plan concerned with the ‘designed’ use of our total global capacities in the service of all men. The results of this continuing program would be exhibited every two years at the successive Congresses of the I.U.A. which are held on each occasion in a different host country.
1.10 After meeting with the VIIIth International Conference of Students of Architecture in Barcelona, June, 1963, Fuller reported that, “The students were in agreement with my conclusion that if the world resources inventory had to be made by the students’ own uncoordinated efforts at separate schools around the world that my whole world redesign program would become impractical. Because I have had a third of a century experience in such inventorying, in 1927 for my own account, in 1936 for the World’s Copper Industry, in 1940 for “Fortune” magazine’s tenth anniversary, U.S.A. and the World issue and in 1943 for the U.S.A.’s Board of Economic Warfare, the students were enthusiastic over the announcement that Southern Illinois University and I are preparing the resources and trends data from which the design program will emanate”.
1.11 The present report is intended as an introductory step towards the student undertaking and will form part of the overall presentation of the world planning proposal to the VIIth Congress of the I.U.A. in October, 1963. It does not purport to be, in any sense, a complete review of man’s resources or his needs, but is intended merely to provide a swift comprehensive glance at certain of the fundamental trends in man’s present relation to his environment, and to indicate broadly how these trendings may relate to the forward task of assessing more completely man’s present and future needs. Its final concern is with the designed utilization and maximal employment of our vast technological resource in ways commensurate with the social and cultural well being of the world community.
1.12 This is a problem which may not be solved either by political strategy or by private enterprise though both function in the realization of the world students’ initiative. The latter’s world retooling design, as transcendental to both political
1.13 and commercial expediency, must effectively implement the industrial system metabolics of a world man ecology. Such design need only convert the overall mechanical efficiency of the world industrial network from its present realized 4% to 12% in order to render all mankind a total success.
1.14 The present first phase report, then, gives an initial presentation of man’s world resources, and relevant forward guidance material, as a catalytic agent towards the world students’ direct implementation of the planned use of these resources. Though their design planning may be innocent of an enabling authority, its existence as presented and progressively circulated will eventually induce world emergency recourse to its effective solution of fundamental world problems.
1.15 It is obvious that the first years world planning will show much fumbling and inadequacy. Criticism will come, not only from the architectural profession, but also from politicians, economists and industrialists. Such criticism, however, will be of great value in accelerating the further years’ comprehension of the problems and their design solutions.
1.16 Such supra-national planning in no way duplicates the work of agencies like the U.N., UNESCO, World Health Organization, etc., and of the various international conference bodies of scientists and technologists, but assumes a designing and planning initiative which would be integrative of data and reports already compiled by such bodies.
1.17 Within the report itself, the text generally is used to set the background for linkage and interpretation of the graphs and charts which in many cases communicate their main import without additional commentary. As this printed version forms only a part of the complete presentation of the theme to the I.U.A. Congress, detailed analysis and discussion of each main section has been kept to a minimum, else the document would have become too unwieldy for use.
1.18 In the charts and text which comprise the main body of the report, emphasis is placed on numerical quantity or cumulative linear increases in resource employment, manufacture, distribution, etc. It should be stressed, however, that this material emphasis does not obscure the prime fact that our basic resource is MAN and his knowledge. All other cultural and technical advantage referred to, and expressed in various ways, is no more than the physically objectified, but truly invisible intellectual resource of all men as displayed in the progressively accumulated array of knowledge, of discovery and invention. It is through this resource that man has maintained himself on earth.
1.19 John McHale Carbondale, Illinois September, 1963
1.20 INTERNATIONAL UNION OF ARCHITECTS
1.21 INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION AMONG STUDENTS OF ARCHITECTURAL SCHOOLS
1.22 This International Exhibition was created in 1951 by the French Section of U.I.A. in co-operation with the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris.
1.23 At the Hague Congress in 1955, the Board of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts kindly entrusted the U.I.A. with the organization of future Exhibitions.
1.24 The special committee appointed by the Executive Committee is proposing the following theme to the Universities and High Schools of Architecture for the International Exhibition of 1965:
1.25 THE DESIGN OF A FACILITY FOR DISPLAYING A COMPREHENSIVE INVENTORY OF THE WORLD’S RAW AND ORGANIZED RESOURCES, TOGETHER WITH THE HISTORY AND TRENDING PATTERNS OF WORLD PEOPLES’ MOVEMENTS AND NEEDS. THE WHOLE SO DRAMATICALLY PRESENTED THAT IT MAY EVIDENCE THE MAJOR LOOMING WORLD SOCIO-ECONOMIC PROBLEMS MOST EFFECTIVELY SOLVABLE BY UNPRECEDENTED PHYSICAL DESIGN STRATEGIES AND THE RELATIVE SEQUENCE OF NECESSARY STEPPING STONE DESIGN SOLUTIONS, THE PROGRESSIVE SOLUTIONS OF WHICH MAY BECOME THE SUCCESSIVE PROBLEM ASSIGNMENTS OF A TEN YEAR SERIES OF U.I.A. STUDENT DESIGN PROGRAMMES.
1.26 This theme will be the motive in each country, and for each School and University of a programme the research for, and drafting of which, will be under the Professors’ responsibility.
1.27 The entire world’s industrial resources are now preoccupied in serving only 40 percent of humanity with the advancing standards of living exclusively provided by the world’s progressively enlarging and integrating industrial networks. Making the world’s totally available resources serve one hundred percent of an exploding population may only be accomplished by a boldly accelerated design evolution which adequately increases the present overall performance per units of invested resources. This is a task of radical technical innovation rather than political rationalization. It is a task which can only be accomplished by the world’s architects, inventors and scientist/artists. The engineer has been deliberately trained by society to be an unquestionable authority: an engineer must not invent for his authority is thus violated.
1.28 Since aircraft and space technologies are already operating at high levels of performance per units of invested resources, the recent decades realization, that space can be enclosed for environment controlling purposes with approximately one percent of the weight of resources at present employed by the conventional building arts for a given task, indicates that the conversion of the world resources from their present service of only 40 percent to service of 100 percent of humanity is to be uniquely effected within what may be called the “livingry” arts in contra-distinction to the “weaponry” arts. The latter alone up to this moment in history has been benefited directly by the highest science and technology. Any and all improvements in the home front’s peace extending “livingry” advantage have been post-weaponry byproducts.
1.29 This brings the solution of the forward “livingry” design problems into direct focus as the responsibility of the architect (as the only technical profession concerned with “putting things together” in an era of the increased fractionation by intensive specialization). Since the practicing architect may operate only when funded by a client and there is no apparent client to retain the architect to solve this world problem, it may only be solved by the world architects taking the initiative, as have the medical scientists, in the development of a comprehensive anticipatory design science dedicating at least its next ten years to making the total world’s resources serve 100 percent of humanity at higher standards of living than hitherto experienced by any men through competent industrially producible designrather than leaving the evolutionary advance to political reforms catalysed by accelerating frequency of world political crises. Because the economics of the architectural profession, at present, precludes the devotion of adequate time and resources to the solution of this task by the graduate practicing architects, it is in evidence that the architectural profession may activate this comprehensive anticipatory design initiative through encouragement of its professional university schools of architecture to invest the extraordinary intellectual resources and available student time within the universities to the establishment of the design science and its application to world planning. This is to be inaugurated with a ten year sequence of joined world architectural schools annual programmes organized for the progressive discovery and design solution of the comprehensive family of economic technical and scientific factors governing such a world planning programme.
1.30 Several dramatically communicated solutions come immediately to mind such as the use of the total facade of a skyscraper or a mountain cliff. The following is an example of a satisfactory solution: - the design of a 200 foot diameter Miniature Earth. This Minni-Earth could be fabricated of a light metal trussing. Its interior and exterior surfaces could be symmetrically dotted with ten million small variable intensity light bulbs and the lights controllably connected up with an electronic computor. This whole Minni-Earth array could be suspended by fine high strength alloy wires from masts surrounding Minni-Earth and at some distance from it. If the sphere were suspended 200 ft. above the ground, the wires would become invisible and it would seem to hover above the earth as an independent asteroid. At 200 ft. minimum distance away from the viewer, the light bulbs’ sizes and distance apart would become indistinguishable as do the size and distances between the points in a fine half tone print. Patterns introduced into the bulb matrix at various light intensities, through the computor, would create an omni-directional spherical picture analogous to that of a premium television
1.31 tube - but a television tube whose picture could be seen all over its surface both from inside and outside.
1.32 Information could be programmed into the computor, and “remembered” by the computor, regarding all the geographical features of the earth, or all those geographical features under a great variety of weather conditions. How exquisite the geographical data may be is appreciated when we realize that if we use the 35 m.m. contact prints of the photographs taken by the aerial surveyors at their lowest altitude of operation, in which individual houses, as homes of men, may be discerned by the naked eye, and paste them together edge to edge on a sphere large enough to accommodate them in their respective geographical positions, that sphere would be 200 ft. in diameter-the size of our hypothetical Minni-Earth. Man on earth, invisible to man even from the height of 2,000 feet, would be able to see the whole earth and at true scale in respect to the works and habitat of man. He could pick out his own home. Thus Minni-Earth becomes a potent symbol of man visible in Universe.
1.33 Man recognizes a very limited range of motions in the spectrum of motion. He cannot see the motions of atoms, molecules, cell growth, hair or toe-nail growth - he cannot see the motion of planets, stars and galaxies - he cannot see the motions of the hands of the clock. Most of the important trends and surprise events in the life of man are invisible, inexorable motion patterns creeping up surprisingly upon him. Historical patterns too slow for the human eye and mind to comprehend such as changing geology, population growths and resource transpositions, may be comprehensively introduced into the computor’s memory and acceleratingly pictured around the surface of the earth. The total history of world population’s progressive positionings, waxings and wanings, individual and popular migrations and redeployments could be presented and run off acceleratingly in minutes, disclosing powerful eastward, westward north and southward swirlings, thickenings and thinnings, with a centre of gravity momentum of such trendings as to permit the computor to surge ten or one hundred years ahead providing reasonable probability for the planner/designer’s anticipatory advantage. So could all the patterns of man’s removal from earth’s crust of the various minerals, their progressive forwardings and temporary lodgings in various design occupations such as in buildings, ships, railway systems and factories and their progressive meltings-out and scrapped drifting into new design formulations in other tasks and other geographies. (While the U.S.A. has no tin mines, its temporary scrap resource of tin continually re-employed in the aircraft industries mass production soft tooling gives the Western United States aircraft factory localities larger tin “mines” above ground as tin ore reserve than the ore reserves still within the mines in any one of the three large tin ore countries Malaya Straits, Bolivia or Tanganyika).
1.34 Our hypothetical Minni-Earth, which the world architectural students may if they wish employ as their design facility, should be located as a major world city’s focal design structure, analogous to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, as a continuing feature of World Olympic Games, to be reinstalled at each successive world site or Minni-Earth might be suspended from masts mounted on the ring of rocks in midstream of New York City’s East River one quarter mile distant from the great East face of the United Nations building, to serve as a constant confrontor of all nations’ representatives of the integrating patterns, both expected and unexpected, occurring around the face of man’s constantly shrinking “one town world”.
1.35 Designs should provide for computor housing remote from the sphere, and for ferries, bridges, tunnel or other approaching means to a position 200 ft. below the Minni-Earth’s surface from which point mechanical means, such as elevators, will transport large numbers of people upward and into the sphere to a platform at the Minni-Earth’s center from which, at night, individuals would be able to view stars in the heavens seen through the lacy openings of the Minni-Earth, giving them the same orientation that they would obtain if they could go to the center of the real Earth and could look out with X-ray vision to see those very same stars seemingly fixed above specific geographical points of the Earth. (A star seen in zenith over Budapest as in zenith over that city at that very moment). A press of a button would show the Minni-Earth central observer the position of all the satellites which men have now sent aloft and though their circling of the earth is as slow as the circling of the hands of the clock and is therefore invisible, the touch of another button could accelerate their motions so that their total interactions and coursings for a period of years to come could be witnessed in a minute. (A bank of cloud lying apparently motionless in America’s vast Grand Canyon was photographed over a long period of time by a cinecamera and the resultant picture accelerated into a one minute sequence. To the surprise of the original viewers of the seemingly still scene a very regular pattern of waves such as those on the surface of a coffee cup in a railway dining car was seen to occur in the cloud surface between the Canyon walls.)
1.36 If the students choose to employ Minni-Earth as their facility they will find the United Nations rich in economic, demographic and sociologic data. They will find the latest publications on the International Geo-physical Year rich in data that may be dramatically displayed on Minni-Earth for instance an accelerated historical sequence of all the world’s earthquakes would give startling indications of further recurrences. The world’s electromagnetic field patterns, the varying astrophysical patterns would each provide spectacular Minni-Earth displays.
1.37 The students should consider their Minni-Earth as a 24 hour visual phenomena, in contradistinction to the conceiving of buildings as visible only in the daylight, a viewpoint which has recently been compromisingly altered by secondary lighting at night. The Minni-Earth sould disclose the world news and events on a 24-hour basis, its patterns being altered periodically for the disclosure of the long-time weather history integrated with the present forecasting.
1.38 The students will be greatly advantaged by the development of models of Minni-Earth at their own schools which could range from 10mm. to 30 metre in diameter. Photographs of data arrays on their models would be appropriate for their final project forwarding to the U.I.A. Congress exhibition.
1.39 In the development of the research for and design solution of this world pattern inventorying facility, the usual procedure in respect to architectural problems may, with the approval of the schools’ professors, be altered so that the students will coordinate their activities as a team; meeting daily to consider the whole progress of the undertaking, but deploying to perform their complementary missions in economic, technical, etc., data procurement and information gathering, processing and design realizations.
1.40 In the same way, within any one country, the schools might profitably divide up the many tasks in a manner appropriate to the special kinds of information most available in their respective localities or universities. If the students are willing the advantages of team coordination might be instituted between countries. The expansion of the rate at which the team coordination advantage might enter into the ten successive years of the world planning and design phases may develop its own logical pace, and students or universities electing to research and design the entire programmes themselves would undoubtedly demonstrate unique advantages accruing to concentrated effort and would also serve as experimental controls for comparison with the results accruing to widely distributed coordinate team functioning.
1.41 The first year’s design programme of all individuals, university teams, continental or intercontinental teams should all include prominent citation of the second and sequitur years looming high priority design problems most evidently essential to the accelerated adaptation of man to his evolutionary trendings through comprehensive anticipatory design science.
1.42PROJECT
1.43 The professors of Universities or Schools will establish the detailed programmes themselves which will be proposed to their students.
1.44 The time dedicated to the study of the project will be fixed by the programme. It depends upon the organization of each School’s teamwork.
1.45NEW TECHNIQUE OF SCHEMATICS WITH SCHEDULES, etc.
1.46 The International Programme does not prescribe any particular drawing to provide; the choice is left to the professors. It is the same thing for the scale of these designs. The projects may be presented either in original drawing, or in any other way, under the condition that the sizes are kept (panels or shoots of 100 c.m. x 100 c.m.) - totalling 2 sq. metres rather than separate panels. The documents (drawings, photos, etc.) will be stuck on rigid panels (Isorel, light metal, or any other light material). The respective schools or students would be permitted to divide their total two square metres of surface into microfilm increments totalling that amount, and would consequently have to plan to install an automatic sequence operating microfilm projector at the 1965 U.I.A. Congress exhibition of the students work.
1.47 In the advanced technology which this world planning programme is meant to employ in direct benefit of livingry the parts production tolerances are held to sub-visible dimensions ranging from one one thousandth to one ten millionth of an inch. Unlike present architectural practices wherein prints of detailed drawings are translated by masons and carpenters into components with 1/4 inch errors tolerated, the advanced technology makes conceptually schematic drawings with schedules only of dimensions between theoretical points. The dimensioning is subsequently scheduled into the production work by instruments and indexing machines, controlling dimensions far below man’s direct discernment. For the bold new design evolution to win the initiative in employment of the world’s prime resources on behalf of livingry from its preoccupation in weaponry will require the architectural students not only to employ the most advanced scientific
1.48 designing techniques, but also to adopt a progressive, comprehensive education in mathematics, physics, chemistry, economics, sociology and general history.
1.49 The ten year world planning and design’s programming should at all times be considered in the light of its regenerative potentials. As with the calculus we cannot ascertain the second derivative’s challenging prospect until we have differentiated our way through the first phases. It may be assumed that the first year’s work when finally presented at the U.I.A. Congress will not only be of interest to world architects and students but that the results of their work will, for the first time, catalyse world attention and recognition of the significance and potentials of their enterprise. The regenerative consequences will probably be of surprising magnitude.
1.50 (Submitted to I.U.A. Executive by R. Buckminster Fuller)