Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1.1With gratitude to:
1.2 Dr. Donald Caspar - Children’s Cancer Research Boston, Massachusetts
1.3 Dr. J. G. Helmcke - Im Fritz-Haber-Institut Berlin, Germany
1.4 Professor Arthur H. C. - University of Western Ontario vonHockstetter London, Ontario, Canada
1.5 Dr. Robert Horne - Institute of Animal Physiology Babraham Hall Cambridge, England
1.6 Dr. Aaron Klug - Cavandish Laboratory Cambridge University Cambridge, England
1.7 For not only respectively identifying virus shells, male testes, human cornea, algae and diatoms with my geodesic structures and my discovery of the mathematical coordinate system apparently employed by nature, but also for their courtesy in accrediting my work, visiting and corresponding with me, and for supplying photographs and data.
1.8 R. Buckminster Fuller
PREFACE
1.9This document, the second in the ’World Design Science Decade’ series, deals specifically with the ways in which the design initiative may be taken, and gives procedural outlines for the conduct of generalized design science exploration.
1.10 The first chapter, entitled "World Design Initiative", contains the text and illustrations of R. Buckminster Fuller’s address to the International Symposium on Architecture, held in Mexico City in October, 1963, by the International Union of Architects as part of their Seventh Congress. This discourse forms an overall introduction to the world program and furnishes also a selected record of Fuller’s personal researches into the various aspects of comprehensive environment control systems.
1.11 Following this chapter is the outline of the five design science phases of the ten year world tool redesign program. As a guide to the forward development of the successive stages of the program, this indicates briefly the content area and relationship of each phase. Preparatory work on the expansion and documentation of this outline has already been initiated by this center and will form the next publication in the present series.
1.12 The charts and their accompanying texts of the ’Historical Blast Off into the Space Age of Man’ are an updating of a series of such socio-economic analyses of scientific and technological trends, first published by Fuller in ’Nine Chains to the Moon’, in 1938, and revised for ’Fortune’ magazine in 1940. The present version was especially prepared for this book and draws upon the latest and most authoritative data available. The time chart of the acquisition of the chemical elements as forming a profile of the Industrial Revolution, which is included in the ’Cumulative Nature of Wealth’ represents an extension of such studies in the relative growth of man’s scientific and technological capacities. Both of these sections are given here, particularly, as guide material for such extended future analyses to be undertaken by architectural and planning groups participating in the world program.
1.13 The ’Universal Requirements of a Dwelling Advantage’ was first drawn up by Fuller in 1927, as a scientific control for the development of the Dymaxion House, and has been successively revised and published at intervals since that time. The version used here appeared in "Architectural Design" magazine, England, and was finally revised for inclusion in his "No More Second Hand God", published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1963. This checklist is a comprehensive attempt to list every requirement, and meet most contingencies, likely to occur to man in relation to shelter as his prime environ control system.
1.14 John McHale World Resources Inventory Carbondale, Illinois