<img src="http://img74.imageshack.us/img74/7572/fullerkr9.gif" align="right">不知道是不是因為 Buckminster Fuller 的生日快到了(1895年7月12日出生)，紐約市的 Whitney Museum of American Art 最近舉辦了關於 Buckminster Fuller 的展覽，名為「Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe」，展期為 2008.06.26 ~ 2008.09.21。
Buckminster Fuller
Starting With the Universe
About the Exhibition
展期：2008.06.26 ~ 2008.09.21
One of the great American visionaries of the twentieth century, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) endeavored to see what he, a single individual, might do to benefit the largest segment of humanity while consuming the minimum of the earth's resources. Doing "more with less" was Fuller's credo. He described himself as a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist," setting forth to solve the escalating challenges that faced humanity before they became insurmountable.
Fuller's innovative theories and designs addressed fields ranging from architecture, the visual arts, and literature to mathematics, engineering, and sustainability. He refused to treat these diverse spheres as specialized areas of investigation because it inhibited his ability to think intuitively, independently, and, in his words, "comprehensively."
Although Fuller believed in utilizing the latest technology, much of his work developed from his inquiry into "how nature builds." He believed that the tetrahedron was the most fundamental, structurally sound form found in nature; this shape is an essential part of most of his designs, which range in scale from domestic to global. As the many drawings and models in this exhibition attest, Fuller was committed to the physical exploration and visual presentation of his ideas.
The results of more than five decades of Fuller's integrated approach toward the design and technology of housing, transportation, cartography, and communication are displayed here, much of it for the first time. This exhibition offers a fresh look at Fuller's life's work for everyone who shares his sense of urgency about homelessness, poverty, diminishing natural resources, and the future of our planet. - Jennie Goldstein
Learn more about Buckminster Fuller
Check out these online resources for more in-depth information on Buckminster Fuller.
Podcast: Download or stream "Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe," a new podcast created by the New York Academy of Sciences in tandem with the exhibition
R. Buckminster Fuller Archive at Stanford University
Buckminster Fuller Institute
Buckminster Fuller quotes
Buckminster Fuller Twitter page
Buckminster Fuller @紐約 Whitney Museum of American Art
由C60追溯 Buckminster Fuller 其人
作者：丁廷楨 （清華大學化學系 北京 100084）
1985年秋，在美國休士頓的萊斯大學的一所研究室裡，羅伯特·柯爾（Curl R F,美國）、哈囉德·克羅托（Kroto H W, 英國）和理查德·斯莫利（Smalley R E, 美國）三位教授及其研究小組，經過一週緊張研究和熱烈討論，終於完成了他們劃時代的重大發現——C60(碳六十)，碳的第三種穩定同素異形體。
對這一後來被人們譽為「本世紀分子」的新發現物質，他們欣然命名為「Buckminsterfullerene」，簡稱「Fullerene」或「Bucky ball」。自此，冠於C60名稱之首的「Fuller」氏，因隨C60研究熱潮的持續掀起，而再度享譽全球。《化學通報》近兩年也發表了十多篇有關「Fullerene」的論文[1∼10]。其實，早在1967年加拿大蒙特利爾世界博覽會（EXPO'67）之後， Fuller即聞名遐邇，只是，那時的中國，自我封閉，正處於動亂無治的「文革」災難之中，怎容得有誰能夠知道，世間上還有那麼一位「Fuller 」君呢？如今，在我國學術界雖已逐漸習慣於「Fuller 烯」的稱謂，然而，為什麼要用一位既非化學家又非物理學家的 Fuller 來為C60命名呢？深知其緣者未必很多，筆者以為，對此作一番溯源追思，或許是不無啟發和裨益的。
1. Buckminster Fuller 生平簡介
Fuller 的全稱是 Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jr.，1895年7月12日誕生於美國麻薩諸塞州米爾頓小鎮（現波士頓市郊）。自幼聰敏，暱稱「Bucky」（巴克），喜愛田徑、橄欖球和劃漿等運動。18歲的Fuller 體質不壯，而且他的一條腿比另一條要短2釐米，儘管如此，他還是加入了有名的米爾頓橄欖球隊，成為四分衛球手。
1913年 Fuller 上了哈佛大學，在學業和體育方面都有良好記錄，但不知何故，曾兩度被哈佛開除學籍，未能完成正規高等教育。第一次世界大戰期間，在美國海軍服役（他的祖父原為英國海軍上尉），曾任華盛頓號艦艇上的通訊官，發明了特殊救生設備，對德國齊柏林飛船的設計和製造極感興趣乃至著迷。後來，專長於材料、建築和工程，對數學、哲學和文藝亦有相當造詣和素養。一生有過多種發明和創造，所獲重要美國專利就有20多項，其中在1923年獲得的第一項專利（U.S.Patent No. 1,633,702）是關於柵欄建築系統的機械設計。日後他成為世界著名的「巨球建築」大師。Fuller 是一位多產的發明家，其主要發明有如：1930年前後設計並試製成功特種越野汽車，速度快，耗油少，可原地轉向180度；1943年試制三引擎汽車，每升汽油行程14∼18公里；能呈現全世界地形的製圖法；模壓預製裝配浴室；四面體的漂浮城市；水下穹窿農場和四維房屋模型等。1968年南伊利諾依大學聘他為教授，同年獲美國文學藝術協會金質獎章，曾獲英國皇家建築金質獎章。1983年7月1日在加利福里亞州洛杉磯去逝，享年88歲。概而言之，Fuller 不僅是一位美國著名的建築師、工程師、哲學家兼詩人，而且還是二十世紀下半葉最富創見的思想家之一。
2. Fuller 與穹窿建築（geodesic domed）
Fuller 從事球堆積的研究，發現如果從一個矢量平衡系統中移走一個中心球，則該系統將關閉為一個正二十面體的「固體」結構。二十面體可分解為正八面體，後者又可進而分解為正四面體（有四個三角面的角錐體）。這意味著，所有的多面體都可分割為其基本成分——正四面體。Fuller 認為，「宇宙中的一切結構都是由這種基本結構單元正四面體所構成。」當他發現三角形與球之間的相互關聯時，高興地寫道：「我意識到了，有可能建造球形結構或多面體穹窿建築，它是一個半球，由31個大圓圈繞著一個球面而構成，彼此交叉形成尺度不定的完美三角形。這種三角形球面就正好是正四面體的外部成分。因此我擁有全部這樣的四面體，它們歸屬於該球的中心，它們不能分離。」Fuller 所發展的「協同幾何學」為多面體穹窿（dome）現代建築奠定了理論基礎。這種由若干三角形或多邊形的面所構築的穹窿，其應力分佈在結構本身之內。穹窿尺度沒有限制，其構架總強度隨尺度按對數比增加。
1965至1967年，Fuller 與他在康奈爾建築研究院時認識的日本學生兼朋友 Shoji Sodao一起，並在來自麻省理工學院（MIT）幾位年輕建築師和工程師的協助下，在蒙特利爾為EXPO'67興建美國展覽館而辛勤工作，他們採用輕質金屬和聚合材料建成別具一格的大球形美國展覽館，轟動世界，Fuller 也因此首次揚名千里，下圖是Fuller 與美國展館。
迄今世界各地已建成的穹窿式建築達數千之多。最著名者，除上述美國展館以外，還有：Fuller 於1958年在美國路易斯安那州巴頓魯日建成的聯合油槽汽車公司修理大廳（球直徑117米，高35米，為當時世界最大淨跨現代建築）；美國聖路易斯植物園中的一個熱帶帶植物展廳，等等。
3. Fuller 與「起居機器」
1927年Fuller 提出「起居機器」（英文：living machine,德文：Wohnmaschine）的設想，同年發明了在工廠裝配而由飛機運載建造的設備齊全的住宅。1928年他在「茲加哥晚報」上發表文章，表述了他關於把「人造生命」（artificial life）作為一個四維「起居機器」的意念。不過，這也還只處於一種想像和設計階段。受此思想的激勵，1952年法籍瑞士建築師 Le Corbusier 在馬賽卻完成一座「起居機器」的建築，包括337個套間和一個供1600人用的廣場。Fuller 建造「起居機器」的最終目的，是欲達到他的「動態最大世界」（Dymaxion World）。
Fuller 理念中的住宅「Dymaxion House」，應具有「動態活力」和「最大的功效」，此作品以一機器供作生活用，其實用性將遠超過隱喻性。與同時代的歐洲純粹主義傑作和相關的運動不同，他的「Dymaxion House」不以講究美學的因素為最終目的，而其主要觀點在於以一種因生活空間的連結所造成的機械服務設備的組合。
1933年，Fuller 根據「Dymaxion」構想發展出一種機械化式樣的三輪自動車「 Dymaxion Car」，該車的燃油效率達到每加侖汽油可供行駛30英里(每 7.8 升 可供行駛 100 公里)。
*「Dymaxion」一詞即為「dynamic + maximal efficiency」的縮寫。
4. Fuller 與 Synergy概念
質量、能量和信息這些科學名詞，從所周知，然而，與能量（energy）一詞相似的Synergy（姑譯為「協量」）卻至今鮮為人曉。按Fuller 的定義，「不能由集成的、集聚的整個系統所分割的任一組分或其組分之亞組分來預測的該系統的行為，稱為Synergy.」
Fuller 上中學唸書，當一位女教師在黑板上畫了一個正立方體，並說這是從一個不存在的點開始畫出的，此時一向執著於獨立思考的Fuller 不能理會，如何有可能實現「從無到有」的。然而，正是這樣的思索方式，卻成為他日後發明「協同幾何」（Synergetic gesmetry）的「閃亮」的智慧之輝光。
1948年Fuller 曾對正二十面體(icosahedron)作過深入研究。基於矢量平衡方法，他把二十面體定義為31個「大圓能量軌跡」，他還推測：「在宇宙之中，正是由於這種二十面體，才使得個性（individuality）成為可能。矢量平衡決不止於平衡，而當大腦關閉思想開關之時，我們的意識將被禁錮在此二十面體中。宇宙裡，二十面體的功能或許就在於，把宇宙能量的開關擲給局部的轉轍系統。在這個二十面體中，能量甚至靠6個大圓而獲得自身的鎖定——這大概就能解釋，為什麼電子是可借用的（borrowable）而獨立於質子中子群」。
Fuller 的Synergy概念在這裡不可能詳述，然而，或許在將來會引起更多人們的關注和研討。
5. Fuller 眼裡的牛頓和愛因斯坦
Fuller 善於思考，勇於實踐，富於創新。而科學與工程結合，藝術與技術相伴，學術與詩歌聯姻則是他的表現風格。
Fuller 關於4D住宅機器的設想，是深受愛因斯坦的影響而提出來的，他接受愛因斯坦物理學中的四維概念和一種可能的解——即有限宇宙猶如一個球體。Fuller 對牛頓的和愛因斯坦的「宇宙」有過深刻的思辨，甚至他寫了如下的詩篇：
牛頓曾是名詞
愛因斯坦卻是動詞
愛因斯坦準則
造就牛頓法則
瞬息宇宙
有多奇妙
唯有天體
執著固守。
在靜寂的狀態裡
或者——
除非受到了影響
這樣樹立起碑群！
非同時發生的物理世界
就是能量，
而且
能量等於
質量乘以光速平方
絕無例外！
裂變證實
愛因斯坦假設
變化是正常的
感謝你，愛因斯坦！
Newton was a noun
And Einstein is a verb
Einstein's norm makes Newton's norm
Instant universe
Absurd
A body persists.
In a state of rest
Or--
Except as affected
Thus gravestones are erected!
Non-simultaneous,physical universe
Is energy,and
Energy equals mass
Times the second power
of the speed of light
No exceptions!
Fission verified Einstein's hypothesis
Change is normal
Thank you, Albert!
6. 篇末語
a. 多學科交叉，給Fuller 的創造思維帶來靈感；學科間的融合，使Fuller 的發明極富設計巧妙，技術精湛，工程實用，藝術優美和思想豐厚的特色，令人讚嘆不已。
b. C60作為科學史上一項最新的偶然發現及其發展，是諸多學科合力碰撞、昇華與結晶所獲得的輝煌成果。
c. 本文開頭提及的三位教授，因C60而獲1997年諾貝爾化學獎，他們為C60取名「Fullerene」，有著真誠紀念與推崇Fuller 之意。有鑑於此，筆者竊以為，把「Fullerene」的中譯名定為「Fuller 碳」為好，一來保留了「Fuller 」的稱謂，以尊重發明者之原意，二來可避免C60家族含氫元素（烯）之嫌。
4.物理量「Sgnergy」的正式學術譯名當請「化學名詞」委員會或「物理名詞」委員會認定。
7. 參考文獻
[1] 王永年. 化學通報, 1997,(7):27
[2] 郝春雁等. 化學通報, 1997,(6):9
[3] 陳仁釗等. 化學通報, 1997,(8):14
[4] 曹保鵬等. 化學通報, 1997,(12):1
[5] 余伯承等. 化學通報, 1997,(5):25
[6] 劉詠梅等. 化學通報, 1997,(1):41
[7] 韓萬書. 化學通報,1997,(4):61
[8] 陸長元等. 化學通報, 1998,(1):1
[9]a.張文根. 化學通報, 1998,(11):61;b. 張文根. 化學通報(網絡版), 1999,(13):9.
[10] 曹保鵬等.化學通報, 1999,(1):15
[11] Koruga D,Hameroff S,Withers J et al. Fullerene C60, North-Holland,1993
[12] Hatch A, BucKminster Fulller: At home in the Universe, Crown Pub. Inc., New YorK, 1974
[13] fuller B R, Synergetics:Explerations in the Geometry of Thinking, MacMillan Publishing Company, New YorK, 1975
[14] Curl R F ,Smalley R E , Fullerenes. Scientific American, 54-63, October 1991
[15] Marks R, Fuller B R, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. Auchor BooKs, New YorK, 1973
[16] Kroto H W, Allaf A W, Balm S P, C60: Buckminsterullerene, Chem Rev 91:1213-1235,1991
[17] Sanders M, Buckminsterfullerene: The Inside Story. Science 213: 330-331, 1991
作者：丁廷楨 （清華大學化學系 北京 100084）
1985年秋，在美國休士頓的萊斯大學的一所研究室裡，羅伯特·柯爾（Curl R F,美國）、哈囉德·克羅托（Kroto H W, 英國）和理查德·斯莫利（Smalley R E, 美國）三位教授及其研究小組，經過一週緊張研究和熱烈討論，終於完成了他們劃時代的重大發現——C60(碳六十)，碳的第三種穩定同素異形體。
對這一後來被人們譽為「本世紀分子」的新發現物質，他們欣然命名為「Buckminsterfullerene」，簡稱「Fullerene」或「Bucky ball」。自此，冠於C60名稱之首的「Fuller」氏，因隨C60研究熱潮的持續掀起，而再度享譽全球。《化學通報》近兩年也發表了十多篇有關「Fullerene」的論文[1∼10]。其實，早在1967年加拿大蒙特利爾世界博覽會（EXPO'67）之後， Fuller即聞名遐邇，只是，那時的中國，自我封閉，正處於動亂無治的「文革」災難之中，怎容得有誰能夠知道，世間上還有那麼一位「Fuller 」君呢？如今，在我國學術界雖已逐漸習慣於「Fuller 烯」的稱謂，然而，為什麼要用一位既非化學家又非物理學家的 Fuller 來為C60命名呢？深知其緣者未必很多，筆者以為，對此作一番溯源追思，或許是不無啟發和裨益的。
1. Buckminster Fuller 生平簡介
Fuller 的全稱是 Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jr.，1895年7月12日誕生於美國麻薩諸塞州米爾頓小鎮（現波士頓市郊）。自幼聰敏，暱稱「Bucky」（巴克），喜愛田徑、橄欖球和劃漿等運動。18歲的Fuller 體質不壯，而且他的一條腿比另一條要短2釐米，儘管如此，他還是加入了有名的米爾頓橄欖球隊，成為四分衛球手。
1913年 Fuller 上了哈佛大學，在學業和體育方面都有良好記錄，但不知何故，曾兩度被哈佛開除學籍，未能完成正規高等教育。第一次世界大戰期間，在美國海軍服役（他的祖父原為英國海軍上尉），曾任華盛頓號艦艇上的通訊官，發明了特殊救生設備，對德國齊柏林飛船的設計和製造極感興趣乃至著迷。後來，專長於材料、建築和工程，對數學、哲學和文藝亦有相當造詣和素養。一生有過多種發明和創造，所獲重要美國專利就有20多項，其中在1923年獲得的第一項專利（U.S.Patent No. 1,633,702）是關於柵欄建築系統的機械設計。日後他成為世界著名的「巨球建築」大師。Fuller 是一位多產的發明家，其主要發明有如：1930年前後設計並試製成功特種越野汽車，速度快，耗油少，可原地轉向180度；1943年試制三引擎汽車，每升汽油行程14∼18公里；能呈現全世界地形的製圖法；模壓預製裝配浴室；四面體的漂浮城市；水下穹窿農場和四維房屋模型等。1968年南伊利諾依大學聘他為教授，同年獲美國文學藝術協會金質獎章，曾獲英國皇家建築金質獎章。1983年7月1日在加利福里亞州洛杉磯去逝，享年88歲。概而言之，Fuller 不僅是一位美國著名的建築師、工程師、哲學家兼詩人，而且還是二十世紀下半葉最富創見的思想家之一。
2. Fuller 與穹窿建築（geodesic domed）
Fuller 從事球堆積的研究，發現如果從一個矢量平衡系統中移走一個中心球，則該系統將關閉為一個正二十面體的「固體」結構。二十面體可分解為正八面體，後者又可進而分解為正四面體（有四個三角面的角錐體）。這意味著，所有的多面體都可分割為其基本成分——正四面體。Fuller 認為，「宇宙中的一切結構都是由這種基本結構單元正四面體所構成。」當他發現三角形與球之間的相互關聯時，高興地寫道：「我意識到了，有可能建造球形結構或多面體穹窿建築，它是一個半球，由31個大圓圈繞著一個球面而構成，彼此交叉形成尺度不定的完美三角形。這種三角形球面就正好是正四面體的外部成分。因此我擁有全部這樣的四面體，它們歸屬於該球的中心，它們不能分離。」Fuller 所發展的「協同幾何學」為多面體穹窿（dome）現代建築奠定了理論基礎。這種由若干三角形或多邊形的面所構築的穹窿，其應力分佈在結構本身之內。穹窿尺度沒有限制，其構架總強度隨尺度按對數比增加。
1965至1967年，Fuller 與他在康奈爾建築研究院時認識的日本學生兼朋友 Shoji Sodao一起，並在來自麻省理工學院（MIT）幾位年輕建築師和工程師的協助下，在蒙特利爾為EXPO'67興建美國展覽館而辛勤工作，他們採用輕質金屬和聚合材料建成別具一格的大球形美國展覽館，轟動世界，Fuller 也因此首次揚名千里，下圖是Fuller 與美國展館。
迄今世界各地已建成的穹窿式建築達數千之多。最著名者，除上述美國展館以外，還有：Fuller 於1958年在美國路易斯安那州巴頓魯日建成的聯合油槽汽車公司修理大廳（球直徑117米，高35米，為當時世界最大淨跨現代建築）；美國聖路易斯植物園中的一個熱帶帶植物展廳，等等。
3. Fuller 與「起居機器」
1927年Fuller 提出「起居機器」（英文：living machine,德文：Wohnmaschine）的設想，同年發明了在工廠裝配而由飛機運載建造的設備齊全的住宅。1928年他在「茲加哥晚報」上發表文章，表述了他關於把「人造生命」（artificial life）作為一個四維「起居機器」的意念。不過，這也還只處於一種想像和設計階段。受此思想的激勵，1952年法籍瑞士建築師 Le Corbusier 在馬賽卻完成一座「起居機器」的建築，包括337個套間和一個供1600人用的廣場。Fuller 建造「起居機器」的最終目的，是欲達到他的「動態最大世界」（Dymaxion World）。
Fuller 理念中的住宅「Dymaxion House」，應具有「動態活力」和「最大的功效」，此作品以一機器供作生活用，其實用性將遠超過隱喻性。與同時代的歐洲純粹主義傑作和相關的運動不同，他的「Dymaxion House」不以講究美學的因素為最終目的，而其主要觀點在於以一種因生活空間的連結所造成的機械服務設備的組合。
1933年，Fuller 根據「Dymaxion」構想發展出一種機械化式樣的三輪自動車「 Dymaxion Car」，該車的燃油效率達到每加侖汽油可供行駛30英里(每 7.8 升 可供行駛 100 公里)。
*「Dymaxion」一詞即為「dynamic + maximal efficiency」的縮寫。
4. Fuller 與 Synergy概念
質量、能量和信息這些科學名詞，從所周知，然而，與能量（energy）一詞相似的Synergy（姑譯為「協量」）卻至今鮮為人曉。按Fuller 的定義，「不能由集成的、集聚的整個系統所分割的任一組分或其組分之亞組分來預測的該系統的行為，稱為Synergy.」
Fuller 上中學唸書，當一位女教師在黑板上畫了一個正立方體，並說這是從一個不存在的點開始畫出的，此時一向執著於獨立思考的Fuller 不能理會，如何有可能實現「從無到有」的。然而，正是這樣的思索方式，卻成為他日後發明「協同幾何」（Synergetic gesmetry）的「閃亮」的智慧之輝光。
1948年Fuller 曾對正二十面體(icosahedron)作過深入研究。基於矢量平衡方法，他把二十面體定義為31個「大圓能量軌跡」，他還推測：「在宇宙之中，正是由於這種二十面體，才使得個性（individuality）成為可能。矢量平衡決不止於平衡，而當大腦關閉思想開關之時，我們的意識將被禁錮在此二十面體中。宇宙裡，二十面體的功能或許就在於，把宇宙能量的開關擲給局部的轉轍系統。在這個二十面體中，能量甚至靠6個大圓而獲得自身的鎖定——這大概就能解釋，為什麼電子是可借用的（borrowable）而獨立於質子中子群」。
Fuller 的Synergy概念在這裡不可能詳述，然而，或許在將來會引起更多人們的關注和研討。
5. Fuller 眼裡的牛頓和愛因斯坦
Fuller 善於思考，勇於實踐，富於創新。而科學與工程結合，藝術與技術相伴，學術與詩歌聯姻則是他的表現風格。
Fuller 關於4D住宅機器的設想，是深受愛因斯坦的影響而提出來的，他接受愛因斯坦物理學中的四維概念和一種可能的解——即有限宇宙猶如一個球體。Fuller 對牛頓的和愛因斯坦的「宇宙」有過深刻的思辨，甚至他寫了如下的詩篇：
牛頓曾是名詞
愛因斯坦卻是動詞
愛因斯坦準則
造就牛頓法則
瞬息宇宙
有多奇妙
唯有天體
執著固守。
在靜寂的狀態裡
或者——
除非受到了影響
這樣樹立起碑群！
非同時發生的物理世界
就是能量，
而且
能量等於
質量乘以光速平方
絕無例外！
裂變證實
愛因斯坦假設
變化是正常的
感謝你，愛因斯坦！
Newton was a noun
And Einstein is a verb
Einstein's norm makes Newton's norm
Instant universe
Absurd
A body persists.
In a state of rest
Or--
Except as affected
Thus gravestones are erected!
Non-simultaneous,physical universe
Is energy,and
Energy equals mass
Times the second power
of the speed of light
No exceptions!
Fission verified Einstein's hypothesis
Change is normal
Thank you, Albert!
6. 篇末語
a. 多學科交叉，給Fuller 的創造思維帶來靈感；學科間的融合，使Fuller 的發明極富設計巧妙，技術精湛，工程實用，藝術優美和思想豐厚的特色，令人讚嘆不已。
b. C60作為科學史上一項最新的偶然發現及其發展，是諸多學科合力碰撞、昇華與結晶所獲得的輝煌成果。
c. 本文開頭提及的三位教授，因C60而獲1997年諾貝爾化學獎，他們為C60取名「Fullerene」，有著真誠紀念與推崇Fuller 之意。有鑑於此，筆者竊以為，把「Fullerene」的中譯名定為「Fuller 碳」為好，一來保留了「Fuller 」的稱謂，以尊重發明者之原意，二來可避免C60家族含氫元素（烯）之嫌。
4.物理量「Sgnergy」的正式學術譯名當請「化學名詞」委員會或「物理名詞」委員會認定。
7. 參考文獻
[1] 王永年. 化學通報, 1997,(7):27
[2] 郝春雁等. 化學通報, 1997,(6):9
[3] 陳仁釗等. 化學通報, 1997,(8):14
[4] 曹保鵬等. 化學通報, 1997,(12):1
[5] 余伯承等. 化學通報, 1997,(5):25
[6] 劉詠梅等. 化學通報, 1997,(1):41
[7] 韓萬書. 化學通報,1997,(4):61
[8] 陸長元等. 化學通報, 1998,(1):1
[9]a.張文根. 化學通報, 1998,(11):61;b. 張文根. 化學通報(網絡版), 1999,(13):9.
[10] 曹保鵬等.化學通報, 1999,(1):15
[11] Koruga D,Hameroff S,Withers J et al. Fullerene C60, North-Holland,1993
[12] Hatch A, BucKminster Fulller: At home in the Universe, Crown Pub. Inc., New YorK, 1974
[13] fuller B R, Synergetics:Explerations in the Geometry of Thinking, MacMillan Publishing Company, New YorK, 1975
[14] Curl R F ,Smalley R E , Fullerenes. Scientific American, 54-63, October 1991
[15] Marks R, Fuller B R, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. Auchor BooKs, New YorK, 1973
[16] Kroto H W, Allaf A W, Balm S P, C60: Buckminsterullerene, Chem Rev 91:1213-1235,1991
[17] Sanders M, Buckminsterfullerene: The Inside Story. Science 213: 330-331, 1991
>>相關影片
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Catch a glimpse of Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe in this collection of archival footage.
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Watch the Whitney Museum build a geodesic dome for the exhibition.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/1W8pFRoIrnk"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/1W8pFRoIrnk" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Watch an animation depicting Fuller's geometric explorations.
Digital animation by Michelle Chang with Helen Han and Temple Simpson.
This animation presents the geometry that is the basis of many of Fuller's key ideas and concepts. At the beginning, twelve spheres are packed as closely as possible around a single central sphere. As the spheres shrink and disappear, they generate a polyhedron in which all edges and all radii are of equal length. This shape is what Fuller called a vector equilibrium. One of the characteristics of a vector equilibrium is its ability to contract by folding in on itself. The animation demonstrates how this simple geometric shape can be transformed to create several complex polyhedra. Next, it produces a different version of a vector equilibrium that Fuller called tensegrity—short for a stable structure of tensional integrity. In the last part of the animation, a map of the entire globe is transferred onto the vector equilibrium, which unfolds to produce a flat map of the earth made from six squares and eight triangles. Unlike conventional world maps, Fuller's vector equilibrium map represents the world with minimal distortions to the relative size of the continents.
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View an Origami demonstration of the arrangement of 60 Carbon atoms known as the Buckyball.
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Learn how to make Fuller-inspired Buckyballs from ice-cream cones.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jnEPI2R2U7w&hl ... ram><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/jnEPI2R2U7w&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
See Buckminster Fuller give his outlook on what can be achieved in the future, in just a few words.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/1jE-XV0eNNo"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/1jE-XV0eNNo" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Catch a glimpse of Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe in this collection of archival footage.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jN3FMx1TYt8"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/jN3FMx1TYt8" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Watch the Whitney Museum build a geodesic dome for the exhibition.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/1W8pFRoIrnk"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/1W8pFRoIrnk" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Watch an animation depicting Fuller's geometric explorations.
Digital animation by Michelle Chang with Helen Han and Temple Simpson.
This animation presents the geometry that is the basis of many of Fuller's key ideas and concepts. At the beginning, twelve spheres are packed as closely as possible around a single central sphere. As the spheres shrink and disappear, they generate a polyhedron in which all edges and all radii are of equal length. This shape is what Fuller called a vector equilibrium. One of the characteristics of a vector equilibrium is its ability to contract by folding in on itself. The animation demonstrates how this simple geometric shape can be transformed to create several complex polyhedra. Next, it produces a different version of a vector equilibrium that Fuller called tensegrity—short for a stable structure of tensional integrity. In the last part of the animation, a map of the entire globe is transferred onto the vector equilibrium, which unfolds to produce a flat map of the earth made from six squares and eight triangles. Unlike conventional world maps, Fuller's vector equilibrium map represents the world with minimal distortions to the relative size of the continents.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Zb2lHNqPm7w&hl ... ram><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Zb2lHNqPm7w&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
View an Origami demonstration of the arrangement of 60 Carbon atoms known as the Buckyball.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/dQyEGsuMES8&hl ... ram><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/dQyEGsuMES8&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Learn how to make Fuller-inspired Buckyballs from ice-cream cones.
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See Buckminster Fuller give his outlook on what can be achieved in the future, in just a few words.
轉貼自聯合報
R. Buckminster Fuller And the Inventor’s Life
美國建築師富勒：一個發明奇才的一生
By James Sterngold
PALO ALTO, California – AS the designer R. Buckminster Fuller liked to tell it, his powerful creative vision was born of a moment of deep despair at the age of 32. A self-described ne’er-do-well, twice ejected from Harvard University, a failure in business and a heavy drinker, he trudged to the Chicago lakefront one day in 1927 and contemplating suicide. But an inner voice interrupted, telling him that he had a mission to discover great truths, all for the good of humankind.
設計家伯克明斯特•富勒總愛說，他的強大創造洞見誕生於32歲那年一個絕望至極的剎那。自稱一事無成的他，兩次被哈佛大學退學，經商失敗，飲酒無度，1927年某天腳步沈重走到芝加哥湖畔想自殺，內心卻有個聲音打岔，告訴他，他身負為人類福祉發現偉大真理的大任。
That was the pivot on which, he claimed, his life turned. The onetime loser entered a period of deep reflection, then emerged bursting with creativity as he developed the “Dymaxion” inventions: technologies that he said would transform housing, transportation, urban organization and, eventually, the human condition. From 1927 on, Fuller seemed utterly self-assured, even messianic, as he developed innovations like the geodesic dome, equal parts engineering élan and poetry.
他說，那是他人生轉向的樞紐。這位過去的失敗者進入一個深潛反思的階段，銷聲忘言，冒出頭來的時候，創意爆發，想出Dymaxion系列新發明：據他所說，那些科技將會改造住宅、運輸、都市組織，終而改變人類處境。1927年起，看似自信滿滿，甚至帶著救世主氣息的富勒，想出兼融工程氣勢和詩意的多面體圓頂之類創新作品。
Those pioneering creations will be on display this summer in “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe,” a sprawling show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York that testifies to the wide-ranging intellectual curiosity of Fuller (1895-1983).
那些具開創性的作品，今夏將在紐約惠特尼美國藝術博物館內涵廣泛的「富勒：天地之初」展覽中陳列，這些作品見證1895年生、1983年過世的富勒包羅廣遠的知性好奇心。
But recent research has shed new light on Fuller’s inner life. In particular, it now appears that the suicide story may have been yet another invention, a myth that served to cover up a formative period that was far more tumultuous and unstable, for far longer, than Fuller ever revealed.
但晚近一些研究使我們對富勒的內心世界有新的認識，尤其自殺故事現在看來可能是富勒的又一個發明，這個用心營造的迷思旨在掩飾一段養成歲月，那段歲月遠比富勒生前向我們透露的要更動盪、更不安定，也更持久。
That is one insights gleaned by researchers who are exploring his personal archives, deposited in 1999 at the Stanford University library by his family. Fuller collected nearly every scrap of paper that ever passed through his hands, including letters that raise questions about the suicide story.
這是探究富勒私人檔案的研究人員獲得的洞識，檔案1999年由富勒的家人交給史丹福大學圖書館典藏。富勒幾乎把他雙手碰過的每片紙張都保留下來，包括使後人懷疑自殺故事是否真實的多封信件。
“If you really look for the details of his life at the time, it’s easy to see that the suicide story was a creation,” said Barry Katz, a Stanford historian who wrote a study in the forthcoming book “Reassessing R. Buckminster Fuller,” co-editor by Hsiao-Yun Chu, a former assistant curator of the papers.
史丹福大學歷史學家貝瑞•凱茲說：「如果你真的找一找他那段時期的生活細節，很容易就能看出自殺故事是他編的。」凱茲和曾任富勒檔案助理編審的朱曉雲（譯音）合編即將出版的新書《再評富勒》，書裡有他一篇論文。
In 1927 Fuller, living in Chicago, and his wife, Anne, in New York, exchanged almost daily letters and telegrams. Not one makes reference either to thoughts of death or to an epiphany.
1927年，住在芝加哥的富勒與人在紐約的妻子安幾乎每天相互通信或拍電報，裡面並無片言隻字提及尋短之念或頓悟。
Instead, Mr. Katz said, he found signs of depression and anxiety stretching from the time Fuller’s first daughter, Alexandra, died in 1922, through his financial failures and, finally, the collapse of a torrid extramarital romance in 1931. Still, the suicide story seemed to serve a purpose.
凱茲說，他發現，1922年富勒的大女兒亞利珊卓過世，接著富勒財務失利，最後是一場激烈的婚外情在1931年破裂，富勒的抑鬱與焦慮跡象貫穿整個過程。但自殺的故事似乎有某種用意。
“It gave a trajectory to his career,” Mr. Katz said. “The story was constructed after the fact to show how he suddenly developed these new ideas. I think he came to believe the story himself.”
凱茲說：「自殺故事賦予他的生涯歷程一個軌跡。他在事後編構這個故事，藉此解釋他為何突然想出一堆新點子。我認為，後來他自己也信以為真。」
Fuller’s daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, a retired professor of dance at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she was not surprised to learn that the 1927 epiphany may not have been literally true. “It was a kind of parable of his interior thinking, really,” she said.
富勒的女兒、洛杉磯加州大學退休舞蹈教授艾蕾葛拉•富勒•史奈德說，獲知父親1927年的頓悟恐怕不是真的，她並不意外。她說：「說真的，那有點像是反映他內心想法的寓言故事。」
She recounted another occasion on which he had seemed to find inspiration at a dark moment. Fuller had tried to turn an idea for prefabricated housing into a business after World War II by teaming with the Beech Aircraft Company and other investors. But in 1946, after prototypes were built, the project collapsed.
她說，她父親彷彿也曾在另一個特別黑暗的時刻找到靈感。第二次世界大戰後，富勒想和比奇飛機公司等投資者合作，把預鑄住宅的概念變成一門生意，但1946年原始模型打造完工後，計畫失敗。
Ms. Snyder recalled her father coming home to their small apartment utterly despondent. She said she went to bed then got up in the morning only to find that he had been up all night working at a small wooden table.
史奈德想起，她父親回到他們在小公寓的家，看起來萬念俱灰。她說，她上床睡覺，第二天早上起來，發現父親徹夜未眠，在一個小木頭桌子前工作。
“I remember very well that he was talking about this new thing, the geodesic dome,” she said. “That’s what he said to me.”
她說：「我記得清清楚楚，他在談他的新發明，多面體圓頂。他跟我說的就是那個。」
For all his creative energy, Fuller’s legacy is slippery. By conventional measures he accomplished little. His soaring geodesic domes have been used – memorably for the United States pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal – but never for the large-scale projects he envisioned, like the dome he hoped would cover most of Manhattan.
儘管富勒充滿無窮的創造能量，卻沒能留給後人具體的建築作品。按傳統標準衡量，他成果甚少。有人採用他設計的多面體圓頂，好比1967年蒙特婁世界博覽會讓人難忘的美國館，但從來沒有人拿來用在富勒設想的那種大規模計畫上，例如他心中那個籠罩大半曼哈坦的圓頂。
Yet Fuller had great influence through his design principles and his lectures and writings. His book “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” helped make him a symbol of the counterculture.
但是，透過他的設計原理、演講與文章，富勒影響深遠。他的書《地球號太空船操作手冊》使他成為反文化運動的表徵。
As Mr. Katz put it, “Fuller’s greatest invention was not a house or a car or a dome. It was himself.”
正如凱茲所說：「富勒最偉大的發明不是一棟房子、一輛車子或一座圓頂，而是他自己。」
關鍵字句
學者說，本文主角富勒是建築師（architect）、詩人（poet）與發明家（inventor），更是一位熱心傳講設計與科學知識的「公眾知識分子」（public intellectual）。
富勒家人交給史丹福大學圖書館保管的檔案文獻（archives），包括大批文件、模型與錄音。
學者發現，在外人面前自信十足（self-assured），彷彿以救世主自居（messianic）的富勒，曾在大張繪圖紙上書寫，坦承自己因為婚外情關係（extramarital romance）破裂而精神崩潰（nervous breakdown）。
那個很可能是憑空編造的自殺故事，似乎有個目的（The suicide story seemed to serve a purpose.），就是創造迷思（myth），藉以解釋他創造力的來源（the origin of his creativity）。
Epiphany 原指神顯靈（the appearance of a divine being），也可單指基督教信仰中的主顯節，現在常用於形容靈光乍現或突然領悟、開竅（a sudden moment of understanding / a sudden realization）。
Parable 是闡釋道德或宗教教訓的簡短故事（a brief story that illustrates amoral or religious lesson），亦即寓言。其意思接近fable。一般而言，Parable不像fable會把動物、無生命的自然現象當作跟人類一樣會說話的故事角色，不過這種分別有時也不太明顯。
原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/arts/ ... 5ster.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/14/arts/buck.php
2008-06-24/聯合報/G6版/UNITED DAILY NEWS 王先棠 原文請見6月24日紐時周報七版右上
R. Buckminster Fuller And the Inventor’s Life
美國建築師富勒：一個發明奇才的一生
By James Sterngold
PALO ALTO, California – AS the designer R. Buckminster Fuller liked to tell it, his powerful creative vision was born of a moment of deep despair at the age of 32. A self-described ne’er-do-well, twice ejected from Harvard University, a failure in business and a heavy drinker, he trudged to the Chicago lakefront one day in 1927 and contemplating suicide. But an inner voice interrupted, telling him that he had a mission to discover great truths, all for the good of humankind.
設計家伯克明斯特•富勒總愛說，他的強大創造洞見誕生於32歲那年一個絕望至極的剎那。自稱一事無成的他，兩次被哈佛大學退學，經商失敗，飲酒無度，1927年某天腳步沈重走到芝加哥湖畔想自殺，內心卻有個聲音打岔，告訴他，他身負為人類福祉發現偉大真理的大任。
That was the pivot on which, he claimed, his life turned. The onetime loser entered a period of deep reflection, then emerged bursting with creativity as he developed the “Dymaxion” inventions: technologies that he said would transform housing, transportation, urban organization and, eventually, the human condition. From 1927 on, Fuller seemed utterly self-assured, even messianic, as he developed innovations like the geodesic dome, equal parts engineering élan and poetry.
他說，那是他人生轉向的樞紐。這位過去的失敗者進入一個深潛反思的階段，銷聲忘言，冒出頭來的時候，創意爆發，想出Dymaxion系列新發明：據他所說，那些科技將會改造住宅、運輸、都市組織，終而改變人類處境。1927年起，看似自信滿滿，甚至帶著救世主氣息的富勒，想出兼融工程氣勢和詩意的多面體圓頂之類創新作品。
Those pioneering creations will be on display this summer in “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe,” a sprawling show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York that testifies to the wide-ranging intellectual curiosity of Fuller (1895-1983).
那些具開創性的作品，今夏將在紐約惠特尼美國藝術博物館內涵廣泛的「富勒：天地之初」展覽中陳列，這些作品見證1895年生、1983年過世的富勒包羅廣遠的知性好奇心。
But recent research has shed new light on Fuller’s inner life. In particular, it now appears that the suicide story may have been yet another invention, a myth that served to cover up a formative period that was far more tumultuous and unstable, for far longer, than Fuller ever revealed.
但晚近一些研究使我們對富勒的內心世界有新的認識，尤其自殺故事現在看來可能是富勒的又一個發明，這個用心營造的迷思旨在掩飾一段養成歲月，那段歲月遠比富勒生前向我們透露的要更動盪、更不安定，也更持久。
That is one insights gleaned by researchers who are exploring his personal archives, deposited in 1999 at the Stanford University library by his family. Fuller collected nearly every scrap of paper that ever passed through his hands, including letters that raise questions about the suicide story.
這是探究富勒私人檔案的研究人員獲得的洞識，檔案1999年由富勒的家人交給史丹福大學圖書館典藏。富勒幾乎把他雙手碰過的每片紙張都保留下來，包括使後人懷疑自殺故事是否真實的多封信件。
“If you really look for the details of his life at the time, it’s easy to see that the suicide story was a creation,” said Barry Katz, a Stanford historian who wrote a study in the forthcoming book “Reassessing R. Buckminster Fuller,” co-editor by Hsiao-Yun Chu, a former assistant curator of the papers.
史丹福大學歷史學家貝瑞•凱茲說：「如果你真的找一找他那段時期的生活細節，很容易就能看出自殺故事是他編的。」凱茲和曾任富勒檔案助理編審的朱曉雲（譯音）合編即將出版的新書《再評富勒》，書裡有他一篇論文。
In 1927 Fuller, living in Chicago, and his wife, Anne, in New York, exchanged almost daily letters and telegrams. Not one makes reference either to thoughts of death or to an epiphany.
1927年，住在芝加哥的富勒與人在紐約的妻子安幾乎每天相互通信或拍電報，裡面並無片言隻字提及尋短之念或頓悟。
Instead, Mr. Katz said, he found signs of depression and anxiety stretching from the time Fuller’s first daughter, Alexandra, died in 1922, through his financial failures and, finally, the collapse of a torrid extramarital romance in 1931. Still, the suicide story seemed to serve a purpose.
凱茲說，他發現，1922年富勒的大女兒亞利珊卓過世，接著富勒財務失利，最後是一場激烈的婚外情在1931年破裂，富勒的抑鬱與焦慮跡象貫穿整個過程。但自殺的故事似乎有某種用意。
“It gave a trajectory to his career,” Mr. Katz said. “The story was constructed after the fact to show how he suddenly developed these new ideas. I think he came to believe the story himself.”
凱茲說：「自殺故事賦予他的生涯歷程一個軌跡。他在事後編構這個故事，藉此解釋他為何突然想出一堆新點子。我認為，後來他自己也信以為真。」
Fuller’s daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, a retired professor of dance at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she was not surprised to learn that the 1927 epiphany may not have been literally true. “It was a kind of parable of his interior thinking, really,” she said.
富勒的女兒、洛杉磯加州大學退休舞蹈教授艾蕾葛拉•富勒•史奈德說，獲知父親1927年的頓悟恐怕不是真的，她並不意外。她說：「說真的，那有點像是反映他內心想法的寓言故事。」
She recounted another occasion on which he had seemed to find inspiration at a dark moment. Fuller had tried to turn an idea for prefabricated housing into a business after World War II by teaming with the Beech Aircraft Company and other investors. But in 1946, after prototypes were built, the project collapsed.
她說，她父親彷彿也曾在另一個特別黑暗的時刻找到靈感。第二次世界大戰後，富勒想和比奇飛機公司等投資者合作，把預鑄住宅的概念變成一門生意，但1946年原始模型打造完工後，計畫失敗。
Ms. Snyder recalled her father coming home to their small apartment utterly despondent. She said she went to bed then got up in the morning only to find that he had been up all night working at a small wooden table.
史奈德想起，她父親回到他們在小公寓的家，看起來萬念俱灰。她說，她上床睡覺，第二天早上起來，發現父親徹夜未眠，在一個小木頭桌子前工作。
“I remember very well that he was talking about this new thing, the geodesic dome,” she said. “That’s what he said to me.”
她說：「我記得清清楚楚，他在談他的新發明，多面體圓頂。他跟我說的就是那個。」
For all his creative energy, Fuller’s legacy is slippery. By conventional measures he accomplished little. His soaring geodesic domes have been used – memorably for the United States pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal – but never for the large-scale projects he envisioned, like the dome he hoped would cover most of Manhattan.
儘管富勒充滿無窮的創造能量，卻沒能留給後人具體的建築作品。按傳統標準衡量，他成果甚少。有人採用他設計的多面體圓頂，好比1967年蒙特婁世界博覽會讓人難忘的美國館，但從來沒有人拿來用在富勒設想的那種大規模計畫上，例如他心中那個籠罩大半曼哈坦的圓頂。
Yet Fuller had great influence through his design principles and his lectures and writings. His book “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” helped make him a symbol of the counterculture.
但是，透過他的設計原理、演講與文章，富勒影響深遠。他的書《地球號太空船操作手冊》使他成為反文化運動的表徵。
As Mr. Katz put it, “Fuller’s greatest invention was not a house or a car or a dome. It was himself.”
正如凱茲所說：「富勒最偉大的發明不是一棟房子、一輛車子或一座圓頂，而是他自己。」
關鍵字句
學者說，本文主角富勒是建築師（architect）、詩人（poet）與發明家（inventor），更是一位熱心傳講設計與科學知識的「公眾知識分子」（public intellectual）。
富勒家人交給史丹福大學圖書館保管的檔案文獻（archives），包括大批文件、模型與錄音。
學者發現，在外人面前自信十足（self-assured），彷彿以救世主自居（messianic）的富勒，曾在大張繪圖紙上書寫，坦承自己因為婚外情關係（extramarital romance）破裂而精神崩潰（nervous breakdown）。
那個很可能是憑空編造的自殺故事，似乎有個目的（The suicide story seemed to serve a purpose.），就是創造迷思（myth），藉以解釋他創造力的來源（the origin of his creativity）。
Epiphany 原指神顯靈（the appearance of a divine being），也可單指基督教信仰中的主顯節，現在常用於形容靈光乍現或突然領悟、開竅（a sudden moment of understanding / a sudden realization）。
Parable 是闡釋道德或宗教教訓的簡短故事（a brief story that illustrates amoral or religious lesson），亦即寓言。其意思接近fable。一般而言，Parable不像fable會把動物、無生命的自然現象當作跟人類一樣會說話的故事角色，不過這種分別有時也不太明顯。
原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/arts/ ... 5ster.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/14/arts/buck.php
2008-06-24/聯合報/G6版/UNITED DAILY NEWS 王先棠 原文請見6月24日紐時周報七版右上
<img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3006/265 ... 2fff_o.jpg" align="right">右圖：1949年，Buckminster Fuller 與他的工作模型
轉貼自 NYTimes
Fixing Earth One Dome at a Time
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: July 4, 2008
Cold war culture has been back in style for a while now, at least in architecture circles. The clarity of its Manichaean worldview, in which everyone seemed to know who the bad guys were, is a comforting refuge from our current ideological confusion. And the era’s brooding architectural monuments look pretty good compared with the Disney-inspired visual noise that has invaded so many American cities.
So “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe,” a timely new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is likely to stir waves of nostalgia. For people of my generation, who spent much of their childhoods clambering over jungle gyms inspired by Fuller’s geodesic domes, his architecture embodies the values of an era when it was still possible to believe that society was gliding steadily toward a better future. If parents sometimes drank too much, got divorced and neglected their children, these were only potholes on the superhighway to utopia.
But Fuller, of course, was more than that. His deep conviction was that environmentally sensitive, technologically innovative design could save the world. One of this show’s strengths is that it allows us to recognize how that vision was shaped by cold war militarism as well as personal idealism. It offers a poignant contrast to the ethos of our era, when the technology of war borders on a science-fiction fantasy, yet we no longer seem able to put it to other, constructive uses.
A descendant of outspoken New England intellectuals and ministers, Fuller was a quintessential American mix of hard-bitten pragmatism and dewy-eyed optimism. His mind was first opened to the potential of America’s technological might during the First World War, when he served as a radio operator, and he never lost faith that wartime technology could be retooled to create a peacetime nirvana.
The Whitney show opens with a series of sweet little sketches from Fuller’s “4D Lightful Towers” of the late 1920s, his earliest vision for a housing prototype. A series of lightweight structures, with floors supported by slender masts, were staffed by airplane maintenance crews and could be transported around the world by zeppelins, an expression of global mobility easily embraced today.
Within a few years that vision had evolved into the Dymaxion House, one of his most mesmerizing creations. A six-sided shelter suspended from a central steel mast, it was in some ways less radical than that earlier design. Depicted here in a gorgeously moody painting by his wife, Anne Hewlett Fuller, it is a futuristic vision of suburbia: a one-story suburban dwelling floating above a trim yard, with a woman reclining on a lawn chair in the foreground. The rooms are arranged around the mast, which houses the entry staircase and all the house’s mechanical systems. (One failure of the show’s catalog is that it never fully explains Mrs. Fuller’s role in her husband’s work; despite her drawings and paintings she remains a largely invisible figure.)
Yet the Dymaxion House’s most radical feature was its nomadic quality. Its efficient assembly mirrored that of auto production, and like a car, it had no fixed relationship to its context. Its pieces could be transported by helicopter and lowered onto a construction site. According to Fuller the rest of the house could be put together or disassembled by two workers in a few days.
The project cemented Fuller’s status as an outsider among the great architects of his day. Designed in the same era that yielded such Modernist marvels as Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House, the Dymaxion House’s bizarre hexagonal form was not about creating a radical aesthetic for a new age. It was conceived as a purely technological solution to a fundamental human problem: the need for affordable shelter.
This faith in technology to solve the world’s problems remained a constant in Fuller’s career. Yet the show’s great subtext is the degree to which this vision would remain entangled in ideological battles: as early as 1932 he was rethinking the Dymaxion House to shelter laborers in pre-industrial Siberia in collaboration with architects who were seeking temporary work in the Soviet Union during the Depression.
Twenty or so years later, with the cold war in bloom, Fuller’s client list included the Ford Motor Company, the federal Department of Commerce and the Marine Corps. His dream of adopting military technology to produce low-cost civilian housing took on a more ominous cast. In a catalog image the steel frame of a geodesic dome is suspended by cables from the bottom of a military helicopter. A model reproduced for the show depicts a community of shiny stainless-steel Dymaxion houses strung along a cul-de-sac fronted by lush lawns. The scene suggests the eerie correlation between the endlessly repetitive suburban subdivisions of postwar America and military barracks.
The line between the utopian postwar vision and the anxieties that it masked was always blurred. And like Charles and Ray Eames, Fuller was often enlisted as a propagandist in the ideological battle between East and West. One of his earliest domes was displayed at the 1959 Moscow trade fair, where Richard M. Nixon and Nikita S. Khrushchev debated the technological superiority of capitalism versus communism. And if Fuller’s domes were soon fixtures in neighborhood playgrounds, the American military also saw their potential as transportable shelters in war zones. From here it was a short distance to the backyard bomb shelters testifying to a fear of nuclear annihilation, the flip side of the postwar suburban dream.
Fuller’s fullest expression of a belief in postwar progress was an enormous geodesic dome he designed for the United States Pavilion at the Expo ’67 world’s fair in Montreal. Measuring 250 feet in diameter, its translucent acrylic shell housed an exhibition that included overscale works by artists like James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol. About 50 million people visited the show in just six months, and the dome became an international symbol of America’s enchantment with the future, the architectural equivalent of the Apollo spacecraft.
Fuller’s vision went up in smoke a few years later, when the dome’s acrylic skin was destroyed in a fire, leaving only the steel latticework. By then he had ventured further into fantasy. One of the most striking images of the show depicts a two-mile-wide glass dome that he wanted built over Midtown Manhattan to create an energy-efficient, Edenlike environment. In another proposal a floating community would live in tetrahedral structures moored off the coasts of overpopulated cities. Because no one would have to pay for land, he argued, this dense offshore network of housing, shops, schools and parks would be affordable to the average worker.
No one bought into the idea, but the innocent optimism of these schemes remains striking today. Although the cold war is long over, the world seems more dangerous than ever. America’s once-proud infrastructure of roadways and bridges is crumbling, and we no longer seem able to muster confidence that our children will live in a better world. Architects expend most of their creative energy on luxury apartments. Or on colossuses in China. Fuller’s brand of idealism seems more distant than ever.
轉貼自 NYTimes
Fixing Earth One Dome at a Time
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: July 4, 2008
Cold war culture has been back in style for a while now, at least in architecture circles. The clarity of its Manichaean worldview, in which everyone seemed to know who the bad guys were, is a comforting refuge from our current ideological confusion. And the era’s brooding architectural monuments look pretty good compared with the Disney-inspired visual noise that has invaded so many American cities.
So “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe,” a timely new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is likely to stir waves of nostalgia. For people of my generation, who spent much of their childhoods clambering over jungle gyms inspired by Fuller’s geodesic domes, his architecture embodies the values of an era when it was still possible to believe that society was gliding steadily toward a better future. If parents sometimes drank too much, got divorced and neglected their children, these were only potholes on the superhighway to utopia.
But Fuller, of course, was more than that. His deep conviction was that environmentally sensitive, technologically innovative design could save the world. One of this show’s strengths is that it allows us to recognize how that vision was shaped by cold war militarism as well as personal idealism. It offers a poignant contrast to the ethos of our era, when the technology of war borders on a science-fiction fantasy, yet we no longer seem able to put it to other, constructive uses.
A descendant of outspoken New England intellectuals and ministers, Fuller was a quintessential American mix of hard-bitten pragmatism and dewy-eyed optimism. His mind was first opened to the potential of America’s technological might during the First World War, when he served as a radio operator, and he never lost faith that wartime technology could be retooled to create a peacetime nirvana.
The Whitney show opens with a series of sweet little sketches from Fuller’s “4D Lightful Towers” of the late 1920s, his earliest vision for a housing prototype. A series of lightweight structures, with floors supported by slender masts, were staffed by airplane maintenance crews and could be transported around the world by zeppelins, an expression of global mobility easily embraced today.
Within a few years that vision had evolved into the Dymaxion House, one of his most mesmerizing creations. A six-sided shelter suspended from a central steel mast, it was in some ways less radical than that earlier design. Depicted here in a gorgeously moody painting by his wife, Anne Hewlett Fuller, it is a futuristic vision of suburbia: a one-story suburban dwelling floating above a trim yard, with a woman reclining on a lawn chair in the foreground. The rooms are arranged around the mast, which houses the entry staircase and all the house’s mechanical systems. (One failure of the show’s catalog is that it never fully explains Mrs. Fuller’s role in her husband’s work; despite her drawings and paintings she remains a largely invisible figure.)
Yet the Dymaxion House’s most radical feature was its nomadic quality. Its efficient assembly mirrored that of auto production, and like a car, it had no fixed relationship to its context. Its pieces could be transported by helicopter and lowered onto a construction site. According to Fuller the rest of the house could be put together or disassembled by two workers in a few days.
The project cemented Fuller’s status as an outsider among the great architects of his day. Designed in the same era that yielded such Modernist marvels as Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House, the Dymaxion House’s bizarre hexagonal form was not about creating a radical aesthetic for a new age. It was conceived as a purely technological solution to a fundamental human problem: the need for affordable shelter.
This faith in technology to solve the world’s problems remained a constant in Fuller’s career. Yet the show’s great subtext is the degree to which this vision would remain entangled in ideological battles: as early as 1932 he was rethinking the Dymaxion House to shelter laborers in pre-industrial Siberia in collaboration with architects who were seeking temporary work in the Soviet Union during the Depression.
Twenty or so years later, with the cold war in bloom, Fuller’s client list included the Ford Motor Company, the federal Department of Commerce and the Marine Corps. His dream of adopting military technology to produce low-cost civilian housing took on a more ominous cast. In a catalog image the steel frame of a geodesic dome is suspended by cables from the bottom of a military helicopter. A model reproduced for the show depicts a community of shiny stainless-steel Dymaxion houses strung along a cul-de-sac fronted by lush lawns. The scene suggests the eerie correlation between the endlessly repetitive suburban subdivisions of postwar America and military barracks.
The line between the utopian postwar vision and the anxieties that it masked was always blurred. And like Charles and Ray Eames, Fuller was often enlisted as a propagandist in the ideological battle between East and West. One of his earliest domes was displayed at the 1959 Moscow trade fair, where Richard M. Nixon and Nikita S. Khrushchev debated the technological superiority of capitalism versus communism. And if Fuller’s domes were soon fixtures in neighborhood playgrounds, the American military also saw their potential as transportable shelters in war zones. From here it was a short distance to the backyard bomb shelters testifying to a fear of nuclear annihilation, the flip side of the postwar suburban dream.
Fuller’s fullest expression of a belief in postwar progress was an enormous geodesic dome he designed for the United States Pavilion at the Expo ’67 world’s fair in Montreal. Measuring 250 feet in diameter, its translucent acrylic shell housed an exhibition that included overscale works by artists like James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol. About 50 million people visited the show in just six months, and the dome became an international symbol of America’s enchantment with the future, the architectural equivalent of the Apollo spacecraft.
Fuller’s vision went up in smoke a few years later, when the dome’s acrylic skin was destroyed in a fire, leaving only the steel latticework. By then he had ventured further into fantasy. One of the most striking images of the show depicts a two-mile-wide glass dome that he wanted built over Midtown Manhattan to create an energy-efficient, Edenlike environment. In another proposal a floating community would live in tetrahedral structures moored off the coasts of overpopulated cities. Because no one would have to pay for land, he argued, this dense offshore network of housing, shops, schools and parks would be affordable to the average worker.
No one bought into the idea, but the innocent optimism of these schemes remains striking today. Although the cold war is long over, the world seems more dangerous than ever. America’s once-proud infrastructure of roadways and bridges is crumbling, and we no longer seem able to muster confidence that our children will live in a better world. Architects expend most of their creative energy on luxury apartments. Or on colossuses in China. Fuller’s brand of idealism seems more distant than ever.
A model of Fuller’s 1946 vision for Dymaxion Dwelling Machines.
The Dymaxion House, a six-sided shelter suspended from a central steel mast, is one of his most mesmerizing creations. It was conceived as a purely technological solution to a fundamental human problem, the need for affordable shelter. But a community of Dymaxion houses clad in shiny stainless steel skins and laid out along a suburban cul de sac suggests the eerie correlation between the endlessly repetitive suburban subdivisions of postwar America and a military barracks.
Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times
Fuller’s illustration of the interior of a utility unit.
In fact, the line between the utopian postwar vision and the anxieties that it masked was always blurred. Fuller was often enlisted as a propagandist in the ideological battle between East and West. The American military saw his domes’ potential as transportable shelters in war zones. From here, it was a short distance to the backyard bomb shelters testifying to a fear of nuclear annihilation, the flip side of the postwar suburban dream.
Fuller’s fullest expression of a belief in postwar progress was an enormous geodesic dome he designed for United States Pavilion at the Expo ’67 World’s Fair in Montreal. Measuring 250 feet in diameter, its translucent acrylic shell housed an exhibition of American Art. Some 50 million people visited, and it became an international symbol of America’s enchantment with the future.
Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times
In an illustration, Fuller compares his style of housing with the traditional kind. (1928)
The innocent optimism of some of Fuller’s schemes is striking today. The cold war is long over, but the world seems more dangerous than ever. And we no longer seem able to muster confidence that our children will live in a better world. Architects expend most of their creative energy on luxury apartment housing. Or on colossuses in China. Fuller’s brand of idealism seems more distant than ever.
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。混沌。建築。
NYTimes 有一篇文章在講 BUCKMINSTER FULLER 的 Dymaxion car，也是會在此次 Whitney Museum of American Art 展覽見到。
::Dymaxion car 影片::
A 3-Wheel Dream That Died at Takeoff
New Yorkers will get a chance to see the Dymaxion car in an exhibition opening June 26 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
By PHIL PATTON
Published: June 15, 2008
BUCKMINSTER FULLER’s 1933 Dymaxion, a streamlined pod on three wheels, is one of the lovable oddballs in automotive history. Three were built, fawned over by the media and by celebrities, but the car pretty much disappeared after one crashed, killing the driver.
Only one of the cars survives, and New Yorkers will get a chance to see it this summer in an exhibition opening June 26 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York called “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe.” The car, a nonrunning shell, has been lent by the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nev.
“The Dymaxion was the zenith of the first wave of semi-scientific streamlining,” said Russell Flinchum, a design historian. It showed up in newsreels and magazines, along with teardrop designs drawn by Norman Bel Geddes, the futurist. It helped lead to public acceptance of streamlined cars like the 1936 Lincoln Zephyr.
The Dymaxion appealed to the era of the Depression, when people dreamed of radical new technological solutions to solve overwhelming problems.
“There is a real fascination about Fuller,” said K. Michael Hays, adjunct curator of architecture at the Whitney and one of the curators of the show. Hugh Kenner, the literary critic, rated Fuller with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot and wrote a book about him.
Fuller was neither architect nor engineer, but a philosopher and preacher, a man more in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. His houses and cars were arguments, not products. He made up the word Dymaxion, combining dynamic, maximum and ion, and used it as a personal brand.
The architectural firm of Norman Foster, the Pritzker Prize winner who once worked with Fuller, is planning to build a replica Dymaxion.
“The Dymaxion car was a thing of great beauty, and it was made at a time when creativity was at the fore in automobile design,” said David Nelson, senior executive head of design at Foster Partners in London, who is directing the re-creation.
Fuller was born in Massachusetts in 1895 and died in 1983. He was admitted to Harvard twice, and twice expelled. He went from job to job until he was broke. After illness killed his young daughter, he had a revelation. He determined to make his life “an experiment to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”
The Dymaxion car was one of the many experiments making up that big experiment, along with his geodesic dome and Dymaxion house.
Fuller sketched the vehicle in 1927 under the name 4D transport, part aircraft, part automobile, with wings that inflated at speed.
In 1932, Fuller asked the sculptor, Isamu Noguchi, who was also a drinking buddy, to prepare sketches. They show a car shaped like an elongated teardrop with a rear third wheel that would lift off the ground and a tail fin that unfolded.
Fuller found an angel to invest in the car. Philip Pearson, a stockbroker who had gotten out of the market just before the 1929 crash, put up enough money to get the project off the ground. Fuller promised the car would have a top speed of more than 120 miles an hour and gas mileage of 30 miles a gallon. He took over the closed Locomobile factory in Bridgeport, Conn., and hired Starling Burgess, a builder of racing yachts, to build the Dymaxion. Fuller opened the plant in March 1933.
Despite Fuller’s talk of borrowing construction methods from the aircraft industry, Burgess built the car using many of the nautical methods applied to a racing boat. The chassis was aircraft-grade steel, but the body was an ash wood frame with aluminum tacked to its sides and a roof of taut, painted canvas. The crude suspension was made up of a Ford beam axle and leaf springs turned sideways. The tail was omitted.
By July, the first car was rolled out to an eager crowd It was sold to Gulf Oil, which showed it off at the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago. But in October, that car turned over, killing its driver, Francis T. Turner, a professional, and injuring two would-be investors.
<img src="http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/6210/450buckyee2.jpg" align="right">右圖：其他跟隨 Dymaxion car 流線型設計的車款，包括 1936 Lincoln Zephyr、Z.car(Zaha Hadid) 、Aptera。
An investigation cleared the Dymaxion of responsibility, but if it was not at fault, it was hardly without faults. Some were small — windshield wiper coverage was inadequate and an awkward periscope replaced a rear-view mirror.
All three wheels turned, making the car Dymaxion terrific for parallel parking, but its V-shaped bottom tended to make it lift off the pavement at speed. Mr. Flinchum said: “Apparently when the vehicle reached approximately 90 m.p.h., its rear wheel lifted from the ground — as it was supposed to in the original auto-airplane conception. Unfortunately, it caused the Dymaxion to skip about erratically.”
“The design ignored ground effects, “ Mr. Flinchum said. The promised top speed of 120 m.p.h. would have been unlikely with the car’s Ford V-8. There are no records showing the highest speed the car ever reached.
Fuller concentrated on the car’s handling. “You couldn’t skid her,” he said. Older cars steered “like wheelbarrows,” he charged.
After the accident, potential investors disappeared. Fuller used an inheritance from his mother to build a third, final car. Fuller, a short man who often wore a white suit, welcomed visitors to the car during the second year of the exposition in Chicago in 1934.
The car drew celebrities. H. G. Wells was photographed in front of the car for the cover of Saturday Review. He talked about using it in the film version of his novel “The Shape of Things to Come.” (The film appeared in 1936, but without the Dymaxion.) Diego Rivera, the artist, showed up to take a look. Leopold Stokowski , the conductor, bought a Dymaxion and it ended up promoting war bond sales in Brooklyn. The first car, repaired after the crash, was destroyed in a fire in a Washington storage garage. The car in the Whitney show, the second car built, may have been used as a chicken coop before being restored.
As with many of Fuller’s ideas and inventions, Mr. Hays said, the Dymaxion car has appeal to a generation seeking radical breakthroughs to save energy and materials. The spirit of the Dymaxion lives on in such eye-grabbing, aero-inspired three-wheelers of dubious practicality as the electric Aptera, with its body like a Cessna, or the architect Zaha Hadid’s blobby Z.car.
Fuller said the Dymaxion was not even really a car.
“I knew everyone would call it a car,” he told Kenner in the 1960s, but really it was “the land-taxiing phase of a wingless, twin orientable jet stilts flying device.” The jets he wanted had not been invented in 1933, he said, so he simply used a Ford V-8 instead. Such compromises rarely bothered Fuller, who always saw the Dymaxion, as he saw much of the world, as a kind of provisional prototype, a mere sketch, of the glorious, eventual future.
::Dymaxion car 影片::
A 3-Wheel Dream That Died at Takeoff
New Yorkers will get a chance to see the Dymaxion car in an exhibition opening June 26 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
By PHIL PATTON
Published: June 15, 2008
BUCKMINSTER FULLER’s 1933 Dymaxion, a streamlined pod on three wheels, is one of the lovable oddballs in automotive history. Three were built, fawned over by the media and by celebrities, but the car pretty much disappeared after one crashed, killing the driver.
Only one of the cars survives, and New Yorkers will get a chance to see it this summer in an exhibition opening June 26 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York called “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe.” The car, a nonrunning shell, has been lent by the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nev.
“The Dymaxion was the zenith of the first wave of semi-scientific streamlining,” said Russell Flinchum, a design historian. It showed up in newsreels and magazines, along with teardrop designs drawn by Norman Bel Geddes, the futurist. It helped lead to public acceptance of streamlined cars like the 1936 Lincoln Zephyr.
The Dymaxion appealed to the era of the Depression, when people dreamed of radical new technological solutions to solve overwhelming problems.
“There is a real fascination about Fuller,” said K. Michael Hays, adjunct curator of architecture at the Whitney and one of the curators of the show. Hugh Kenner, the literary critic, rated Fuller with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot and wrote a book about him.
Fuller was neither architect nor engineer, but a philosopher and preacher, a man more in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. His houses and cars were arguments, not products. He made up the word Dymaxion, combining dynamic, maximum and ion, and used it as a personal brand.
The architectural firm of Norman Foster, the Pritzker Prize winner who once worked with Fuller, is planning to build a replica Dymaxion.
“The Dymaxion car was a thing of great beauty, and it was made at a time when creativity was at the fore in automobile design,” said David Nelson, senior executive head of design at Foster Partners in London, who is directing the re-creation.
Fuller was born in Massachusetts in 1895 and died in 1983. He was admitted to Harvard twice, and twice expelled. He went from job to job until he was broke. After illness killed his young daughter, he had a revelation. He determined to make his life “an experiment to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”
The Dymaxion car was one of the many experiments making up that big experiment, along with his geodesic dome and Dymaxion house.
Fuller sketched the vehicle in 1927 under the name 4D transport, part aircraft, part automobile, with wings that inflated at speed.
In 1932, Fuller asked the sculptor, Isamu Noguchi, who was also a drinking buddy, to prepare sketches. They show a car shaped like an elongated teardrop with a rear third wheel that would lift off the ground and a tail fin that unfolded.
Fuller found an angel to invest in the car. Philip Pearson, a stockbroker who had gotten out of the market just before the 1929 crash, put up enough money to get the project off the ground. Fuller promised the car would have a top speed of more than 120 miles an hour and gas mileage of 30 miles a gallon. He took over the closed Locomobile factory in Bridgeport, Conn., and hired Starling Burgess, a builder of racing yachts, to build the Dymaxion. Fuller opened the plant in March 1933.
Despite Fuller’s talk of borrowing construction methods from the aircraft industry, Burgess built the car using many of the nautical methods applied to a racing boat. The chassis was aircraft-grade steel, but the body was an ash wood frame with aluminum tacked to its sides and a roof of taut, painted canvas. The crude suspension was made up of a Ford beam axle and leaf springs turned sideways. The tail was omitted.
By July, the first car was rolled out to an eager crowd It was sold to Gulf Oil, which showed it off at the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago. But in October, that car turned over, killing its driver, Francis T. Turner, a professional, and injuring two would-be investors.
<img src="http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/6210/450buckyee2.jpg" align="right">右圖：其他跟隨 Dymaxion car 流線型設計的車款，包括 1936 Lincoln Zephyr、Z.car(Zaha Hadid) 、Aptera。
An investigation cleared the Dymaxion of responsibility, but if it was not at fault, it was hardly without faults. Some were small — windshield wiper coverage was inadequate and an awkward periscope replaced a rear-view mirror.
All three wheels turned, making the car Dymaxion terrific for parallel parking, but its V-shaped bottom tended to make it lift off the pavement at speed. Mr. Flinchum said: “Apparently when the vehicle reached approximately 90 m.p.h., its rear wheel lifted from the ground — as it was supposed to in the original auto-airplane conception. Unfortunately, it caused the Dymaxion to skip about erratically.”
“The design ignored ground effects, “ Mr. Flinchum said. The promised top speed of 120 m.p.h. would have been unlikely with the car’s Ford V-8. There are no records showing the highest speed the car ever reached.
Fuller concentrated on the car’s handling. “You couldn’t skid her,” he said. Older cars steered “like wheelbarrows,” he charged.
After the accident, potential investors disappeared. Fuller used an inheritance from his mother to build a third, final car. Fuller, a short man who often wore a white suit, welcomed visitors to the car during the second year of the exposition in Chicago in 1934.
The car drew celebrities. H. G. Wells was photographed in front of the car for the cover of Saturday Review. He talked about using it in the film version of his novel “The Shape of Things to Come.” (The film appeared in 1936, but without the Dymaxion.) Diego Rivera, the artist, showed up to take a look. Leopold Stokowski , the conductor, bought a Dymaxion and it ended up promoting war bond sales in Brooklyn. The first car, repaired after the crash, was destroyed in a fire in a Washington storage garage. The car in the Whitney show, the second car built, may have been used as a chicken coop before being restored.
As with many of Fuller’s ideas and inventions, Mr. Hays said, the Dymaxion car has appeal to a generation seeking radical breakthroughs to save energy and materials. The spirit of the Dymaxion lives on in such eye-grabbing, aero-inspired three-wheelers of dubious practicality as the electric Aptera, with its body like a Cessna, or the architect Zaha Hadid’s blobby Z.car.
Fuller said the Dymaxion was not even really a car.
“I knew everyone would call it a car,” he told Kenner in the 1960s, but really it was “the land-taxiing phase of a wingless, twin orientable jet stilts flying device.” The jets he wanted had not been invented in 1933, he said, so he simply used a Ford V-8 instead. Such compromises rarely bothered Fuller, who always saw the Dymaxion, as he saw much of the world, as a kind of provisional prototype, a mere sketch, of the glorious, eventual future.