Buckminster fuller

Buckminster fuller was an American who specialised in architecture, was also an engineer. He was born on July 12, 1895 but sadly died on July 1, 1983. He is widely known for the development of the geodesic dome. 

Buckminster did a couple of jobs before he was known as a an architect, such as working as a mechanic in a textile mill, as a labourer in the meat-packing industry and most importantly he served in the U.S Navy in WW1 as an editor of a publication, as a radio operator, and as a crash rescue boat commander. 

Buckminster won various awards such as the Frank P. Brown Medal from The Franklin Institute, The Gold Medal award from the AIA and was also awarded 28 United States patents and many honorary doctorates.

Examples of Buckminster's works:






Although Buckminster was a revolutionary architect, his greatest and most influential work till today is the geodesic dome. The geodesic dome is said to be "a frame of total strength of which increases in logarithmic ratio to its size". A geodesic dome is a " spherical or hemispherical thin-shell structure (lattice-shell) based on a network of geodesics (great circles) on the surface of a sphere or a hemisphere. The geodesics intersect to form triangular elements, which have local, triangular rigidity, and so distribute the structural stress throughout the geodesic sphere". Interestingly within my research I found out that although Buckminster is praised highly for the invention of the structure, the idea of the geodesic dome was around and invented by a man called Dr. Walther Bauersfeld and this was about 20 years before. 

Personally, I really like Buckminster's  geodesic dome due to the fact that the structure makes sense, the collection of triangles really gives it a sturdy appearance and also seems like it could withstand any weather or disaster such as a tsunami if the structure was placed in a fixed position within the ground, this could also mean that the spherical structure could carry on underground as well. 

I plan on implementing this structure into my final idea because I think that the structure is quite ingenious and I quite like the design and the idea of a dome like structure because it has a futuristic element about it.