Dymaxion

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Dymaxion is a term that the architect Richard Buckminster Fuller used for some of his inventions and can therefore be considered a trademark.

term

The word is an abbreviation of " dy namic max imum tens ion " (English for: dynamic maximum voltage ). However, other sources claim that it stands for dynamic, maximum, and ion.

Advertising expert Waldo Warren coined this term for Fuller around 1928 when he needed a brand name for his first architectural project, the Dymaxion House. Warren spent two days listening to Fuller to get a feel for his language. Then he played with the syllables from typical Fuller words and finally came up with the word "Dymaxion"

Fuller was very fond of the new word and used it for many of his inventions, such as the Dymaxion house, the Dymaxion car, and the Dymaxion world map.

Examples

Dymaxion house

Dymaxion House in the Henry Ford Museum

The Dymaxion House looks like a flying saucer, and was made a house dismantled to pack and take with you when the family moved. It had a circular shape because Fuller viewed circular buildings as particularly economical. The 97 square meter house with furniture weighed no more than 2,227 kilograms with a diameter of 15 meters and a height of 12 meters. Fuller designed the prototype as early as 1927, but the house was only produced after the Second World War, when an aluminum alloy developed for aircraft made the construction possible in the first place.

In total, only two prototypes were built. Fuller found no financial backers for mass production. The Dymaxion House was also said to be leaking and cold.

This house later became known as the 4-D house and stood for Fuller's basic principle of achieving the greatest benefit by using the least amount of energy and materials.

Entrepreneur William L. Graham bought both prototypes and lived in one of them in Wichita, Kansas from 1946 to 1972 . In 1992, Graham donated the prototypes to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn , Michigan.

Dymaxion world map

Unfolding of a Dymaxion world map on an icosahedron

The Dymaxion world map is the projection of a world map onto a polyhedron , the surface of which can be represented as a two-dimensional map in different ways by unfolding its mesh . Fuller worked on this project, which he first since 1927. The One-Town World   called, his projection method was in 1946 patented and published in 1954 under the title The Airocean World Map (English for air ocean world map ), where he was a used a slightly modified icosahedron as the basis of the projection.

Unlike other projection methods, the Dymaxion world map is only intended for depicting the entire globe . Fuller claimed several advantages of his world map:

Two similar projections on polyhedra that address some of the disadvantages of the Dymaxion map are the Waterman world map and the Cahill-Keyes world map .

Dymaxion car

The Dymaxion car was designed by Fuller in 1933. The place of manufacture was Bridgeport , Connecticut . At that time it had an unusually low consumption of 7.8 liters per 100 kilometers - for the USA -, could transport eleven passengers and reached a top speed of 193 km / h.

Dymaxion car, 1933

The Dymaxion car rode on three wheels and was controlled by the single rear wheel. This allowed it to turn on its own length. An accident at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 severely damaged the car, killing the driver and seriously injuring several occupants. The cause of the accident was never established, Fuller claims that the accident was caused by another car that was too close to the Dymaxion car. However, it resulted in potential investors withdrawing.

Of the three prototypes, only one remains, which can be seen today in the National Automobile Museum in Reno , Nevada, USA .

The three-wheeled folding car ( Zaschka-Threewheeler ) produced by German chief engineer Engelbert Zaschka in 1929 comprised functions and properties that were important for Fuller and the development of his Dymaxion car.

In 2010, the British architect Norman Foster presented a Dymaxion car in Madrid , which was modeled on Richard Buckminster Fuller.

Dymaxion Chronofile

1927, at the age of 32 years, was Fuller bankrupt and without a job, and after the death of his first child on the verge of suicide to commit. He decided to see the rest of his life as an experiment and wanted to find out what a person could do to change the world in a positive way. He began meticulously documenting his life in a diary that he kept for the next half century and called "Dymaxion Chronofile".

In it he recorded his daily routine every 15 minutes from 1915 to 1983. The notes contain his full correspondence, invoices, notes, sketches and newspaper clippings. The entire collection is estimated at 80 feet of paper and has been in the Stanford University Library since 1999 .

Geodesic domes

Biosphère Environment Museum

After working in various industries, Fuller began working as an architect. Since the late 1920s he dealt with the construction of geodesic domes , which he also marketed as Dymaxion .

His most famous building is the US pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal . Made of steel and acrylic , it was 76 meters in diameter and 62 meters high. The temperatures inside the sphere were regulated by a complex system of diaphragms. Inside the geodesic sphere was a 37-meter-long escalator ; the tallest ever built.

During renovation work in May 1976, the building caught fire. The entire acrylic shell burned away while the steel framework remained.

In 1992 the Canadian government and the city of Montreal decided to restore the structure of the dome and to build the Biosphère Environment Museum inside .

Sleep rhythm

Buckminster Fuller developed a wake-sleep rhythm that should allow him to stay awake for the maximum amount of time. This should consist of 30 minutes of sleep every 6 hours (i.e. 2 hours out of 24 hours). He is said to have maintained this rhythm for two years.

literature

  • R. Buckminster Fuller: Artifacts of R. Buckminster Fuller - A Comprehensive Collection of His Designs and Drawings: The Dymaxion Experiment, 1926-1943: A Comprehensive Collection of His Designs and Drawings: 001 . Garland Publishing, 1995, ISBN 0-824050827 .
  • Robert W. Marks: Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller . Doubleday, 1973, ISBN 0-385018045 .
  • Sydney LeBlanc: Modern Architecture in America. A guide to the buildings of the 20th century . Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998, ISBN 3-421-031-36-3 .
  • Leigh White: Buck Fuller and the Dymaxion World. in: The Saturday Evening Post (October 14, 1944), quoted in: Joachim Krausse & Claude Lichtenstein (eds.): Your Private Sky , Lars Müller Verlag, Baden / Switzerland, 1999, ISBN 3-907044-88-6 , p 132.
  • Elena Ochoa Foster (Ed.): Dymaxion Car, Ivory Press 2011, ISBN 978-0-9564339-3-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Dymaxion-Auto ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the National Automobile Museum @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.automuseum.org
  2. ↑ The Fuller Projection Map on the Buckminster Fuller Institute website
  3. ↑ Beverly Rae Kimes, Henry Austin Clark Jr .: Standard catalog of American Cars. 1805-1942. Digital edition . 3. Edition. Krause Publications, Iola 2013, ISBN 978-1-4402-3778-2 , pp. 510 (English).
  4. ↑ See Synergetics Stew January 2009. In: synchronofile.com , January 2, 2010, accessed March 13, 2011.
  5. ↑ See The Buckminster Fuller Institute: Synergetic Stew: Explorations In Dymaxion Dining. Philadelphia 1982, ISBN 0911573003 .
  6. ↑ See Jan Baedeker: Norman Foster resurrects Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion . In: classicdriver.com , October 29, 2010, accessed November 3, 2010.
  7. ↑ [1]