Resources For ‘Livingry’ Instead Of ‘Weaponry’

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30399, 25 March 1964, Page 7

Resources For ‘Livingry’ Instead Of ‘Weaponry’

It seemed like a glimpse of the future to hear Professor R. Buckminster Fuller tell it—feather-weight buildings spanning areas the size of huge football stadiums, dome-shaped buildings made of paper, massive structures erected by unskilled labour in a few hours. But the future is today to Professor Fuller. Everything he described tp a public meeting in Christchurch sounded fantastic but he had figures and pictures to prove that all were solid, practical facts.

Introduced as “a genius” by Professor H. J. Hopkins, Canterbury University’s professor of civil engineering, Professor Fuller described to his audience not only his almost magical geodesic dome structures, but also the considerations which ted him to experiment in the application of modern technology to domestic living.

Professor Fuller, who Is a research professor of architecture at the University of Southern Illinois, said he had invented “livingry” in contradistinction to “weaponry." He wanted to take the total knowledge of mankind to date and apply it to making man a success on earth, just as man’s knowledge had been applied so intensively in weaponry.

When he was in the Navy in World War I he found himself in strange intimacy with technological events, and became deeply imbued with the concept of performance per pound weight. After the war he entered the building field and decided that the world of building was really a most ignorant technical activity contrasted with the other scientific things going on.

Then there was no scientist working on the ecology of man to see how best he could live. Now that was being done for the space programme, seven billion dollars being spent in the East and West to make the most scientific house in history. “All of this hit me very hard in 1927,” said Professor Fuller. “I was sure that everything in the domestic scene was anti-priority, while weapons were priority.” He said people became so psychologically involved with housing that it was difficult to be critical about it. Ship Design

In designing a ship the ratio of performance per pound for item after item was the basis of design; designers were always trying to do more with less, and ships were built on the assumption that they must sustain seaquake, flood, avalanche, and hurricane every day. This was even more critical in the design of aircraft, whose development had cost “two and a half trillion dollars” in the last 50 years. But this way of things was not operative in the domestic field at all. -

Salaries When the Canterbury University Council made a brief reference to salaries In relation to staffing, the Vice-Chan-cellor (Dr. L. L. Pownall) said he had received an interesting letter froom a foreign ambassador in Wellington. He said that a young man had sought his advice about a lectureship offered in New Zealand. As the salary offered did not exceed that of his own chauffeur, cook, or gardener, the ambassador said, he had to advise the young man not to accept.

A new American soft drink vending machine gives refunds on empties. It rejects broken or non-returnable bottles after inspection.

To prove his point Professor Fuller asked his audience —half of whom signified that they were architects or engineers—the weight of the building where they were. No-one could answer, as Professor Fuller expected. “So you see,” he said, “that those two worlds are quite different. You don’t know the performance characteristics of houses. You just hope the flood won’t come.”

Since the war producers had successfully used some of their war capabilities for domestic production—particularly in heating and refrigeration—and the mechanical inclusion of houses was going up all the time. “So I felt it could be that Malthus was wrong and we could be upping the performance per pound so much that we were making everything available to everyone. I saw that the day could come when the total advantaging of all could do away with the Malthusian concept. “Just an Explorer”

“I decided to engage the rest of my life in exploring that proposition. I’m just an explorer—l don’t profess capability.” To further this exploration Professor Fuller devised his own projection of the earth’s surface so that the world could be seen without distortion as one world island and one world ocean. It showed, he said, that the thermal effect of the Northern Hemisphere was predominant in the affairs of men. Ninetynine per cent of humanity was in the north thermal zone.

New Zealand on Fuller’s Projection was very remote—right in the bottom corner. “So there are extraordinary advantages,” he said. “I always say when I look at my map that New Zealand has enormous perspective. You are very close to the South Pole and that could be one of the controlling factors of your coming history. It is very important.” Early Inventions Professor Fuller showed his audience pictures of his earlier inventions—a 10-deck “wire-wheel” building which could be delivered long distances by air to isolated spots, a three-wheeled car which could smartly about-turn at' 15 miles an hour and was highly manoeuvrable. Finally, he described his geodesic domes—an invention which he said emerged only by emergency. The United States Government had come to him as a last resort when it needed a structure with the geodesic dome’s attributes.

By using advanced tooling methods his domes had been cut down to half the weight they would be if constructed by the best craft methods.

They were so easily assembled that Eskimos had been able to put one up in 14 hours to cover radar equipment in the Distant Early Warning System. Skilled labour working on the same dome for a museum in New York had taken one month. Domes up to 140 ft in diameter had been carried by helicopter at 60 miles an hour and in the next decade it would be possible to deliver a dome to cover 14 acres in one air-drop. Afghans who assembled one of his domes for a fair building to house American exhibits in Afghanistan were so pleased with their own work that they decided geodesic domes were Afghan architecture. The same dome had since been seen in New Delhi, Madras, Burma, the Philippines, Peru, Chile, Paris and Algiers. Reception Pavilion One of his domes was the main reception pavilion at the New York World Fair, another with a diameter of 384 ft at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, encased a football stadium. Khrushchev had invited him to Russia to talk with Russian engineers and they were now planning geodesic domes to enclose compete cities in the Arctic. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see them in the Antarctic,” said Professor Fuller. He lives in one himself—a 39ft diameter dome made of plywood. One of his next projects was the development of a dome that could be thrown over a whole house and garden. “Then you throw away your house and drive your car in,” he predicted. “You have distance instead of partitions for privacy in my Garden of Eden. It is so big that you can’t hear each other and you can’t smell each other—its a great attraction in that direction.”

After 12 years of developing. his geodesic domes, Professor Fuller can now point to more than 3000 of them in use in 50 countries. “Experience shows,” he said, “that I am able to control a given volume for a given weight for given requirements. That is using 1 per cent of the weight otherwise needed for an enclosed cubic foot. “All the metals that are mined in the world are serving only about 40 per cent of humanity. So to make it work for everybody we’ve got to make it do more per pound. I am very confident that a design revolution could be undertaken by the profession, led by architects within the universities, whose students already feel that the world should be made to work—that is Why they are discontented and take to political activity. "Unfortunately engineering, architecture and science are still only slave professions. They are slaves to big government and to weaponry. They are not free to take the initiative—except as a profession, just like the medical profession when it decided that the client didn’t really know what was the matter with him."