You Belong to the Universe by Keats Jonathon;

Author:Keats, Jonathon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2016-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

IV A Geopolitical Planetarium

THE DYMAXION WAS more than a map. Those great circles that Fuller inscribed on his globe also suggested a new approach to the problem underlying his cartographic interest: portable shelter. A great circle is also called a geodesic, and just as different networks of geodesics correspond to different polygons, they have different physical properties when fabricated as stand-alone structures. Some are collapsible, such as the cuboctahedron. Others are incredibly strong, especially the icosahedron, which became the structural framework for the geodesic dome.13

Fuller’s domes embodied everything he valued in architecture, from minimal use of materials to easy air delivery—not to mention a touch of Platonic mysticism. But even as they evolved into trade pavilions and hippie housing, their cartographic origin continued to influence how Fuller thought of them. A dome was the planet in microcosm. Looking out from within, your view was global, and beyond the geodesic shell was “your private sky,” as he observed in the margin of a 1948 drawing. Much as the Dymaxion map put the world on your table, the geodesic dome made the entire cosmos personal.

Four years later, while teaching at Cornell University’s School of Architecture, Fuller enlisted some students to raise a private sky in Ithaca. Their materials were wooden slats and brass mesh. Bent into hoops, the slats were arranged as icosahedral geodesics, making an openwork sphere twenty feet in diameter. The mesh was then cut into the shape of continents and attached to the surface, matching their icosahedral position on the Dymaxion map. The students oriented the sphere on an enormous tripod so that the location of Cornell was precisely at the top of the world, and built an observation platform inside their miniature Earth with a chin rest at the center.

It was Fuller’s first geoscope. Standing within, students were able to experience the world spinning by observing the changing position of constellations relative to the continents. And the view was astronomically accurate: The star seen through any given space in the continental mesh was the star in zenith over the corresponding location on Earth. Essentially it was an outdoor planetarium.14

This planetarium could support additional layers of information. Transparent plastic “data planes” could be added to the outer surface, marked to indicate the location of minerals within the Earth’s crust or wind patterns above. In a larger version, the data could be animated by lining the interior and exterior surfaces with miniature colored light bulbs. The computerized display would not be limited to geophysical conditions, but could also show population growth, energy use, or military action. The geoscope could compress activity too vast for people to see, and also too gradual, such as plate tectonics and hominid migration. “There are many motion patterns … that cannot be seen or comprehended by the human eye and brain relay and are therefore inadequately comprehended and dealt with by the human mind,” Fuller said in an oracular 1961 lecture at Southern Illinois University. The geoscope “will make possible communication of phenomena that are not at present communicable to man’s conceptual understanding.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.