Sales-model of a Fuller geodesic home

This Buckminster Fuller geodesic home model (auctioned off by Wright for $7,500) was a portable model employed by salesmen who went around trying to sell people on the idea of having one built for themselves.

Geodesic Home model (via Core77)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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dculberson

I just can’t picture looking at this model and thinking, “yeah, that looks beautiful!” It’s neat and all, but just to visit. Not to own and live in.
Zhenia

The home looks pretty nice to me. But anyway I think it would be great for camping not for living.
EMJ

Never did get domes – waste of materials, impossible to put in good windows, furnish and weather seal, difficult to build and ugly.
In hideous blue/white plastic – double ugh!
- Anonymous
  
  I agree. As an engineer and mathematician, I’ve always struggled with the claim that geodesic domes are efficient. It’s true, a sphere encloses the most volume with the smallest surface. Dedesic domes are a good approximation of a sphere. But if you want to put stuff, like people, furniture, equipment, and so on, they become very inefficient.
  
  Take a geodesic home. Walk towards the outer wall. Bumped your head yet? Your feet still have room that is unused. Why not make that a vertical wall and save material.
  
  Take a geodesic warehouse. You cannot fill it completely with boxes. There will always be unfilled spaces. Use shelving and any systematic storage, and the waste becomes worse.
  
  Take a dome covering a city. If it’s taller than any structure inside, you’ve wasted space.
  
  And so on.
  
  But they sure are cool looking and a fun engineering gadget.
- Anonymous
  
  can someone explain any advantages of these domes?
  
  I agree with EMJ , they’re waste of materials, impossible to put in good windows, furnish and weather seal, difficult to build and ugly.
  
  are these structures meant to be underground?
rosyatrandom

Is this some kind of joke? It’s got to be at least… three times as big.
Anonymous

One thing geodesic domes are horrible at, is mimicking a traditional built house. So in the 60s when people were building geodesic domes out of wood, and other standard building materials, the buildings leaked a lot because a dome is 100% roof, so one side is cooked in the morning, and the other is cooked in the afternoon. Sound was an issue as you could hear everything inside. Any failure of domes has been because people want a dome, so they try and use standard materials, and fail miserably. Domes need to be able to flex. The “Eden project” in north England is an example of a non-leaking dome.

Domes are built using a different form of math than a standard house. Domes use the same math nature uses (energetic geometry). They are tension/compression structures like a mast on a sail boat with its stay wires.

What does need to be thrown out is how we look at shelter, and what “home” means. If you liked the movie The Matrix, learning about energetic geometry, the math nature used to build you, is like taking the pill that turns your life on its head.

Euclidean geometry which is what we use to build everything, nature never uses…ever. in the know universe science has not located as yet any evidence of a straight line, a flat plane, or a singularity.

Energetic Geometry uses angle, frequency, and duration to build you me and everything else.

Check out a 10,000sq ft dome home design 3 people could build in 3 weeks with no tools.

http://leifthor.wordpress.com/design/new-home-project/
nixiebunny

That’s one snazzy typewriter!

As for the dome, it’s even smaller than the one I grew up in, and that one was a tiny 26 feet in diameter. I couldn’t see anyone buying one of these things, at least of this size. We built ours by hand.
Anonymous

It’s in a typewriter case! Ha!
mpb

Remington Rand case, if my memory of my Dad’s is correct.
- turn_self_off
  
  what a ironic combination of names.
afs97209

Buckminster Fuller: “C’mon, guys… Has anybody seen my character sheet or my dice? The sheet says “Buckminster the Mage” at the top. That blue and white d20 is lucky….”
Mark Crummett

Barbie’s Dream Dome. In a box!
Anonymous

Hey, bud, how’d you like to buy a smurf scalp?
Michael Leddy

It looks like the case of my mid-’60s Olympia — same lock.
DB Cooper

I wouldn’t want to live in a Fuller dome. But I sure as heck would love to have that little salesman’s model.

I spent about 7 years studying “social studies” in Carbondale, Illinois in the 1990s. One of the places that I frequently hung out at was a dome home on South Forest Avenue. The fact is, the place was Bucky’s personal residence when he lived and taught at Southern Illinois University.

Leave it to your imagination what we drank and smoked in the place, but it was darned cool. While the place was a rental and was partied in by college students, everyone was respected the significance of the structure and the history of it. We even did a little repair to it now and again.

Its a bit nostalgic to think about it now, as I know it fell into disrepair. There was a group in the early 2000s that got together and tried to restore it and protect it. I think the work continues.
redesigned

What is this a home for ants? It has to be at least 3 times that size!