Broward Community College - Silver Sands Yearbook (Fort Lauderdale, FL)

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num me Buckminster Fuller: A Terrific Package of Experience Earth Metabolic Design Florida's Eco-System Boogie at Summer Jam: Watkins Glenn, N.Y. Adak: Our Forgotten Frontier Freedom Rider: The Long Road LIFESTYLE SECTION Inside Rapp with Gail Morris Mike Pinera: A Journey through Rock Can a Priest Find Happiness in a Stable? Tim Baker: Land Wizard Learning V. Programing Biofeedback Artists Exhibit Gallery of Perceptive Photography Health, Sports and Culture Matchmaker Serpent Union Grove: Fiddlers' Convention Graduation '73 Memorium cover and table of contents designed by Gale Wilhelms HQYCEEEN !fli'EL1C P3 Tl ' P'

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'B'llCJlJ1'lJ'8J E8 Ji -N-'I-'58 rrific .Package of xperi 'Learn all you can about . I 'mnster Fuller.' Love, Leon. Richard Buckminster Fuller is not sv man to categorize. Whofs Who, ed out 114 lines on his various .fements and professions, and then up trying to squeeze him into a paragraph. He iust doesn't buy ries, therefore, categories don't buy He is a world citizen, a 'iger-captain on a tiny, precious hip Earth, a self-appointed ity agent for the universe. uller: comprehensive designer, or, engineer, mathematician, ect, cartographer, philosopher, cosmogonist, choreographer, and ary. 'l am not a genius, but I am a c package of experience. My tive has been humanity's rehensive welfare in the universe. l I have ended up with a pair of flying irs. To begin somewhere, he designs and structures for living and moving sing that are less a combination of and connectors than a pattern of and materials. Idea, integrity, making, intuition--these are as basic ials to his creations as are struts onnectors. lf one looks at a conventional ing long enough, and looks at a f long enough, one begins to have an 'standing of where Bucky Fuller l Geodesic spheres larger than half a in diameter can be floated in the air, clouds. Draped with polyethylene ins-to retard nighttime air e-the spheres would be light enough :main aloft, at preferred altitudes. d nines one mile in diameter could thousands of people, whose weight be negligible. Passengers could pass 'cloud' to 'cloud' or from 'cloud' 'ound, as the 'clouds' float around Earth or are anchored to wtaintops. The 'clouds' could become food factories by impounding sunlight. The conventional Joe wants structures to live under, to shelter himself from the elements. So he starts with a pile of blocks, and makes a row of them, and then another row on top of that row, and so on. Pretty soon he has a wall. Then three more walls and a covering for the walls, and there it is-a house. A big box, really. ' Now consider a little paper house with a paper roof. Apply any weight to that roof and the house will collapse. Have some wind puch against a corner of that house and it will fold. Now that's obvious with a paper house because paper isn't a strong material. So what does Joe do? He blames it on the paper and continues to think that the box is basically okay. So he keeps making the blocks heavier and heavier, and keeps using more and more materials which become more and more scarce and therefore more expensive, all trying to make that box stand up against its very nature. Man's preocuppation with irrelevancies has conditioned him to believe security is having more with more-fortress, cathedral, mansion. Secure as the Rock of Gibraltar. Man in fear built his castle with thicker and thicker walls. Bon moat. The Maginot Line was history's greatest fortress. It was overrun by the Nazis in two day's. The geodesic dome is something else altogether. Bucky has known for a very long time that boxes are just not what's happening. If a box is such a great thing, why aren't airplanes huge, heavy, flying boxes? Why aren't ocean liners likewise? Because, unlike the house builders, the ship builders and airplane makers know that piling one box on top of another is no way to cooperate with and take advantage of the natural forces of the ocean and atmosphere. Another thing, the ocean liner and the airplane have to work. You just can't decide in mid-Atlantic that the whole thing was a bad idea and start rebuilding. That house builder, though, he thinks he's got all the chances he wants, wants, he can make that same mistake over and over again for all eternity and it really isn't going to matter. But it does matter. Man wears blinders. He rarely sees beyond his feed bag. Space ship Earth is not one enormous pile of building blocks. Bucky knows better, perhaps better than anyone else in the world, about people, about the earth, about shape, about wind, about gravity-and therefore, about houses. Perhaps through some lack of comprehensive anticipatory design in contemporary education, geometry is not generally thought of as having much to do with dynamic living. Bucky is making people think twice about that. When he explains something in terms of its geometric integrity, it becomes real and important. lt is suddenly remarkably clear that geometry is a language, a perception of reality that may be missing in his audience's view of the world. After considering the box, consider the triangle. Stand three equilateral triangles on end, join them so that each shares a side with each of the others, and a fourth triangle will be formed on the underside. The resulting pyramid-like form is a tetrahedron. The tetrahedron in itself is an exciting idea, a provocative corner of reality, because it is an organic shape which occurs in nature. Carbon bonding, for example, is tetrahedronal in structure. Fuller demonstrates such realitites to his audiences. One need not be a mathematician or chemist or architect to become involved in and enraptured with his explanations about shape and form. lt is ultimately stimulating because it makes sense, and making sense about how the world is working brings about more sense as to how it can work better. Ephemeralization is doing continuously more with less. The cube Q 4 . I