The patent for a dome framed along great-circle lines of a sphere, subdivided into triangles so that a network of short, light, nearly identical struts encloses the greatest volume with the least material.
Fuller spent his career on what he called ephemeralization: doing ever more with ever less material, energy and weight. The geodesic dome, developed with students at Black Mountain College in 1948–49 and patented in 1954, is its most famous product. Its geometry starts from the icosahedron, the regular solid with twenty triangular faces; each face is divided into smaller triangles and the new points are pushed out onto the circumscribed sphere. The number of divisions along an edge is the dome’s frequency: the higher it is, the rounder the dome and the shorter the struts, at the price of more strut lengths.
Because every member is part of a triangulated shell, loads spread through the whole surface and no strut is much more stressed than its neighbours. Domes were built for the US military, for trade fairs and as greenhouses; the largest of Fuller’s own, the US pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal (with Shoji Sadao), was a three-quarter sphere 76 m across. Fuller also coined tensegrity (tensional integrity) for structures in which isolated compression members float in a continuous net of tension.
The book, part by part
I The patent
Great-circle framing; subdivision of the icosahedron; struts, hubs and skins.