Tensegrity

It is commonly overlooked that the patrons of architects, engineers and professional craftsmen are inherently the prime designers of their projects. Theirs is the conceptioning, the will to do, the initiative and the statement of limits.
Conceivers of great industries and their trans-national patterning have been the large pattern-designers of the last world century. Those who have been successful world-industry designers have also been powerful anarchistic authorities.

In this last century many conceivers and concept-explorers have been unwilling to submit to patronage lest the patron compromise the potentials of their conceiving. Under the powerful economic network woven by the major industrial conceivers, economic survival was difficult for the untamed artists--for this they were.


In the long evolution of fundamental rights of men and the slow inhibition of these rights into the securing codes of society, the letters patent issuable to individuals who, on their own initiative, succeed in augmentation of the commonwealth have been common to all manner of governments. Absolute monarchs and republics have alike honored their individuals with temporary monopolies to replenish and regenerate their creative resources. Patents are operative in Russia and behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains; patents are operative in the Western world. Patents are not operative, however, between these two world domains.


Amongst other fundamental experiments which I have been conducting over the last forty years has been the testing of whether the individual may achieve original formulations and initiate their realization in world economic patterning without either the compromising direct patronage or politically-seized dictatorial power. It seemed that the only possibility of so doing lay in the direction of patents secured entirely through the inventor's own economic means. Because I have been fortunate enough to have been befriended by many artists of extraordinary individual and original conceptual initiative, and because I have had the further good fortune to have gained long-time experience, not only in patent-law, but in patent-securing, -maintenance, and the broad economic ramifications of patent-holding in the most recent era of massive government and massive corporation (made more difficult by the shroud of official secrecy embracing the unprecedented technical acceleration of our era), I am eager to discuss the economic security of the artists and their potential joining of forces, as did the medical profession long ago, in the advantageous realizations for world democracy inherent in the artist-joined anticipatory competence.

It is a sad fact that the world of patronized design is the last area of commonly accepted social behavior where piracy is considered ethical. Patrons hire designers to steal their competitors' work. Patrons hire designers to steal other non-professional designers' fresh-new crops of potential economic growth. Only by joining forces will the architect-, scientist-, engineer-artists be able to eliminate this intellectual cancer of the regenerative processes.

I am going to discuss a special case of structural exploration and invention. This published discussion constitutes what is legally called "public disclosure" of an invention which I have "reduced to practice," which latter reduction puts me by common law in the powerful position of holding momentary monopoly of the economic employment thereof. I have fortified this common-law position with patents already obtained, as well as patent applications in process. I fortunately hold several patents covering geodesic structures in America and in almost every other country in the world which subscribes to the Berne (Switzerland) patent convention. If I did not have this patent protection, I am confident that neither the government nor any of the great industrial corporations would in any way have recognized my invention of these structures. Though big government has spent billions in noneffective structural research, I frequently encounter the statement by government and corporation bureaucrats that they consider it their duty to the taxpayer to use their enormous powers of specification and purchase to circumvent my patents covering structures which I had anticipatorily invented at my own expense and developed to satisfy society's needs under just such emergent necessities as those confronting the bureaucrats. The basis of their contention is that the few thousands of regenerative dollars that may be returned to me represent an immoral exploitation by the individual of democracy's emergency needs. They completely overlook the billions of taxpayers' dollars they have already fruitlessly spent in their intra-mural budgetary politics, attempted under the supposition that they will be rewarded by their incumbent masters if they can stretch yesterday's investments to cover tomorrow's evolutionary transformations. How can they justify large research and development budgets for next year if it were visible that the original technical gains were accruing exclusively to society from the individual preoccupations and initiatives existing entirely outside of massive government and massive corporate manufacture and distribution? The self-deceit of democracy at this moment in history by its professionally advertised aggrandisement of the "corporate image" with reputed impeccability of super-inventiveness may be the undoing of democracy's case until another century has washed away this miasmic fallacy. Not only have these professional word- and picture-factories manufactured the greatest and most persuasively erroneous myths, but they also have robbed our heritage of word- and picture-language of its incisively exquisite effectiveness. The primary tools of men have been blunted and misappropriated. Bereft of the age-long developed tools, artists of our day have sought for new and vital means of communication. The beatnik is the anti-body of Madison Avenue. The true artists seek escape from the stale-mated vacuum of the two. History tells us that they will probably be successful. The probability is that the artists will win enjoyment of our whole earth by all the world's people--with the complete emancipation of man's innate freshness and regenerative conceptioning.


PATENTS AND NATURAL PRINCIPLES

One cannot patent geometry per se nor any separate differentiated-out, pure principle of nature's operative processes. One can patent, however, the surprise complex behaviors of associated principles, where the behavior of the whole is unpredicted by the behavior of the parts, i.e. synergetic phenomena. The latter is what is known as an invention, a complex arrangement, not found in nature, though sometimes superficially similar to nature. Though superficially similar in patternings to Radiolaria and Flies' Eyes, geodesic structuring is true invention. The Radiolaria collapse when taken out of water. Flies' Eyes will not provide structural precedent or man-occupiable structures.

The processes of engineering, up to the moment of introduction of my invention of Geodesic structures, are predicated upon the stress analysis of individual beam and column behaviors, as separate components and thereafter upon comprehensively organized beams, columns and cantilevers as a solid compressional over-all integrity of cohesion, aided here and there by tensionally exaggerated sinews--tension being subordinate and local. Therefore, engineering as academically constituted in 1951 could in no way predict the associated behaviors of Geodesics, in which any one, several or many of the components could be removed without, in any way, jeopardizing the structural integrity cohesion of the remaining primary structure.

I have visited approximately all the leading universities and engineering schools in the U.S.A. (only as their spontaneously invited guest, as I allow no promotion or agentry solicitation of engagements ), and I have been a guest of major architectural and engineering societies around the world. I am able to state from the direct testimony of its leaders, that world engineering not only was surprised by the Geodesic behavior but clearly stated that it was unable to explain or predict the unprecedented performance per pound efficacy of the geodesic structures by any of the academically known mathematical principles of analysis. In lieu of an extant and proven theory of Geodesics and their stress analysis strategies, engineers professionally charged with the responsibility of validating my (or my companies') Geodesic dome undertakings have only one recourse, and that is to direct static load testing accompanied by progressive electric strain gauge readings with loading carried through to "failure." Thereafter, formulas are derived, which do not provide any general theory but only special knowledge concerning this particular case. However, I do enjoy a lucid theory of geodesic structuring which I have frequently reduced to successful practice in technical, economic and industrial ways.

For these reasons I have had to develop a completely new strategy of educational exposition of synergetic behaviors.It is because I have developed the Geodesic theory and not only the invention but this effective strategy of exposition, that I am, and have been, invited to conduct original seminars in the primary educational institutions around the world, as well as before the important annual professional conventions of primary engineering-architectural bodies of these countries.

Whereas, engineers told me, before my full-scale demonstrations of Geodesic structures, that Geodesics would not work; now, after one-third of a century of expositional engagements and discourse, there has been produced altogether such an effect upon the general climate of technology that Geodesic componentation is frequently employed by others with satisfactory structural results, though the individuals do not know why. This occurs because of a subconsciously-marshaled approach of the design factors generated by hundreds of news photographs of successfully standing structures, ranging from desk models to the largest clear-span enclosures of all history. Many of these are shown being flown to installation sites, some of which are at the world's formidable polar,mountain and desert regions.

GENESIS OF SYNERGETIC GEOMETRY