Next picture. Now here is at the Institute of Design in Chicago. I took the 31 great circle pattern, because I first thought I would like to 31 great circles resolve everything goes into triangulation. And you get only there are only 4 different triangles may I go back one picture again? If you'll go to the red there's a red square, and you go from the mid edge of the red to the center and then go from the center out to a corner of the red square and you will see a triangle which has 1,2,3,4 triangles in it. Can you make out then that in relation to the square there is 1/8 of a square which starts then at the mid-edge and goes to the center of the square, which is dead in the middle of the picture, and then from there to the corner of the square. So you find that there are 8 of those patterns repeated as you go around the square, and each one is broken into 4 triangles, so here you have an omni-triangulation, and just 4 types of triangles, and I thought that this in itself was because everything in great circles is the shortest distance between points, nothing can want to be in any other everything is just where it is most comfortable and it's not going to transform in any other, because this is already the most economical relationship. So it is inherently a very powerful structure in Nature.

So the picture that I had shown you of the next one where the dome, you'll see a little dome made of it, using the 31 great circles, and this was at the Institute of Design in Chicago where I explained then that we are going to be able to enclose very large environments with very little material, and you could really then, you don't need a roof over you and you don't need walls to keep warm. You are really going to be living in the garden instead of having a house, and you have a lot, but most of your garden is outside and you can't really use a lot of it in the winter time, so everything can be inside. And so the students at the Institute of Design in Chicago went to work and we developed a two-deck, sort of a veranda structure that was in the back there are trees and a pool, then, out in front of the garden, and they did some very extraordinarily good work at the Institute of Design on this work.

I got these students at the Institute of Design to I gave them a project in which I said, I'm going to give you all, all the money we need, and I'm telling you that our economy is going to absolutely shut down, there's going to be no opportunity to get things anymore after one week. But I'm going to give you all the money you need to buy anything you need to buy, in any of the stores in Chicago, and I want you to go shopping, and I want you then to get up your lists, and I want you to price it all, and I want more than that, I want the size of the packages that things come in all the containers, and I want all of the weights and so on, I want complete specifications of what you do. There were 30 students and they broke up into teams, and they broke up the different kinds of things your life would need again coming back to the Universal my they worked from my Universal Requirements list, and they had a checklist to be sure they were not leaving something out. They made really extremely good lists, and they talked them over and argued them, and then they all went shopping round the city of Chicago, and these different teams in different areas. And they came back then with a complete filling out, with photographs and extremely adequately performed task. They had that one week to do it, and it was just superbly done.

So now we had this total shopping list and what it would really cost, and then I pointed out to them that many of the things that they had, really all of them were lose items which you could bring into a house, as you know a house. And yet many of them were going to be associated and related, sewing things would be near sewing things and whatever it might be, and there would be a then things that you do in the kitchen, and the cleaning up things, so they certainly needed to be in proximity one with the other. I pointed out to the with the automobile, you have a there is a dash board, and you have a lot of things that are built into your car, and you find that they take up less room, and really more convenient, and sum totally, I'm not talking about what the automobile company is charging for it, trying to make money, but I finally got down to the manufacturing costs. They cost very much less to really have unit mountings, and so we got into the following:

They developed a we found out what the sum total of all the bulk of these would be, and so in their individual packages they are going to take up much more room than if they were literally fastened and arrayed in someplace literally to work with one another. So what we did was to say then, well, we find that on the highway then at that time there was a limit-size truck. 8ft wide was the limit and still is unless you go along with a special escort and in '5l you didn't have that special escort, they didn't have the mobile home business that you have today. And it could only be so it could be 8 feet high and 8 feet wide, and it could be 40 feet long. I said, alright, we're going to have such a package, and I realized then that the package not only then has a floor 8 feet by 20 feet, but it has actually four sides to the package, and there are two ends, 8 x 8. So we found that if we had hinges, this made a box and there were hinges there so the side wall would hinge down, and the ceiling would hinge down, and the ends would hinge open, so we found that all of this was a perfectly practical matter. if you then, designed and had things fastened onto those panels, I talked to you about "jig shipping" during W.W.II, when you began to make this delicate airplane wing in this small plant, and then you wanted to be able to get it to the main assembly plant without anything hurting it, we found then we had special riggings, so that the things fitted in place in the truck. So we found that we could fasten all the equipment, the main equipment we had onto one of these six panels. Four of them, twenty by eight, and two of them eight by eight. That's a whole lot of space. Twenty by eight is 160 isn't it, so you have 4 x 160. What's that? 640 + 64 twice on the ends, you're up to pretty close to 900 square feet here, and this is many of your apartments are only 400 square feet, so 1,000 is a pretty decent little home, really quite a comfortable little home. A house is 1,400 feet, so this is a whole lot of area.

And so the students went to work on the panels and decided how they could arrange certain things to be the most logically in the center of activity, and they had things mounted on the floor base, but made fast you see. Then there were things on the other ones that were all made fast, whether it was beds or whatever it may be, and finally, the whole thing could fold up, but each being designed so that what was on this panel would fit into the space, and the other space panels. It was a superbly well done piece of work, and sure enough we were able then to get up this package which would contain everything that you would possibly want, and without any packaging on it, and already to use when you got there. So your truck box would simply open out and there you could start living, and it would be under a dome. And we were going to be able to put the dome up in a hurry, so there could be then very swift living.

There was quite a lot about that in the Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller book, but we also have lots more slides, and we may have some here. I don't know if they are in the project tonight or not. But this is also then, the Institute of Design and was a very beautifully done reinforced concrete geodesic dome on the 31 great circles, and there, this was done with venetian blind stock. And venetian blind stock where you then made it into a you can put it on the break and make a "U" shape out of it, these "U" channels came together at hubs, and then we simply filled with this was a quick setting cement, and we put because you have the "U" channel that you were filling with cement, you then have a sling across it so you'd have cables running around, so the wires ran around this thing and we filled it I can tell you this is a fantastically strong structure.

Next picture. Then we developed the foldable mobile dome out of the 31 great circles. This picture is down at Black Mountain College, and there were then only the four types of triangles, and there were only four different lengths of edges, and we had hubs, there were four different kinds of hub angles. So we had special made little special aluminum castings where cables the two halves were hollow, so cables could run across each other coming in one side of the hub there were little nodes on the hub for a tube to come on, like corks, but the cork was split open and the cable ran through inside, and these hubs, then, made it possible to have the cables run through between them. And you can see those hubs, they are quite prominent, of the two aluminum castings, and we have then continuous cable from equator to equator, of the we had 31 great circle cables, flexible aircraft cable, the very finest of size. I thing it was 1 or 2/16, quite a very delicate little thing running through these hubs. You couldn't see it and the tubes as they came up to the hubs we made the hubs themselves like a sphere, a spherical surface, but an Edam cheese cutting through the circle, so it left some so a tube coming up to it could be perpendicular, it is a lesser circle onto the sphere rather comfortably, so it made a comfortable kind of universal joint, and yet there was a centering, a centering node through which the cable led in, so we have then the cable running through, and you tighten this. At the equator, then, we had turnbuckled forms really screw jacks where you let the cable nice and loose and the whole thing would fold up really incredibly beautifully, and then you, if we get the thing up then you just tighten and everything came absolutely rigid, it couldn't have been better.

Next picture please. This is our dome at Black Mountain College, and erected outside, then we found that when it was up you could dimple it. They are diamonds, and every diamond turns out to be then really two different types of diamonds. You went around pushing in the centers of diamonds and the whole thing stiffened up even more. It became very, very rigid, so it had mountains and valleys and you could put enormous weights on it.

Next picture. Then we had it covered with a pneumatic skin, a double skin and the pneumatic skin was sealed in hexagons and pentagons, because I said alt you can pair triangles into diamonds or you could collect them into hexagons and pentagons, the whole thing goes that way, so we then made a platform. One of the ladies sitting on that platform is my wife Anne, over in the left hand one if you can see behind the young man in the front left foreground. There were three girls sat on the platform and we carried this thing around, it was strange how extraordinarily rigid and stiff it was a beautiful, beautiful canopy.

Next picture. Then it had a hole in the top for the our ventilator, so we were contemplating having the airs coming in the bottom and the top and doing all the kinds of tricks that I have given you about using aerodynamics to do that. That pneumatic skin idea at that time I said the vinyls were not as good as they are today, anywhere nearly. But I told you we have one such pneumatic skin geodesic up at Bear Island which has gone through four winters and four hurricanes, and many more hurricanes than that and all the snow and ice, and hasn't even deflated. Just original gas put in it and nothing else. So it turns out to be a very practical idea and it will not flutter in any wind. It is extremely, just absolutely firm like human skin.

Next picture. Then we had the next really large size dome was the Fuller Research Foundation up in Canada. This is near Montreal, and we used, in this one got into now the icosahedron, and we get, this is an eight-frequency icosahedron pattern. And I had it at vertexes, tubes running outwardly, and cables running at the head down to the next hub. In other words we trussed the whole thing extremely powerfully. I was trying to get down to the lightest kind of structures, and I wanted to be able to do good static load testing and these took incredible loadings.