Buckminster Fuller invented the Geodesic Dome in the late 1940s to demonstrate some ideas about housing and ''energetic-synergetic geometry'' which he had developed during WWII. This invention built on his two decade old quest to improve the housing of humanity. It represents a brilliant demonstration of his synergetics principles; and in the right circumstances it could solve some of the pressing housing problems of today (this housing crisis Fuller predicted back in 1927).

Richard Buckminster Fuller: the planet's friendly genius. A scientist, philosopher. Bucky has gained renown as an inventor and designer (of the Dymaxion house, car and map), the creator of the geodesic dome, the man who coined the term "Spaceship Earth" and organized the World Game, the mathematician who discovered Synergetics, and as a dogged individualist whose genius has been felt throughout the world. He made his mark in areas of architecture, mathematics, philosophy, religion, urban development and design, naturalism, physics, numerology, art and literature, industry and technology.

A Geodesic Dome is a type of structure shaped like a piece of a sphere or a ball. This structure is comprised of a complex network of triangles that form a roughly spherical surface. The more complex the network of triangles, the more closely the dome approximates the shape of a true sphere.

By using triangles of various sizes, a sphere can be symmetrically divided by thirty-one great circles. A great circle is the largest circle that can be drawn around a sphere, like the lines of latitude [Ed. he means longitude] around the earth, or the equator. Each of these lines divide the sphere into two halves, hence the term geodesic, which is from the Latin meaning "earth dividing". [From Mitch Amiano]

The dome is a structure with the highest ratio of enclosed area to external surface area, and in which all structural members are equal contributors to the whole. There are many sizes of triangles in a geodesic, depending on the frequency of subdivision of the underlying spherical polyhedron. The cross section of a geodesic approximates a great-circle line.

And finally a few quotes from Richard Buckminster Fuller's "Critical Path" (pg. 233/234):

"All technical evolution has a fundamental behavior pattern. First there is scientific discovery of a generalized principle, which occur as a subjective realizatin by an experimentally probin individual. Next comes objective employment of that principle in a special case invention. Next the invention is reduced to practice. This gives humanity an increased technical advantage over the physical environment. If successful as a tool of society, the invention is used in bigger, swifter, and everyday ways. For instance, it goes progressively from a little steel steamship to ever-bigger fleets of constantly swifter, higher-powered ocean giants."

"All the technical curves rise in tonnage and volumetric size to reach a 'giant' peak, after which progressive miniturization sets in. After that, a new and more economical art takes over and then goes through the same cycle of doing progressively more with less, first by getting bigger and taking advantage, for instance, of the fact that doubling the length of a ship increases its wetted surface fourfold but increases its payload volume eightfold."

(principle holds true for ships of both air and water)

Then comes the miniaturization, the overall and inexorable trending to DO MORE WITH LESS, known as "progressive ephemeralization". Trends toward an ultimate doing of everything with nothing at all, which is a trend of the omniweighable physical to be mastered by the omniweightless metaphysics of intellect.

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