Dome, Sweet Dome
The Whole Earth Catalog, which anticipated the internet, took as its inspiration Bucky Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" and the first real photograph of the whole earth, taken from Apollo 8 by the first astronauts to orbit the Moon. We did great things then and assumed ourselves virtuous. But Fuller rode through those ambitions and prolific decades like a precocious child who asked too many questions. And though his intent was to accelerate progress, he made us stop. And think. His impatience was our conscience; his ambitions were our inhibitions; his "comprehensive anticipatory design science" was our resistance to its opposite: the realization of the ideal; the exclusive, apprehensive, prescriptive, and domesticating ideologies of power.
Though Fuller wasn't an idealist, he invoked the concept of God and even prayed in a manner he associated with the purpose of prayer. He didn't believe in a God independent of and outside the universe, but he did accept Einstein as His prophet. And because Einstein's theories resonated so beautifully with the mystical apprehension of a timeless ideal (represented by general principles and mathematical laws), Fuller assimilated the monotheistic world view of modern civilization without fully realizing its association with the very power he opposed.
His geodesic domes were at once a refutation and a symbol of domestication. We mostly understood the space they contained, but those of us who knew better were just as interested in the space they excluded, and even more interested in the design of the divisive-synthetic tension-integrity that manifested as a system dividing inside (and comprehended) from outside (and temporarily irrelevant). The hippies who built them desired a self-contained utopia under a celestial dome, but found that they leaked and were difficult to furnish with all the things that belonged in their domain.
So we divided the spherical space into boxes and found ourselves back where Bucky began in the same year my parents were born, complaining about parallel lines, up and down, and the rectilinear thinking that assumed them to be axiomatic.
Though Fuller wasn't an idealist, he invoked the concept of God and even prayed in a manner he associated with the purpose of prayer. He didn't believe in a God independent of and outside the universe, but he did accept Einstein as His prophet. And because Einstein's theories resonated so beautifully with the mystical apprehension of a timeless ideal (represented by general principles and mathematical laws), Fuller assimilated the monotheistic world view of modern civilization without fully realizing its association with the very power he opposed.
His geodesic domes were at once a refutation and a symbol of domestication. We mostly understood the space they contained, but those of us who knew better were just as interested in the space they excluded, and even more interested in the design of the divisive-synthetic tension-integrity that manifested as a system dividing inside (and comprehended) from outside (and temporarily irrelevant). The hippies who built them desired a self-contained utopia under a celestial dome, but found that they leaked and were difficult to furnish with all the things that belonged in their domain.
So we divided the spherical space into boxes and found ourselves back where Bucky began in the same year my parents were born, complaining about parallel lines, up and down, and the rectilinear thinking that assumed them to be axiomatic.
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