A Geodesic Chandelier.
Designed by Buckminster Fuller, and made by James & Gill Meller as a wedding present for Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon.
A basketweave geodesic sphere, of perspex (aka lucite) prisms wired together with steel fishing line, served with crimps and electrical terminals, the crimps threaded into cut out venturi.
89 cm in diameter, just over ten kilograms in weight.
With James Meller's small lettered labels on one section, presumably as an aid to assembly. Single spot of white paint (from decoration of Snowdon's studio), recently cleaned with minor repairs, generally in fine condition overall. 1962
Attractive and practical, this is a unique three-dimensional souvenir of the great maverick philosopher-inventor Fuller and a remarkable manifestation of a period when Britain, against the odds, embraced and integrated the ideas of this most awkward and inspirational member of the American avant-garde into a new school of radical architecture
Fuller
Richard Buckminster Fuller [1898-1983] 'Bucky' to his friends, or 'Guinea Pig B' to himself, made his first 'octet truss', (a design which he was to patent fifty years later), while in the sandpit at kindergarten, using peas and toothpicks. This began his formal education which ended after his second expulsion from Harvard (he was the fourth generation of his family to attend there) in 1915.
When the U.S. joined the Great War, he volunteered for the Navy, bringing with him the family motor-launch. His design of a revolutionary rescue winch was 'noticed', and in 1918 he did an accelerated officer training programme that, despite his short height and extreme myopia, resulted in active warzone service, as aide to the admiral in command of cruiser and transport forces of the Atlantic Fleet. By war's end he was married with a daughter, whose early death combined with the failure of the firm he was working for convinced him that the world of employment was not for him, and he set up as an independent entrepreneur. His first venture was to promote his father in law's "Stockade" construction system, a series of shelters manufactured from blocks of compressed wood-shavings. 'Stockade' failed, hobbled by customer scepticism, costs, bureaucracy, delays and Fuller's lack of business sense: in 1927, deeply depressed, Fuller stood beside the Chicago lakeside preparing to drown himself when he heard a voice saying: "You don't belong to you; you belong to the universe."
With his metaphysical accounts now in the black, instead of suicide he committed 'egocide', and went into a form of silent retreat for two years, studying the universal principles of the beauty of mathematics and 'nature's own geometry'. The result was his first book '4D-Timelock' and the invention of the Dymaxion House - a 'hexagon hung on cables' [De Kooning in Krausse p.298] designed to be be mass produced, and delivered 'off the peg' by zeppelins. Through the 1930s and early 1940s he continued to develop his dymaxial ideas and products, including a one piece plug in Dymaxion Bathroom, the "Dymaxion Deployment Unit" - an adaptation of grain silos into wartime demountable mass produced housing, and the Dymaxion World Map, a patented new projection. Not the least flattering tribute to him was Einstein's inclusion of him as the eleventh person alive capable of understanding his theories on time and space.
His geodesic principles, as exemplified in the famous domes, were developed more fully in the late 1940s in the experimental community of Black Mountain College. The College was something of a successor to Germany's Bauhaus, offering a multidisciplinary environment for innovation in the arts and sciences, and its list of alumni reads like a who's who of American cultural life: Josef Albers (actually a refugee from the now-closed Bauhaus), artist Robert Rauschenberg, dancer Merce Cunningham, musician John Cage, poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson among many others. Fuller's first true geodesic structure was built there, and was a famous failure, becoming known as the 'Flopasphere' or 'supine' dome. It was fifty feet in diameter, was constructed out of long strips of venetian blind and collapsed to the ground when tension was applied during its attempted erection. The second, produced shortly after, was made out of aluminium aircraft tubing and was a grand success, strong enough for Bucky and the Black Mountain student body to hang from, like Dymaxial apes. The structures slowly filtered into public consciousness and commercial use: the first commercially commissioned one was for Ford at Dearborn, followed by their widespread use as radomes for early warning radar and a particularly large one for the Montreal Expo of 1967. A three and half kilometre dome to enclose the whole of Manhattan was never built.
Nothing under the sun is totally new of course, and the first genuine geodesic dome was designed by Walter Bauersfeld in 1922 for the planetarium on the roof of the Carl Zeiss factory in Jena. Bauersfeld was largely unaware of the significance of his design, which was incidental to his invention of the projecting machinery for the planetarium: Fuller however was completely aware of what he was doing, both theoretically and practically.
The domes themselves have become a familiar enough part of the built environment, but the principles he developed of "tensegrity" - bounded structures distributing and using stress to maintain stability - have been central to much modern architecture. With their "frameworks made of rigid struts, each bearing tension or compression . . . connected into triangles, pentagons or hexagons" [Margolius p 46] they are capable of producing "unprecedented performance per pound". [p229. Krausse].
Fuller in Britain.
Fuller's principles of synergy, geodesics and tensegrity found fertile ground in postwar London, and were embraced with gusto by a new generation of architects and engineers. Their first prominent exposition was in Powell, Moya and Samuely's Skylon for the 1951 Festival of Britain, which although long since gone, still has the power to astonish.. The Independent Group of London (whose members included the Smithsons, David Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi) recommended Fuller to RIBA as a speaker in 1958, and RIBA awarded him their Gold Medal in 1961.
Among Fuller's British supporters were the radical architect Cedric Price (soon to be the subject of an exhibition at London's Design Museum), the engineer Frank Newby and the designer Lord Snowdon. These three formed the team that designed and built the aviary in London Zoo [1961-1964], a startling building that dominates the Regents Park Canal. Its tetrahedral structure, draped with netting, is not strictly geodesic, but does have a clear debt of inspiration to Fuller's ideas, and is the earliest surviving major manifestation of them in Britain.
Snowdon, born Anthony Armstrong-Jones, was given the title of Lord Snowdon on his marriage to the Queen's younger sister Princess Margaret in 1960. The marriage took place during the gestation of the aviary, and the sphere was Fuller's wedding present to the couple, although it was not completed and presented by him until 1962. The actual production of the sphere was undertaken by the architect James Meller, one of Fuller's most eloquent and ardent followers, later to edit the influential Buckminster Fuller Reader. The individual perspex prisms were made by "The Perspex Shop" in Soho, and assembled by Meller himself. A natural collector, he still has the archive of the sphere's construction, including correspondence and original drawings by Fuller, unused crimps, tools, and scraps of wire. In a fine piece of serendipity we had to replace two of the wire links, and bought the wire (eighty pound plastic-coated trace wire) and crimps from Farlows in St. James', later to find that Meller had originally sourced them from exactly the same place.
Geometrically speaking the sphere is a truncation of a truncated icosahedron, a form which results in a polyhedron with 12 pentagons, 20 hexagons, 60 triangles, 90 vertices, and 180 edges. It works tremendously well as a chandelier, as the Perspex components function as refracting prisms and produce subtle rainbow coloured patterns. It is currently suspended on a simple rope harness, with no light source supplied.
In preparation of this description we were greatly helped by James Meller and Bob Gray.
Select references: Pawley, Martin. R Buckminster Fuller, 1990, this illustrated at page 146; Fuller Archive, Stanford, see photographs E-7-1 & E-7-2.
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