Design for Wholeo Fuller Dome Yoga Mat
To see a larger picture, click a small one
Design for Wholeo Fuller Dome Yoga Mat
To see a larger picture, click a small one
The South Pole area of the map on Fuller Dome is out of sight. As I walked around under the dome, designs for a yoga pad came to me. Something like a rug, underfoot, showing the missing continents. See Wholeo Fuller Yoga Mat Design Sketches and Yoga Mat..
Ordering a Dymaxion AirOcean World map from the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI), I planned to use it to get the continents for the invisible 1/4 of the 3/4 Fuller Dome. I had not foreseen how difficult it would be to remap the 1-frequency icosa map centered with the zenith on North and South poles to a 5-frequency map centered on Edwardsville, IL, which is about 52° south of the North Pole. Working on the triangles in Photoshop, I located the nadir, marked with red dot on the graphic. Measuring 52° in four directions did not work for me (four X marks). I cut out the map and made the model, hanging it suspended from Edwardsville at the zenith. See a movie of it. I tagged some locations that I could see from photos of the dome were at the base of Fuller Dome. I found them on the digital map and came up with a rough circle of the target area (shown in light blue on the graphic with the triangles from the map). With each pentagon hub open, how to flatten it?
Searching the web, I didn't find any Dymaxion maps or any others that would help solve my problem. See Dymaxion Map Differences. In Google Earth I could center on 38°S, 90°E, which would be the approximate nadir. The photo at the top of the page is how a rug would look viewing earth from outer space. Or perhaps it works to see it as the edges of the globe collapsed to the floor.
Looking at the world map on the Wiki page for 90th meridian west: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90th_meridian_west makes it clear why the Dymaxion map is needed.
My next step was to find the original design documents for the Fuller Dome. To get the images, if Fuller and the architect Sadao flipped the Dymaxion Map, relocated the nadir and zenith, and subdivided the icosa to a 5-freqency, perhaps it would be easier to imagine a base for the dome. In the meantime I continued, using Google Earth.
Why do it?
"One goes inside to go outside one's self and into the center of the Earth and thence outward to the stars." says RBF in his essay, "Geoview". As I walked into the dome I was entranced, enveloped, engaged to the extent that weeks later, I'm still on the same wavelength and path. Wanting to solve or to finish the spiritual and artistic achievement of Fuller Dome. Being inside earth is to be in the dark, since I'm down below the airy part of earth above in the dome. It felt a bit claustrophobic, even suffocating. Fuller mentions a viewing platform in Geoview, which I assume would place me above at the base of the dome and thus feeling up in the "AirOcean". Down here with the rows of chairs, the offices with different things happening on the periphery, it is hard to feel centered in the distracting space.
The remaining part of the 40' dome would be 10' high. The height of the dome above the floor is 12'. How can I remain grounded in this beautiful building, but imagine an entirely blue and white sphere of earth that I'm entering from the knees up, or if seated on the floor, from the heart up? My solution is a rug or yoga mat like a flying carpet for my senses and imagination. See sketches for how it would look in use or a movie about the idea: Vimeo or YouTube.
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