PART 1 OF 2
CHAPTER 10: Critical Path: Part Four
HAVING COMMITTED OURSELVES to solving humanity's problems with artifacts, we can use the Geoscope and World Gaming strategies as a "test-bed," and can now sort out which comes first of various artifacts -- all of which are going to be needed to get Spaceship Earth operating omnicooperatively on behalf of all.
Not only may we begin to make the whole world work for all humanity but incidentally to actualize the human functioning in Universe as local information-gatherers and local problem-solvers in support of the eternal regeneration of Universe itself.
No single move can bring us more swiftly in the direction of complete overall desovereignization, unblocking the free flow of technologies and resources, than that of instituting the world-around integrated electrical-energy network fully described in the Introduction to this book and the "World Game" chapter.
Next in artifact design priority to the integrated world electrical energy network comes the physical-environment-controlling equipment of world-around humanity's momentarily geographically fixed activities -- fixed in contradistinction to humanity's swiftly mobile environment-controlling artifacts such as automobiles, buses, trains, airplanes, and satellites. So seemingly stationary are city skyscrapers that few think about the fact that all their parts have been transported from far away and that many of those parts and materials have been intertransported many times in the course of their production and assembling. As of 1980 the average U.S.A. family moved out of town to a new location every three years. They do so primarily in readjusting human production functions to relocated factories and offices and to new airport and shopping centers' living-local convenience. When I speak of mobile dwellings, I do not refer to camping trailers or tents, I speak of those dwellings which will stay geographically fixed for many months or years but which are readily and economically transportable and reinstallable over wide ranges of distance.
As I have mentioned before and now repeat in a more comprehensive manner, in 1800 the average human being was walking an annually cumulative distance of 1100 miles and riding ten additional annual miles. By 1900 the average human being was yet walking a total of yearly distance of 1100 miles but the average U.S.A. citizen's annual vehicle-ridden miles had increased to 400. All humanity is as yet in 1980 walking an annual average of 1100 miles but in the U.S.A., Europe, and parts of the Near East, Asia, Africa, and Australia, all men, women, and youngsters free to travel, are averaging over 20,000 annual miles of vehicular travel.
Class-one evolution has all humanity progressively cross-breeding to produce an integrated world human race. If we pass our present cosmic examination to continue aboard planet Earth in Universe, the to-and-froing of humanity will increase rapidly. The motion patterns of humanity, as also mentioned earlier, are pulsating between ever more widely convergent and divergent to-and-froing. Two main types of environment controls are required: a whole city under one dome for convergent phases of human living and single-family or small group air-deliverable domes for remote deployment for skiers, geologists, artists, and others.
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Since 1927 I have been deeply involved with the issue of making high-performance shelter available to all humanity. By high performance I mean such environment-controlling shells -- and their survival equipment -- as can be produced only by the most advanced aircraft and space technology and the latter's level of technical problem-solving. In 1927 I anticipated a fifty-year- long gestation period for a new building industry. Since 1977 was the fifty-year target date, I began the prototyping of my Fly's Eye dome, which embodied design attention to all that I had learned not only throughout that fifty-year development period but in all my thirty-two earlier years. They, will not be sold. Like telephones, they will be rentable.
The Fly's Eye uses a very few types of nestable, mass-produced fiberglass, sheet aluminum of thin gauge, or polyester-coated sheet steel components that, when assembled, produce a 5/8 sphere of the "Hex-Pent" geodesic configuration. As with the ports and pores of all organic systems, the size and shape of these openings sort, sieve and classify the in-bound and outbound physical-component traffic of metabolic regeneration which the Fly's Eye domes embody.
The Fly's Eye domes' "pores" are all seven-foot-diameter circular openings. These circular openings serve alternately as doors, vents, solar-energy-cell mounts, etc. The circular openings constitute three-fourths of the surface area of the domes, while the manufactured shell-structure components constitute only one-fourth of the structures' surface. Since the circles have rigid rims, the closure of the circles can be accomplished by two, spread-apart drumheads of tensed, thin film or fabric materials -- ergo, at low relative cost.
The structural shell components constitute a comprehensive leakproof, watershedding system that, with the circular openings covered, leads all rain and melting snow into the shell's watercourse cisterning system. The cylindrically rimmed circular openings will be tensilely covered with opaque, translucent, or transparent glass, plastic film, metal glazing or screening, or some combination thereof. They will serve as energy harvesters in the operation of the dwelling by parabolically collecting incoming energy in sunlight foci, liquid-heating cells and by circular-opening-mounted, wind-drag-driven, air turbines.
FIGURE 41. 26-foot-diameter Fly's Eye dome prototype
FIGURE 41. Fly's Eye dome transported by helicopter
Fly's Eye domes are of two sizes. The smaller twenty-six-foot-diameter one is constructed of only one type of mass-produced, strong, lightweight, hyperbolic-saddle-form component; the larger fifty-foot-diameter one is comprised of only two types of mass-produced structural shell and watershed- constituting components, which are also of the hyperbolic-saddle type.
Both twenty-six- and fifty-foot-diameter domes can consist of two concentric identical domes with a space of six inches between and no metallic interconnectors -- this spacing produces highly effective insulation as well as an excellent hot- and cold-air ducting system. The concentric domes' interconnection is accomplished with a seven-foot-diameter outside circle and six-inch-deep conic tubes made fast at the seven-foot outside end of the circular openings of the spheres.
The smaller Fly's Eye provides the optimally workable fundamentals for comfortable, efficient living in a two-story shelter. It is small compared to a conventional house, but huge next to a van, camper, or almost any of the thousands of yachts enthusiastically occupied while tied up at the marina slips. Optimum use of space will be important.
The larger Fly's Eye is fifty feet in diameter, capable of enclosing three or more stories (each of 2000-square-foot floor area), a garden, trees, and a pool. While also equipped with all the living essentials at different levels, its space utilization will be quite different from the smaller Fly's Eye--the fifty-footer accommodates what we call the Garden of Eden living-living in a garden.
FIGURE 42. Fly's Eye dome with trussed flooring
FIGURE 43. 50-foot-diameter Fly's Eye dome prototype
The Fly's Eye domes are designed as components of a "livingry" service. The basic hardware components will produce a beautiful, fully equipped, air-deliverable house that weighs and costs about as much as a good automobile. Not only will it be highly efficient in its use of energy and materials, it also will be capable of harvesting incoming light and wind energies. The software part of the product will include a service industry to air- or highway- transport, install, lease, maintain, remove, and relocate the domes or their separate hardware components. And as mentioned, they will not be sold.
Both the twenty-six- and fifty-foot Fly's Eye domes are semiautonomous -- i.e., have no sewer, water-pipe, or electric-power-supply connections. The personal hygiene, clothes-and-utensil-washing functions are accomplished with the high-pressure, compressed air and atomized water fog gun which requires only a pint of water per hour.
The human excrement is sittingly deposited in the dry-packaging toilet. The human sits on fresh, plastic-film-covered, fore-and-aft seat halves. The excrement falls into the top-open plastic tube as it is formed by the two converging edges of the two plastic sheets, which are then electrosealed together from the originally separate two plastic film rolls, whose filmstrips first covered the two seat-sides. The hermetically sealed-off tubular section containing the excrement is then mechanically detached and conveyed away as litter to be neatly packed in a corrugated carton clearly marked for pickup and dispatch to the methane-gas-producing plant and the dry-powder fertilizer manufacturer or to be processed into methane gas and fertilizer powder by accessory equipment of the dome home itself.
• • •
Having undertaken the solution by artifacts of the world's great housing crisis, I came to regard the history of cities. Cities developed entirely before the thought of electricity or automobiles or before any of the millions of inventions registered in the United States Patent Office. For eminently mobile man, cities have become obsolete in terms of yesterday's functions -- warehousing both new and formerly manufactured goods and housing immigrant factory workers. Rebuilding them to accommodate the new needs of world man requires demolition of the old buildings and their replacement of the new and now obsolete real estate, streets, water and sewer lines, and yesterday's no longer logical overall planning geometries. I sought to take on this challenge and developed plans for an entirely feasible and practical new way for humans to live together economically. Old Man River's City is one such design.
Old Man River's City, undertaken for East St. Louis, Illinois, takes its name from the song first sung by Paul Robeson fifty years ago, which dramatized the life of Afro-American blacks who lived along the south-of-St. Louis banks of the Mississippi River in the days of heavy north-south river traffic in cotton. Cessation of the traffic occurred when the east-west railway network outperformed the north-south Mississippi, Mexican Gulf, and Atlantic water routes, which left many of its riverbank communities, such as East St. Louis, marooned in economic dead spots. East St. Louis is an American city overwhelmed by poverty. Its population of 70,000 is 70 percent black.
I originally came to East St. Louis to discuss the design and possible realization of the Old Man River's City, having been asked to do so by East St. Louis community leaders themselves, being first approached by my friend Katherine Dunham, the famous black dancer. At the community leaders' request I presented a design that would help solve their problem. It is moon-crater-shaped: the crater's truncated cone top opening is a half-mile in diameter, rim-to-rim, while the truncated mountain itself is a mile in diameter at its base ring. The city has a one-mile-diameter geodesic, quarter- sphere, transparent umbrella mounted high above it to permit full, all-around viewing below the umbrella's bottom perimeter. The top of the dome roof is 1000 feet high. The bottom rim of the umbrella dome is 500 feet above the surrounding terrain, while the crater-top esplanade, looks 250 feet radially inward from the umbrella's bottom, is at the same 500-foot height. From the esplanade the truncated mountain cone slopes downwardly, inward and outward, to ground level 500 feet below.
The moon crater's inward and outward, exterior-surface slopes each consist of fifty terraces -- the terrace floors are tiered vertically ten feet above or below one another. All the inwardly, downwardly sloping sides of the moon crater's terraced cone are used for communal life; its outward-sloping, tree-planted terraces are entirely for private life dwelling.
The private-home terraces on the outward circular bank are ·subdivided by trees and bushes to isolate them one from the other. This garden-divided exterior terracing hides the individual private-home terraces from one another while permitting each an unobstructed view outward to the faraway landscape. Thus landscape-partitioned from one another, the individual homes beneath the umbrella dome do not need their own separate weather roofs. The experience will be that of living outdoors in the garden, without any chance of rain and out of sight and sound of other humans, yet being subconsciously aware that your own advantage is not at the expense of others' zonal advantage.
The floors of the individual homes on the outward terraced slopes penetrate inwardly of the "mountainside" to provide an 85-percent-enclosed family apartment set back into the "mountain's" surface. Each family's apartment floor area totals 2500 feet, being 100 feet inwardly extended and twenty-five feet, one inch, wide at its outside terrace front line and twenty-five feet at its innermost chord line. Each apartment occupies only one sixhundredth of the circle's 360 degrees of arc. In addition there will be 1300 square feet of public space for each of the 25,000 families that Old Man River's City will accommodate on the fifty interior, communal, terraced slopes of the crater city.
The geodesic-sky parasol-umbrella protects the whole of Old Man River's City from rain or snow. The sky dome is transparent. Its aluminum-and-stainless- steel-trussed structure will be covered in two alternate ways: (1) glazed with wire-reinforced glass -- ergo, fireproof; (2) with a pneumatically filled, glass-cloth-pillowed umbrella. The dome will admit all biological, life-supporting Sun radiation. The great umbrella is a watershed whose runoff is collected in a dome-level reservoir for a high-pressure fire sprinkler and service purification system, after which the reservoir's overflow is piped downwardly to a dome-surrounding "moat" reservoir.
The interiormost, circular diameter ground level of Old Man River's City is twice the size of the playing-ground area of any of the world's large athletic stadia. This means that it has about four times the interior horizontal area of a regulation football stadium's oval ground area.
The terraced (angle of repose) slopes of Old Man River's City, both outside and inside, are very gradual slopes and are thus unlike the steeply tiered athletic stadium's seating slopes. The angular difference is like that of a reclining chair versus an upright chair.
Many of the lower tiers of Old Man River's City's interior terraces have enough horizontal surface to accommodate groups of tennis courts, whole school and playground areas, supermarkets, outdoor theaters, etc. The terraces are of graduated widths. With the narrowest at the top, they become progressively wider at each lower level.
Inside -- that is, below the moon crater's three-and-a-half-mile-circumferenced, surface-terraced mountain mass -- are all the communal services not requiring daylight: for instance, all the multilevel circumferential trolleyways, interlevel ramps, roadways, and parking lots, with numerous radial crosswalks and local elevators. There are radial crosswalk bridges at every four terrace levels. These provide bridges -- never more than two decks up or down-for walking homeward, outwardly from the interior community bowl, to one's individual, terraced, tree-hidden dwelling area. In addition to the foregoing interior structuring and facilities, the factory, office and parking space within the crater mountain is colossal -- about ten million square feet. The city is as complete a living, working, studying, and playing complex as is a great ocean passenger ship -- but without the space limitations imposed by the ship's streamlined forming to accommodate swift passage through the seas.
Because its life-style will be so vastly improved over present-day living, Old Man River's City has been designed to accommodate 25,000 families -- i.e., 125,000 humans -- though East St. Louis has now only 70,000 humans grouped in 14,000 families.
There are many exciting consequences of Old Man River's City community life being introverted and its private life extroverted.
Within the interior community bowl everyone can see what all the rest of the community is doing, as do the 125,000-member audiences of our present- day great "bowl" games see all the other humans present, though indistinctly at the farthest distances. The difference in Old Man River's City experience will be that each of its 125,000 individuals will have an average of 260 square feet of communal-terrace roaming space versus the six square feet of seating space of the football stadium fan -- i.e., the OMR citizen will average forty-three times as much free space as does the football fan.
FIGURE 44. Total Undercover Area 1,767,146 M
FIGURE 45. Model of Old Man River's City (elevation)
FIGURE 45a. Model of Old Man River's City (aerial view)
FIGURE 46. Plan view of Old Man River's City, East St. Louis, Illinois
From the individual, external home terrace on the crater's outer slopes one can see no humans other than those within one's own family's home-terrace domain. People can look outwardly, however, from Old Man River's City as far as the eye can see at the interesting Mississippi River scenery outside the moon crater's umbrella limits. The Old Man River City's home views are analogous to those of individuals living in dwellings on mountainsides, such as those of residents on the hills of Hong Kong Island or those above Berkeley, California. Such hillside dwellers overlook vast, mysteriously inspiring scenic areas, ever-changing with the nights, days, and weather.
The total roof surface area of the one-mile-diameter, quarter-sphere dome is only 2 percent that of the total roof and exterior skin surface area of all the buildings standing on an equal ground area in any large conventional city. The amount of external shell surface through which each interior molecule of atmosphere can gain or lose heat is thus reduced by 98 percent. Another energy-conservation factor is operative, for every time we double the sphere's diameter, we increase its surface by four and its volume by eight. Therefore, the energy efficiency doubles each time we double the dome size. This means that the structural efficiency, useful volume, and energy conservation are all at optimum in the Old Man River's City project. Throughout the year Old Man River's City will have a naturally mild climate. With a large, aerodynamically articulated, wind-and-weather-controlled ventilator system atop and round the dome, together with the 500-foot-high vertical opening that runs entirely around the city below the umbrella, the atmospheric controllability will guarantee fresh air as well as energy conservation. The umbrella will jut out above and beyond all the outer-slope residential terrace areas as does a grandstand roof, so that neither rain nor snow will drift horizontally inwardly, being blocked from doing so by the mass inertia of the vast quantity of atmosphere embraced by the umbrella as well as by the vertical mass of the crater's cone within the dome.
Optimum efficiency also characterizes the way in which Old Man River's City is to be produced. The three-and-a-half-mile circumferential moon crater and its terracing will be developed entirely with modern, high-speed, highway-building equipment and earth-moving techniques as well as with suspension-bridge-building and air-space technologies. Construction will begin with installation of a set of concentrically interswitching railway tracks, with tangential shunting bypass tracks, on which great cranes and other machinery will travel. The mammoth, 500-feet-high and 2000-feet-wide-based, A-frame-shaped, circumferential segments of the crater become highly repetitive and economically producible. There will be 100 columns rising from the A-frame tops at the crater's top-rim esplanade. These 100 columns will be 500 feet high and will be spaced forty meters apart, mounted above the A-frames. The tops of the 100 columns will be 1000 feet high and will be capped by a circumferential ring.
The whole terraced crater structure, inside and out, will be of thin-wall reinforced concrete. This terraced shell will be cast-mounted upon, and will thus encase, an inverted, kitchen-sieve-like, domical basket, consisting of an omnitriangulated, quarter-sphere geodesic, basket-bowl, suspension web of fine-diameter, high-tensile steel rods and wires. The spider-fine steel web basket will be suspended from the A-frame tops at the base of the 100 columns. The whole structure is, in effect, a circular, triangularly self-stabilizing, "suspension bridge"-principled, terraced, ferroconcrete bowl with the human occupants and their goods constituting only a small fraction of the stress loads of equimagnitude highway traffic bridges.
The 1500-meter- (one-mile) diameter dome itself will be a horizontal wire wheel suspension consisting of an octahedral-tensegrity-trussed, one-quarter sphere geodesic dome suspended horizontally from the 100 circumferential columns. This method means mounting the dome one-quarter of a mile inwardly from the one-mile-diameter parasol dome's outer rim. This results in an inner clear span of only one-half mile, a distance comparable to that of the Golden Gate Bridge's central clear span between its two masts.
I said to the East St. Louisans at the outset that our first resolve must be not to compromise our design solution in order to qualify for any private foundation or government subsidy funds. Three-quarters of the United States national debt of almost $1 trillion and much of the private debt, which altogether transfers $25 billion a year "interest" from our nation's pocketbooks to the banks and insurance companies, has been amassed through government building subsidies that were designed strictly as "money-makers" for bankers, real estate operators, and handcraft building-industry interests. The funds were not amassed in the interest of the individuals and the community. I advised the East St. Louisans that we must develop our design and its production and assembly logistics strictly in terms of the individual and the community's best interests. I said that if we solve the human problem and do so in the most economical and satisfactory manner, independent of building codes, zoning restrictions, etc., while employing airspace technology, effectiveness, and safety, we will do that which no subsidized housing thus far has done. I pointed out that, with increasing socioeconomic emergencies, the economic support will ultimately materialize simply because we have what world-around humanity is looking for and needs. The money-making solutions of housing are exactly what humanity is not looking for but has had to accept, lacking any alternatives.
The East St. Louis schoolchildren are soon to be provided with a fifty-foot- diameter miniature OMR moon-crater city with which (and on which) to play, simulating actual living conditions. The children will furnish its terraces with miniaturized, scale-model equipment, landscape material, athletic facilities, interior transportation equipment, factories, and similar materials they will design and make. As the political leader of East St. Louis, who was formerly principal of its largest high school, says, "By the time Old Man River's City gets completed, our present high school students will be its grown occupants, and they might just as well start right now using their imaginations in play living in and operating it." Fabricating and assembling the model itself will be in strict conformity with the full-scale operation.
At the outset meeting of our OMR's City's development, I told the East St. Louisans that I would develop the design and models at my own expense and do so without fee. I said that what I would design must be so "right" that the entire community would fall in love with it ... or it would be dropped. I said that if they did fall in love with it, I would carryon with all the development expense and that they must not allow the project to become a political football. It was fortunate that the East St. Louis community did fall spontaneously in love with the design. This held the project together through many critical moments of preliminary challenges of its validity and practicability. There were many critical meetings wherein skeptics, some of them powerful political activists, declared that this design, with its domed-over interior community and exterior private-dwelling terraces, might be part of its social enemy's conspiracy to entrap them. Fortunately the design gradually explained itself, until all the leaders of the community's diverse factions -- political, ethnic, and economic, as well as the city's engineer -- all agreed on its desirability.
I have been greatly aided in the Old Man River's City development by a group of volunteer architectural students from Washington University in St. Louis and, above all, by Professor James Fitzgibbon, head of Washington University's architectural school. As I am absent a great deal due to my world traveling, Jim, who is one of my best, lifelong friends, has been locally in command of the development. Most powerful support of the East St. Louisans has been provided by Wyvetter Younge, Carl Utchmann, and Bob Ahart.
Both the East St. Louis and St. Louis newspapers and radio and television stations have given good and favorable reception to the project. Now world-around interest in the Old Man River project is beginning to be manifest. As interest grows, more and more articles are being published about it, despite its having no public relations or advertising promotion. Quite to the contrary, I have asked the community to let the project gestate at a natural rate. Answer questions faithfully when they are asked, but otherwise be silently at work.
As the first favorable publicity occurred, it was inevitable that Illinois's political representatives would quickly offer the East St. Louisans their aid in securing government funds, which funds, however, would involve so many restrictions and compromises as to utterly emasculate the OMR City's design rationale. Thus it was a second victory for the project when I was able to dissuade the community from being tempted by the "millions" of dollars tendered them.
I have never engaged in a development that I have felt to have such promise for all humanity, while being, at the same time, so certain of realization, because its time is imminently at hand.
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In 1951, at North Carolina State University at Raleigh, I designed an automated cotton mill.
Situated upon the banks of many New England rivers and employing the latter's waterpower, all the great cotton mills of the nineteenth-century U.S.A. were built four stories high. They used giant pulley wheels mounted on the hubs of their great main waterwheels to drive leather belts which led slantingly upward into the mills' top floors and thence to the ceiling-hung, pulley-driven shafting mounted under the ceilings of each of the mills' four floors. There were many pairs of pulleys, their axes hung in parallel. Each driving wheel had its own idler wheel. When the belts were shifted over from the idler to the driving wheel, they drove the wheels of their respective machines of the various types of cotton mill machinery, which was positioned just below the ceiling-hung shafts. To operate those early-in-the-nineteenth- century mills the owners imported whole town-size armies of immigrants, who settled into the companies' houses. Having no other sources available, the millworkers bought all their supplies from the company stores. Their wages were minimal. After one-half a century the organized- labor movement forced wage increases for them.
In the early twentieth century the cotton-manufacturing business owners abandoned their New England mills and moved their machinery into the Southern states, where homes need not be heated and where they could reach a low-cost labor market. Instead of the belting, overhead shafting, and pulleys, they used the World-War-I-developed electric motor drives for each separate machine. This freedom from a shafting-and-waterpower-driven system economizedly (which is not always most economically) called for single-story factories with large roof areas. The latter's black tar and gravel roofs impounded vast quantities of Sun heat, which in turn produced many internal environment-control problems.
Before that southward cotton-milling migration my earliest job before World War I had been as an apprentice cotton millwright (cotton machine fitter). The new mill we were equipping with machinery was located in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Most of the machinery was manufactured in Lancashire, England, some in France. Working first as a helper to the Lancashire master machine fitters, I learned how to put together by myself every one of the various kinds of cotton mill machines. These began with the cotton bail "openers" at railroad track level and the blowing of the cotton to the top (fourth) floor of the mill, after which the cotton went through the pickers, combers' cards, and slubbers, all of which gradually cleaned and formed the cotton into a continuous single strand of cotton, which strands then ran through the twisters, into thread-spinning machines, and thereafter into cotton cloth weaving machines.
Eventually, together with other fitters, I taught the cotton mill workers how to operate their machines. It was a powerful and valuable experience. It was synergetic -- behavior of a whole system unpredicted by the behavior of anyone of its parts only separately considered.
Fifty years later, with much other experience including the development of large geodesic domes, I found I could build a large spherical environment control for much less expense in materials and labor than was required to produce the traditional one-story-high Southern cotton mill. Inside the great column-free space of the clear-span geodesic sphere, an octet-truss mast structure would support many levels of surrounding, outwardly cantilevered, octet-truss platforms.
In the great steamships of yesterday the engine room area occupied a very large part of the ship's interior space. This was occupied by large equipment, such as three-decks-high engines and boilers. In place of decks these engine rooms had open-grating platforms, walkways, and stairways, all open for seeing through and for free circulation of the air.
In 1952, at the university in Raleigh, North Carolina, I was asked to lead a full· term design problem in their department of architecture. I proposed the designing and detailed scale-modeling of a large spherical cotton mill within which -- and not touching the sphere -- would be open-frame grating platforms 'supported by octahedron-tetrahedron trusses cantilevered outwardly around the central mast at many levels, with the octet-trussed platforms occurring only where the machinery was to be situated. In the conventional Southern one-story cotton factory all the machines are on one single floor, requiring the horizontal transfer of the semiprocessed cotton products of one machine to the next machine in the manufacturing sequence. In mill terms this carry-across-of-product is called "doffing." In my vertical mill proposal all "doffing" was eliminated. The first processing machinery would be situated on a cantilevered open truss at the highest point around the mast, inside the dome, and the products would start a continuous downward flow from one machine to another accomplished exclusively by gravity. No doffing would be required.
I designed this factory in conjunction' with North Carolina State University's top cotton mill professors as well as with the operating superintendents and other industry experts from neighboring mills. All the cotton mill machinery companies' sales engineers participated in the project, which was being run for the senior class in architecture of North Carolina State University. (North Carolina State University happens to be the leading university in the cotton manufacturing area of the South, and has more engineers in that trade than can be found anywhere else.) We designed this factory to be completely automated. Inadvertently it became extraordinarily beautiful. (See Figs. 47, 47a and 47b.)
FIGURE 47. Model of automated cotton mill, Raleigh, North Carolina
FIGURE 47a. Model of automated cotton mill, Raleigh, North Carolina (interior detail)
FIGURE 47b. Cross-section of Raleigh cotton mill
When the cotton mill owners moved their mills from New England into the Southland, they did not move their own homes. They remained deliberately remote from any labor hassling. When I developed this new mill, which all the professionals considered to be a great improvement, the ownership of the cotton mills was so far away from where the mills are located that the owners heard nothing of our new cotton mill development. The people who managed the mills for the remote owners were economists and statisticians, seeking only to squeeze every cent out of costs. They had no engineering-design analytical capability. They sought only to reduce labor costs. Nobody was then considering new cotton-manufacturing technology. It was assumed that all possibilities of improving the manufacturing processes had been exhausted long ago. As a consequence the cotton mill owners paid no attention whatsoever to the mill I designed; the North Carolina State cotton-manufacturing engineering scientists who participated in the project agreed that my spherical, gravity-serviced mill was optimally efficient and highly desirable. The design exists. We probably will see it adopted one of these days. That is the way with critical-path items. They come into use only when class-one evolution needs them.
* * *
In the following year, 1952, at North Carolina State University I introduced the idea of what I called the mechanical Growth House. At that time I knew how to construct -- and had already constructed -- many geodesic domes. Some were enormous, spherical environment controls. As mentioned before, ever-larger spheres have ever-less surface area per unit of enclosed volume. Doubling a dome's diameter increases its surface fourfold while increasing its volume eightfold. Large domes can be completely transparent, allowing ultraviolet radiation to enter wherever necessary to support the growth of vegetation and the latter's impoundment of Sun energy through photosynthesis. Transparent domes can also be opaquely shuttered or mirrored where desired. It is highly feasible to produce two concentric, translucent spheres, the outer one being, for instance, 100 meters in diameter, and the inner one being four meters less in diameter than the outer one and having no metal conductors running between their two plastic and fiberglass intertrussed surfaces and with top and bottom, remotely controlled openings in both domes.
The southeastern United States has more of what we think of as individual farmers than anywhere else in this country. North Carolina State University, Cornell, and Iowa State University, are the leading agricultural-engineering- sciences schools in America. It was at North Carolina State that, in conjunction with the, Growth House, I conducted comparative studies into (1) the economics of individually operated versus business-corporation- operated farms and (2) the critical-limit size and other conditions of individually owned and personally operated farms versus those same questions for corporation-operated farms. I also made comparative studies of farms' operated by the very rich as tax write-offs versus the few little subsistence farms, such as those owned by the small tobacco farmers in North Carolina, which are worked entirely by the resident owner-farmers. These latter are very personal types of operation, in which the farmers carefully watch their crops, even to each tobacco leaf, to get the best out of their investment in the land. These little tobacco farms and certain subsistence farms were quite a different type of eco-technical game than that of the huge conglomerate-owned multithousands-of-acres farm operations. The small, individual farmers soon learned all the ways in which the government could help them run their farms.
For instance, the U.S. government at the time of the New Deal helped the small farmers by underwriting the cost of constructing little local dams on their land, which produced small ponds and lakes that the government stocked with fish. These new energy sources greatly increased the farmers' crop yields and earnings.
From that time on the farms began to hold the water that fell on them. People like myself who were light-plane flyers began to notice as we flew westward cross-country that, late in the afternoon with the Sun in the west, its brilliance began to reflect from the myriads of these little newly dammed farm ponds. Soon the glare of these farm ponds became almost blinding to the airplane pilot; before that period the farmland had been a dark carpet at dusk.
Overnight the New Deal had captured all that water for all those farms and had stocked them with highly reproductive fish.
I found that North Carolina State University at Raleigh was a great place to discuss the idea of a Growth House because the plant physiologists there were some of the best agricultural scientists I could find in America.
These scientists agreed with me about the desirability of producing a Growth House -- an enormous clear-span sphere with no interior bearing walls or columns. It would have a great central mast around which, one above the other, would, be cantilevered octahedron-tetrahedron arms, like branches of a tree extended at successive levels. The horizontally rotatable arms would carry the growing plants, with their roots hung in trays. The Growth House would be a multitiered-tray agriculture. Tray agriculture had already been studied a great deal in North Carolina and had been successfully developed. (We had some very satisfactory tray-growing experiments.) We then went on to find that inside the great sphere we could atomize the water, atomize all the chemical fertilization, and immerse the plants in a Sun-and-nutriment-filled atmosphere that would produce the greatest growth in a given time. The growth-supporting, rotatable arms could be separately rotated for cultivation. All the resultant food grown would gradually work downwardly by gravity, finally to be packaged or canned automatically and delivered in, cases out through the bottom. This Growth House is completely designed and ready to be produced. If it were to be used to produce the new "winged bean," the life-support worth of its product would be enormous.
Referring back to my designing of the Dymaxion House of 1927 -- that of producing an environment most favorable to a living organism's growth and to its dynamic process, and doing so in the most economically pleasing and safe manner -- we found that in designing our North Carolina Growth House we had used the same principles for inventorying its essential functions as those we had employed in designing the 1950-1956 North Carolina cotton mill and subsequent projects. Considering in some detail how such a most favorable environment can be arrived at, we see that, in the first place, we wished to have clear space wherever possible. Needing no interior bearing columns or walls, we would interrupt our enclosed space only when we had some service that we needed at that point. There would be no walls or partitions that arbitrarily stopped you from passing through. Space would be broken up only by devices that served you at preferred locations -- for instance, by a bathroom or a clothes-storage device.
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