3/01/2011

Consequences of fantastic, perverse and underrated urbanism

File:Dymaxion 2003 animation small1.gif

The Dymaxion map or Fuller map is a projection of a world map onto the surface of a polyhedron, which can then be unfolded to a net in many different ways and flattened to form a two-dimensional map which retains most of the relative proportional integrity of the globe map.
It was created by Buckminster Fuller, and patented by him during 1946, the patent application showing a projection onto a cuboctahedron.[1] The 1954 version published by Fuller with the title The AirOcean World Map used a slightly modified but mostly regular icosahedron as the base for the projection, and this is the version most commonly referred to today. The name Dymaxion was applied by Fuller to several of his inventions.
The Dymaxion projection is intended only for representations of the entire globe. It is not a gnomonic projection, whereby global data expands from the center point of a tangent facet outward to the edges. Instead, each triangle edge of the Dymaxion map matches the scale of a partial great circle on a corresponding globe, and other points within each facet shrink toward its middle, rather than enlarging to the peripheries.[2]
(Wikipedia)