Buckminster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Innovation That Revolutionized Map Design (1943)

In 2017, we brought you news of a world map pur­port­ed­ly more accu­rate than any to date, designed by Japan­ese archi­tect and artist Hajime Narukawa. The map, called the Autha­Graph, updates a cen­turies-old method of turn­ing the globe into a flat sur­face by first con­vert­ing it to a cylin­der. Win­ner of Japan’s Good Design Grand Award, it serves as both a bril­liant design solu­tion and an update to our out­mod­ed con­cep­tions of world geog­ra­phy.

But as some read­ers have point­ed out, the Autha­Graph also seems to draw quite heav­i­ly on an ear­li­er map made by one of the most vision­ary of the­o­rists and design­ers, Buck­min­ster Fuller, who in 1943 applied his Dymax­ion trade­mark to the map you see above, which will like­ly remind you of his most rec­og­niz­able inven­tion, the Geo­des­ic Dome, “house of the future.”

Whether Narukawa has acknowl­edged Fuller as an inspi­ra­tion I can­not say. In any case, 73 years before the Autha­Graph, the Dymax­ion Map achieved a sim­i­lar feat, with sim­i­lar moti­va­tions. As the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute (BFI) points out, “The Fuller Pro­jec­tion Map is [or was] the only flat map of the entire sur­face of the Earth which reveals our plan­et as one island in the ocean, with­out any visu­al­ly obvi­ous dis­tor­tion of the rel­a­tive shapes and sizes of the land areas, and with­out split­ting any con­ti­nents.”

Fuller pub­lished his map in Life mag­a­zine, as a cor­rec­tive, he said, “for the lay­man, engrossed in belat­ed, war-taught lessons in geog­ra­phy…. The Dymax­ion World map is a means by which he can see the whole world fair­ly at once.” Fuller, notes Kelsey Camp­bell-Dol­laghan at Giz­mo­do, “intend­ed the Dymax­ion World map to serve as a tool for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion between nations.”

Fuller believed, writes BFI, that “giv­en a way to visu­al­ize the whole plan­et with greater accu­ra­cy, we humans will be bet­ter equipped to address chal­lenges as we face our com­mon future aboard Space­ship Earth.” Was he naïve or ahead of his time?

We may have had a good laugh at a recent repli­ca of Fuller’s near­ly undriv­able, “scary as hell,” 1930 Dymax­ion Car, one of his first inven­tions. Many of Fuller’s con­tem­po­raries also found his work bizarre and imprac­ti­cal. Eliz­a­beth Kol­bert at The New York­er sums up the recep­tion he often received for his “schemes,” which “had the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry qual­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with sci­ence fic­tion (or men­tal hos­pi­tals).” The com­men­tary seems unfair.

Fuller’s influ­ence on archi­tec­ture, design, and sys­tems the­o­ry has been broad and deep, though many of his designs only res­onat­ed long after their debut. He thought of him­self as an “antic­i­pa­to­ry design sci­en­tist,” rather than an inven­tor, and remarked, “if you want to teach peo­ple a new way of think­ing, don’t both­er try­ing to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of think­ing.” In this sense, we must agree that the Dymax­ion map was an unqual­i­fied suc­cess as an inspi­ra­tion for inno­v­a­tive map design.

In addi­tion to its pos­si­bly indi­rect influ­ence on the Autha­Graph, Fuller’s map has many promi­nent imi­ta­tors and sparked “a rev­o­lu­tion in map­ping,” writes Camp­bell-Dol­laghan. She points us to, among oth­ers, the Cryos­phere, fur­ther up, a Fuller map “arranged based on ice, snow, glac­i­ers, per­mafrost and ice sheets”; to Dubai-based Emi­rates airline’s map show­ing flight routes; and to the “Google­spiel,” an inter­ac­tive Dymax­ion map built by Rehab­stu­dio for Google Devel­op­er Day, 2011.

And, just above, we see the Dymax­ion Woodocean World map by Nicole San­tuc­ci, win­ner of 2013’s DYMAX REDUX, an “open call to cre­ate a new and inspir­ing inter­pre­ta­tion of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Map.” You’ll find a hand­ful of oth­er unique sub­mis­sions at BFI, includ­ing the run­ner-up, Clouds Dymax­ion Map, below, by Anne-Gaelle Amiot, an “absolute­ly beau­ti­ful hand-drawn depic­tion of a real­i­ty that is almost always edit­ed from our maps: cloud pat­terns cir­cling above Earth.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Buck­min­ster Fuller Tells the World “Every­thing He Knows” in a 42-Hour Lec­ture Series (1975)

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live and Learn More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness