#HTE

Brendan Ravenhill Creates Folding Version of Buckminster’s Fuller’s Dymaxion Map

Lots of designers want to change the world. Buckminster Fuller did, at least representationally, by conceiving the following image:

Might’ve taken your brain a second to recognize that particular chain of islands. Fuller’s Dymaxion Air-Ocean World, as he called it, presented the world from a different perspective. Rather than separate continents, through Fuller’s eyes we see “Earth as an archipelago absent of its territories.” As Areaware explains,

Fuller felt that a world map was needed which highlights the relationships among all nations and cultures of the world, revealing what unites us rather than what separates us. In Fuller’s own words, “the Dymaxion Map reveals a One-World Island in a One-World Ocean”, helping us to view the world as one interdependent system.

It’s telling that Fuller conceived of the Dymaxion Map in the early 1940s, in the midst of the globe-ravaging World War II. Life magazine first published it in 1943. Eleven years later, along with architect and collaborator Shoji Sadao, Fuller released a version projected onto an icosahedron.

Industrial designer Brendan Ravenhill has how revived this design for Areaware. Ravenhill’s version comes printed on Tyvek and is embedded with magnets, so that one can choose to examine the map flat, or fold it up to form an icosahedral globe:

The $15 map (or $40 for all three colorways) is part of Areaware’s 2016 Fall Collection.