时差N小时:巴克敏斯特福乐和他的球型屋顶

Ever heard of a man named Buckminster Fuller, orBucky, as hisfriends called him?

听说过一个叫巴克敏斯特·福乐的人吗?

R.Buckminster Fuller was a twentiethcenturyscientist, philosopher, inventor, and was alsonamed a great architect.

朋友们常叫他巴基。巴克敏斯特·福乐是二十世纪的科学家，哲学家，发明家，同时他也是一名伟大的建筑师。

Part of what made Bucky so special was his concernfor the planet and humanity.

他如此特别的部分原因是他很关心地球和人类。

When you have a shortage of resources, he said, you get war.

他说当缺乏资源时，就会发生战争。

Thus, he developed an idea called ComprehensiveAnticipatory Design Science.

所以，他开创了一种观念，叫作“全面预期设计科学”。

It’s a mouthful, but what it entails is his belief that to solve humanity’smajor problems.

这个名字有点拗口，但它需要巴基的信念来解决人类主要问题。

We have to look forward to the future; we have to anticipate what will becomeproblems asresources diminish, etc.

我们必须展望未来;我们必须预期会出现的问题，比如资源减少等等。

His goal? Quote:

他是目标?

“More and more life support for everybody, with less and less resources.”

引用一句话：用最少的资源维持更多人的生活。

He wasespecially interested in developing more efficient housing; that is, a new way ofconstructingbuildings so that they provide more housing space with the use of fewer resources.

他对开发更高效的住房特别有兴趣;那是一种建造房屋的新的方式，用更少的资源提供更多的住房空间。

One solutionhe came up with in the late 1940′s is the geodesic dome, the invention he ismost famous for.

上世纪40年代末，巴基提出了一个解决方法，即球型屋顶，这也是他最著名的发明。

The geodesic dome is a structure shaped like a piece of a sphere.

球型屋顶是一个形状像球体的结构。

It’s made up of a complexnetwork of triangles, and the more complex this network the closerthe comes to the shape of atrue sphere.

它由一个复杂的网状三角形构成。网状结构越复杂，建筑物的形状就越接近于真实的球体。

What’s so great about the dome is that it does exactly what Bucky wanted; that is,it has thehighest ratio of enclosed area to external surface.

圆屋顶额伟大之处在于它封闭区到外部表面的比例最高，那正是巴基想要的效果。

In other words, it uses fewer materialsto create more housing space.

换句话说，就是用更少的材料建造更多住房空间。