Monday, April 27, 2009

Star Trek & Sixties Design, 2: The Geodesic Spaceship

All those years flipping through art & design books, working at the art college library, I have a database of images in my head. It's fun matching them up with Star Trek, but time consuming.


As someone who got a D in high school geometry, I'm going out on a limb to say the gigantic spaceship Fesarius, toward which the Enterprise is flying (or being dragged in a tractor beam, I think), is a geodesic dome.
(This shot, left, is from the 2006 remastering of the 1966 Star Trek episode "The Corbomite Maneuver." )

R. Buckminster Fuller didn't invent the geodesic dome, but he popularized it in his design, for instance, of the U.S. Pavilion for the 1967 World’s Fair, in Montreal, left.

Fuller said:
"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
Magnified on the Enterprise's bridge screen, below left (not a remastered GCI), the globes of the Fesarius make it look more like a lava lamp

Edward Craven Walker applied for a patent in 1965 for his invention he called the Astro, but it was marketed as a Lava Lite.

4 comments:

  1. I think the Fesarius is a version (using gold tacks?) of the old cloves-in-orange Christmas ornament.

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  2. Ha! I hadn't seen that, but you're right! However, that orange is not a 1960s design.

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  3. I remembering poking cloves in oranges for my mom to make things to hang on the tree!

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  4. Me too! I made one a couple years ago, too--those cloves have hard points on them that really do a number on your thumb.

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