"Architecture on our planet Earth is the design process of building macrostructures out of microstructures, the building of visible structures out of invisible structures." (Synergetics 790.24)
The relevance of synergetics to this process can be easily inferred:
"The whole theory of structure is both altered and enormously expanded and implemented by the introduction of a mathematically co-ordinate, comprehensively operative, discontinuous-compression, continuous-tension system as inherent to synergetics and its omni-rationality of vectorial energy accounting". (Synergetics 212.00)
In the course of the text, "The Comprehensive Man" (Reader, p.331), Fuller recommends the study of chemistry to architecture students.
Of course, there may be more involved than Fuller is prepared to mention:
"Architecture is a thing of art, a phenomenon of the emotions, lying outside questions of construction and beyond them. The purpose of construction is to make things hold together; of architecture to move us". Corbusier (1923, p.257)
The relations between geometry and classical architecture are explored in Pedoe (1976).
A classic introduction to architecture in general is Pevsner (1963, 1968). For 20th century architecture, see Banham (1960), Curtis (1996).
Fuller hardly ever mentions other architects or schools of architecture. The main exception was the Bauhaus.
See also Performance, Pre-Dymaxion Architecture and Naval Architecture.
© Paul Taylor 2001