modulesconstellations
For Fuller it was a great enigma why one form should endure while another does not, especially because he disclaimed both the term “bodies” and the concept of “building blocks” that lead one to believe that it is obvious that a form will be retained. Today every physicist affirms that the concept of “building blocks of material” has been rejected once and for all.
Fuller’s little rubber hoses, which he introduced into his model as the nodal connectors for the rods, are a ridiculous detail from a material point of view, but from a conceptual point of view they are a firstrate tool. Flexible nodes, which Fuller stipulated as early as 1932, make it possible to create a model that enables the formation of rigid “bodies” on the basis of moveable constellations and that thinks of stabilization as a self-stabilizing pattern. Fuller attributes the retained form to a recurring pattern; he defines structure as a “locally regenerative pattern integrity.”