Dymaxion Map

Created by Buckminster Fuller. We're astronauts aboard a little spaceship called Earth.

$24.50Ref: 2484Available now

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Commendations

Teaches people to see the world from a broader, more inclusive perspective
Invaluable classroom resource
860 x 560 mm
Comes folded

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The Dymaxion map is a projection of a world map onto the surface of a polyhedron, which can then be unfolded to a net in many different ways and flattened to form a two-dimensional map which retains most of the relative proportional integrity of the globe map.

It was created by Buckminster Fuller, and patented by him in 1946, the patent application showing a projection onto a cuboctahedron. The 1954 version published by Fuller used a slightly modified but mostly regular icosahedron as the base for the projection, and this is the version most commonly referred to today. The name Dymaxion was applied by Fuller to several of his inventions.

This Raleigh Edition of the Dymaxion map, first designed in Raleigh, North Carolina, is a vivid color reproduction of the 1954 rendition, reproduced exactly as it was first conceived and produced by its creator. Both the land masses and the grayscale shading in the oceans represent mean low annual temperatures.

Unlike most other projections, the Dymaxion is intended purely for representations of the entire globe. It is not a 'gnomonic' projection, whereby global data expands from the center point of a tangent facet outward to the edges. Instead, each triangle edge of the Dymaxion map matches the scale of a partial great circle on a corresponding globe, and other points within each facet shrink toward its middle, rather than enlarging to the peripheries.

It therefore has less distortion of relative size of areas, most notably when compared to the Mercator projection; and less distortion of shapes of areas, notably when compared to the Peters projection.

More unusually, the Dymaxion map has no "right way up". Fuller frequently argued that in the universe there is no "up" and "down", or "north" and "south", and that the north-up-superior/south-down-inferior presentation of most other world maps is cultural bias.

The visionary Fuller designed this map to help us recognize that ''we're all astronauts aboard a little spaceship called Earth.'' Because it can be reconfigured into a variety of patterns, it also communicates the point that "there are many ways to see the world."