Whole Earth Catalog 1968

Whole Earth, Winter, 1998

The greatest clue to the inner structure of any dynamic process ties in its reaction to change.

The Mousgoum cannot afford, as we do, to regard maintenance as a nuisance which is best forgotten until it is time to call the local plumber. It is in the same hands as the building operation itself, and its exigencies are as likely to shape the form as those of the initial construction.

The selfconscious individual's grasp of problems is constantly misled. His concepts and categories, besides being arbitrary and unsuitable, are self-perpetuating. Under the influence of concepts, he not only does things from a biased point of view but sees them biasedly as well. The concepts control his perception of fit and misfit -- until in the end he sees nothing but deviations from his conceptual dogmas, and loses not only the urge but even the mental opportunity to frame his problems more appropriately.

The solution of a design problem is really only another effort to find a unified description. The search for realization through constructive diagrams is an effort to understand the required form so fully that there is no longer a rift between its functional specification and the shape it takes.

Two misfits are seen to interact only because, in some sense at least, they deal with the same kind of physical consideration....

It is such a physical center of implication, if I may call it that, which the designer finds it easy to grasp. Because it refers to a distinguishable physical property or entity, it can be expressed diagrammatically and provides a possible non-verbal point of entry into the problem.

On Growth and Form

A paradigm classic. Everyone dealing with growth or form in any manner can use the book. We've seen worn copies on the shelves of artists, inventors, engineers, computer systems designers, biologists. Would one of you do a thorough review of D'Arcy Thompson's venerable book for the CATALOG?

When Plateau made the wire framework of a regular tetrahedron and dipped it in soap-solution, he obtained in an instant a beautifully symmetrical system of six films, meeting three by three in four edges and those four edges running from the corners of the figure to its centre of symmetry. Here they meet, two by two, at the Maraldi angle; and the films meet three by three, to form the re-entrant solid angle which we have called a `Miraldi pyramid' in our account of the architecture of the honeycomb.

The very same configuration is easily recognized in the minute siliceous skeleton of Callimitra. There are two discrepancies, neither of which need raise any difficulty. The figure is not rectilinear but a spherical tetrahedron, such as might be formed by the boundary edges of a tetrahedral cluster of four co-equal bubbles; and just as Plateau extended his experiment by blowing a small bubble in the centre of his tetrahedral system, so we have a central bubble also here. This bubble may be of any size; but its situation (if it be present at all) is always the same, and its shape is always such as to give the Maraldi angles at its own four corners. The tension of its own walls, and those of the films by which it is supported or slung, all balance one another. Hence the bubble appears in plane projection as a curvilinear equilateral triangle; and we have only got to convert this plane diagram into the corresponding solid to obtain the spherical tetrahedron we have been seeking to explain (Fig. 63)