Airocean World

Dymaxion™ Maps

Fuller used his Dymaxion trademark to market various inventions, including his maps. Dymaxion map most commonly refers to the icosahedral layout shown above, though his first ever Dymaxion map was in fact based on a cuboctahedron, reproduced approximately here.

For each polyhedral face, Fuller developed his own projection, but these reproductions use the gnomonic projection instead for ease of implementation.

Incidentally, this year (2013) is the 70^th anniversary of this cuboctahedral map, which was published by Life magazine in 1943.

Technical Notes

The maps above were rendered using a custom version of D3, modified to support clipping against arbitrary spherical polygons.

This was necessary because unlike the octahedron, the icosahedron cannot be unfolded exactly along a whole meridian.

The polyhedral plugin automatically generates an outline in geographic coordinates, which can be passed directly to D3 as a clip polygon.

Further Reading

• R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World, Life Magazine, March 1943.
• Faumaxion II by Michal Migurski allows you to navigate icosahedral raster tiles.
• Icosahedral, dodecahedral and other maps, Carlos A. Furuti.
• Dymaxion Map, Buckminster Fuller Institute.
• the buckymap puzzle, Susanne Schuricht.
• Myriahedral projections, Jarke J. van Wijk.

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