axwl:

Buckminster Füller & Shoji Sadao, Cloud Nine (1960)

Fuller’s exploration of housing solutions that extended above the erth’s surface are represented in this image in wich spherical clouds house floating cities. he argued that geodesic structures increase in strenght as they grow in scale and therefore have no practical limitations on their size. e calculated that when sunlight heats the air inside a geodesic sphere with a diameter of half-mile or more, the combined weight og the interior air and the sphere’s physical structure would be lighter than the atmoshpere, allowing the sphere to rise in the air. Fuller playfully referred to these flotable cloud structure as Cloud Nine. Each sphere could be designated to hover at a particular altitude and house several thousand passengers.

(Source: lightismore)