World Cup Tales: The Creation Of A Design Classic, 1970

05-06-2010 02:08 - Source: 200percent.blogspot.com
It is one of the curious anomalies of our game that when we close our eyes and think of a football we tend to think of a specific type of football and, moreover, that the type of football that we are likely to think of is a specific type of ball which hasn’t been widely used in major tournaments for over thirty years. To geometrists, it would be known as spherical polyhedron, but we would be more likely to know it as a 32-panel football, a Buckminster ball or a “bucky ball”, it made its international debut at the 1970 World Cup finals in Mexico, and it is a perfect example of the application of science to commercial design. One of the more noticeable traits of the football itself is how difficult it is to design correctly. It needs to be neither too heavy nor too light and, more importantly, as near to perfectly round as possible. Until the late 1960s, the tradition football shape was the eighteen panel ball, which was made up of six blocks of three oblong strips of material. However, in the late 1960s, having signed a sponsorship deal with FIFA that still exists to this day, Adidas changed the design of the football itself and created something of a design classic – the Adidas Telstar. The key name in this development is Richard Buckminster Fuller. Born in 1895 in Massachusetts, Buckminster Fuller was an architect, whose most famous design was the geodesic dome, which was based upon a design by the German engineer Walther Bauersfeld, whose first geodesic dome was built into the roof of the corporate headquarters of the Zeiss Coroporation in Jena, Germany and was the world’s first planetarium. Initially designed as he was looking for a way of constructing a building which used the absolute minimal of building materials, by using hexangonal and pentagonal panels, Buckminster Fuller could create a perfect sphere, and this proved to be a radical design for buildings. Amongst the many geodesic domes around the world are the Eden Project ... - Continue...