J. Baldwin

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James Tennant Baldwin (born 1934) (whose books and articles have been published under the names J. Baldwin, Jay Baldwin, and James T. Baldwin) is an American industrial designer and writer. Baldwin was at one-time a student of Buckminster Fuller; Baldwin's work has been inspired by Fuller's principles and (in the case of some of Baldwin's published writing) has popularized and interpreted Fuller's ideas and achievements. In his own right, Baldwin has been a figure in American designers' efforts to incorporate solar, wind, and other renewable sources of energy. In his career, being a fabricator has been as important as being a designer. Baldwin is noted as the inventor of the geodesic "Pillow Dome."

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[edit] Life and work

J. Baldwin was born the son of an engineer. Baldwin has said that, at 18, he heard Buckminster Fuller speak for 14 hours non-stop. This was in 1951 at the University of Michigan, where Baldwin had enrolled to learn automobile design because a friend of his had been killed in a car accident that Baldwin attributed to bad design. He worked with Fuller prior to graduation from U. of M. in 1955. During his student years, Baldwin worked (in a unique job-sharing role) in an auto factory assembly line. He went on to do graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. As a young designer in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he designed advanced camping equipment with Bill Moss Associates. Thereafter, he taught simultaneously at San Francisco State College (now called San Francisco State University), San Francisco Art Institute, and the Oakland campus of California College of Arts & Crafts for about six years.

The period 1968-69 found him both a visiting lecturer at Southern Illinois University and the design editor of the innovative Whole Earth Catalog. (The Catalog came out in many editions between 1968 and 1998, and Baldwin continued to edit and write for both the Catalog and an offshoot publication, CoEvolution Quarterly, later renamed Whole Earth Review.) In the early 1970s, Baldwin taught at Pacific High School.

Baldwin was at the center of experimentation with geodesic domes (an unconventional building-design approach, explored by Fuller, that maximizes strength and covered area in relation to materials used). He also dove enthusiastically into the application of renewable energy sources in homes and in food-production facilities, working with Integrated Life Support Systems Laboratories (ILS, in New Mexico) and with Dr John Todd and the other New Alchemists involved with the "Ark" project. Baldwin's initial involvement with solar energy was during that very experimental, ad-lib phase when much was moving from principles or theory into actual development. In the 1970s, at ILS, he was the co-developer of what has been touted as the world's first building to be heated and otherwise powered by solar and wind power exclusively.

Baldwin referred to his own rural home as "a three-dimensional sketchpad."

During the Jerry Brown administration, Baldwin worked in the California Office of Appropriate Technology. Since the 1970s, Baldwin has continued to work as a designer in association with numerous organizations and projects. He organized for himself a mobile design studio and machine workshop (in a van pulling an Airstream trailer) to drive to various projects across America.

With the ears of a wider audience in the 1980s, Baldwin developed an incisive critique of the American automobile industry, which he viewed as over-focused on superficial marketing concerns and farcically under-concerned with real innovation and improvement. He was also a constructive critic of the emerging industries manufacturing "soft technology" equipment like wind turbines.

In the 1990s, Baldwin wrote a book about Buckminster Fuller, his ideas, experiments, and influence, Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller's Ideas for Today.

In the late 1990s, he worked with the Rocky Mountain Institute (Snowmass, Colorado) in the research, design, and development of the ultralight, ultra-efficient "Hypercar" — a prototype by way of which independent designers hope to show the way for the world's auto manufacturers. With conceptual development having begun in 1991, the current version of the Hypercar uses a small generator to power an electric motor in each wheel.

Given his long-term role as a "technology" editor, something should be mentioned about the scope of Baldwin's focus on technology. His interests remained broader than that represented in the shifting media and popular focus of the mid 1980s and later, which inclined to highlight the micro chip and electronic devices based on it. Baldwin has continued to point out the value of (and need for evaluation of) technologies within a larger perimeter. Certainly shelter and transportation technologies have always interested him. So have tools, and whether a device or tool or process was freshly innovative or age-old in concept, if it enabled a person to “do the job” with wood, metal, fiberglass panels, soil, trees, or whatever, it remained worthy of Baldwin’s attention. Whereas the personal computer often (though not necessarily) inclines its operator toward imagination, almost in the sense of entertainment, Baldwin has remained equally interested in doing, in application. And while he has never ceased to be interested in the products of the factory, Baldwin has always wanted to empower individuals and small teams of people to accomplish something.

Baldwin, as one of the notable designer technologists whose cross-disciplinary approaches have opened new territory, was featured in the 1994 documentary film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future. The film viewed these designers as "outlaws" whose careers have necessarily developed "outside the box" of their time, largely unsupported by mainstream industry and often beyond the pale of mainstream academia, as well.

J. Baldwin invented (and has built) a permanent, transparent, insulated structure, of aluminum and Teflon, he calls a "Pillow Dome" — said to have withstood 135-mph winds and tons of snow. The Pillow Dome weighs just one-half pound per square foot. Baldwin continues to practice design (as exemplified in the unique and aerodynamic 'mobile-room' Quick-Up camper he has put on the market) and to teach design at the college level. In recent years, he has taught at Sonoma State University and at California College of Arts & Crafts.

[edit] Quotes

  • "Human handling and manipulating of materials and the tools that work them, as well as making and testing your own prototypes, ensures that nothing gets lost or diluted in the translation from thought to thing."
  • "Two or three-dimensional CAD renderings can neither predict nor project complex and often subtle interactions with the actual world. They can help refine an idea, but they cannot innovate or identify opportunities for synergetic advantage."

[edit] Books

[edit] External links

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