[carapace]

Never did find it. In one of his books he points out that associating the second power with the area of a square (as opposed to some other base shape, like a triangle or circle) is a choice we make.

Consider triangles (hallucinate the bases):

    Side  Area

     1 /\ 1


       /\
    2 /\/\ 4


       /\
    3 /\/\ 9
     /\/\/\

[corpus]

it wasn't hard to find once i read your explanation

https://books.google.com/books?id=03fSBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA20&dq=bu...

[carapace]

First of all: THANK YOU THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!! It's been years, over a decade. This is awesome. Thank you.

What did you do to find it? (Is Google "punishing" me? My Google-fu used to be strong but I could not find this.)

[corpus]

Sure :) You mentioned it was in a book, so the first thing I did was go to books.google.com; after that, I just typed in some keywords that seemed right - you can see them at the top, I searched for [buckminster fuller triangle squaring power]

[carapace]

Thank you. :)