Buckminster Fuller

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Buckminster Fuller
Born July 12, 1895
Flag of United States Milton, Massachusetts
Died July 1, 1983 (age 87)
Los Angeles, California, USA
Occupation Visionary, designer, architect, poet, author, inventor
Spouse Anne Fuller
Children 2

Richard Buckminster ("Bucky") Fuller (July 12,[1] 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American visionary, designer, architect, poet, author, and inventor.

Throughout his life, Fuller was concerned with the question "Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?" Considering himself an average individual without special monetary means or academic degree, he chose to devote his life to this question, trying to find out what an individual like him could do to improve humanity's condition that large organizations, governments, or private enterprises inherently could not do.

Pursuing this lifelong experiment, Fuller wrote twenty-eight books, coining and popularizing terms such as "spaceship earth", ephemeralization, and synergetics. He also worked in the development of numerous inventions, chiefly in the fields of design and architecture, the best known of which is the geodesic dome.

Late in his life, after working on his concepts for several decades, Fuller had achieved considerable public visibility. He traveled the world giving lectures, and received numerous honorary doctorates. Most of his inventions, however, never made it into production, and he was strongly criticized in most of the fields that he tried to influence (such as architecture), or simply dismissed as a hopeless utopian. Fuller's proponents, on the other hand, claim that his work has not yet received the attention that it deserves.

[edit] Biography

Fuller was born on July 12, 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews also the grandnephew of the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. The Fuller family in particular produced noted New England non-conformists[citation needed]. Attended Froebelian Kindergarten. Buckminster Fuller's father died when the boy was 12. Spending his youth on Bear Island off the coast of Maine, he was a boy with a natural propensity for design and for making things. He often made things from materials he brought home from the woods, and he even sometimes made his own tools. Notably, he experimented with designing a new apparatus for the human-powered propulsion of small boats. Years later he decided that this sort of experience had provided him not only an interest in design, but a habit of being fully familiar and knowledgeable about the materials that his ambitious later projects would require for actualization. Indeed, Fuller earned a machinist's certification, and he also knew how to fabricate using the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment relied upon in the sheet-metal trade.

Fuller was sent to Milton Academy, in Massachusetts. Afterwards, he began studying at Harvard but was expelled from the university twice: first, for entertaining an entire dance troupe; and second, for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest." By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment. Later in life, Fuller received a Sc.D. from Bates College in 1969.

Between his sessions at Harvard, he worked for a time in Canada as a mechanic in a textile mill, and later as a laborer working 12 hours a day in the meat-packing industry. He married Anne Hewlett in 1917, and he also served in the U.S. Navy in World War I. In the Navy he was employed as an aboard-ship radio operator, as an editor of a publication, and as a crash-boat commander. After discharge, he again worked for a period in the meat-packing business, where he acquired management experience. In the early 1920s he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing light-weight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing — though ultimately the company failed.

In 1927 at the age of 32, bankrupt and jobless, living in inferior housing in Chicago, Illinois, he saw his beloved young daughter Alexandra die of the complications of polio and spinal meningitis. He felt responsible, and this drove him to drink and to the verge of suicide. At the last moment he decided instead to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."

Fuller accepted a position at a small college in North Carolina, Black Mountain College. There, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began work on the project that would make him famous and revolutionize the field of engineering, the geodesic dome. In 1949, he erected the world’s first geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. It was a 14-foot diameter dome constructed using lightweight aluminum aircraft tubing with a vinyl-plastic skin in the simple form of a tetrahedron (a triangular pyramid). To prove his design, Bucky and several of his students who had helped to build it would hang daringly from the structure’s framework to awe his non-believers. The U.S. government recognized the importance of the discovery and employed him to make small domes for the army. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the world.

For the next half-century Fuller contributed a wide range of ideas, designs and inventions to the world, particularly in the areas of practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. He documented his life, philosophy and ideas scrupulously in a daily diary and in 28 publications. Fuller financed some of his experiments with inherited family money, sometimes augmented by funds invested by his professional collaborators, one example being the Dymaxion Car project.

His international recognition was established by the success of his huge geodesic domes in the 1950s. Fuller taught at Southern Illinois University Carbondale from 1959 – 1970 (Assistant Professor 1959 – 68, full Professor in 1968) in the School of Art and Design. Working as a designer, scientist, developer, and writer, for many years he also lectured all over the world on design. Fuller collaborated at SIU with the designer John McHale. In 1965 Fuller inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in Paris. This was (in his own words) devoted to "applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity."

Fuller believed human societies would soon be relying mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity. He hoped for an age of "omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity."

Fuller was ultimately awarded 28 US patents and many honorary doctorates. On January 16, 1970 Fuller received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects and also received numerous other awards.

He died on July 1, 1983 at the age of 87, a guru of the design, architecture, and 'alternative' communities (such as Drop City, an experimental artists community to whom he awarded the 1966 "Dymaxion Award" for "poetically economic" domed living structures). His wife was comatose and dying of cancer and while visiting her in the hospital he exclaimed at one point: "She is squeezing my hand!". He then stood up, suffered a massive heart attack and died an hour later. His wife died 36 hours later. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston, Massachusetts.

[edit] Philosophy and worldview

Buckminster Fuller strove to inspire humanity to take a comprehensive view of the finite world we live in and the infinite possibilities for an ever-increasing standard of living within it. Deploring waste, he advocated a principle that he termed "ephemeralization" — which in essence (according to Stewart Brand) Fuller coined to mean "doing more with less." Wealth can be increased by recycling resources into newer, higher value products whose more technically sophisticated design requires less material. In practice, it has often meant miniaturization, for example, as when table-model calculating machines were succeeded over time by smaller ones, until the calculator of today fits in one's hand. Fuller also introduced synergetics, which is a metaphoric language for communicating experiences using geometric concepts. (long before the term synergy became popular).

Fuller was one of the first to propagate a systemic worldview (see 'Operating manual for Spaceship Earth', 'Synergetics') and explored principles of energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design. He cited Francois de Chardenedes' view that petroleum from the standpoint of its replacement cost out of our current energy "budget" (essentially the incoming solar flux), he declared that it had cost nature "over a million dollars" per U.S. gallon ($300,000/L) to produce. From this point of view its use as a transportation fuel by people commuting to work represents a huge net loss compared to their earnings (See: Critical Path pp. xxxiv-xxxv).

He dedicated himself to advancing the success and fulfillment of humanity and lived by a set of self-disciplines; he was deeply concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet was profoundly optimistic about humanity's prospects. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the "technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life", his analysis of the condition of "Spaceship Earth" led him to conclude that at a certain point in the 1970s humanity had crossed an unprecedented watershed.

Fuller was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of key recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had reached a critical level, such that competition for necessities was no longer necessary. Cooperation had became the optimum survival strategy. "Selfishness", he declared, "is unnecessary and...unrationalizable...War is obsolete..."

By considering historical comparisons like the fact that even relatively poor people today are able to travel at speeds and with a degree of comfort which were unobtainable at any price in earlier times, and that illnesses that were fatal even to kings in the past can now be cured with affordable drugs, he concluded that everyone alive today can potentially live like a "billionaire." Hence he described the human race as "four billion billionaires."

Besides important comprehensiveness of thought and his philosophical concepts, Fuller's most lasting insights may be geometric. He claimed that the natural analytic geometry of the universe was based on arrays of tetrahedra. He developed this in several ways, from the close-packing of spheres and the number of compressive or tensile members required to stabilize an object in space. Some deep confirming results were that the strongest possible homogeneous truss is cyclically tetrahedral.

[edit] External links

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