Richard Buckminster Fuller (Video Coming Soon)
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Commonly known as Bucky, Richard Buckminster Fuller was an inventor, author, and systems theorist, and even the second world president of MENSA. He devoted his life to unraveling the intricate workings of the universe. His interests were so holistic that to try to even summarize the contents of his 30 some odd books would require a whole playlist and though it is interesting content that we urge our viewers to look into we will instead focus on the small portion of his work that made him renowned worldwide as an Architect.
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Bucky was born in 1895 and often attributed his unique way of seeing the world to the many scientific break throughs that occurred in the decades following his birth:
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"When I was three the electron was discovered... When I was 14 man did get to the North Pole, and when I was 16 he got to the South Pole... when I was 7 the Wright brothers suddenly flew... when I was 23 the human voice came over the radio for the first time."
- Fuller, Everything I Know, 1975
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Bucky excelled at mathematics and would often irritate his teachers with his many questions and challenges to their claims. He was kicked out of Harvard twice, lost a child, and was struggling financially. After a series of business failures he considered suicide so that his wife and second child could cash in on life insurance when in 1927 he had a revolutionary experience that he later described as a disembodied voice speaking to him to say:
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"From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others."
- Fuller, Everything I Know, 1975
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Of course, there probably was no voice and it’s likely Bucky made up the story as a metaphor for these formative days in his life but regardless of the reasons, Bucky returned to his work with a new drive.
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Bucky’s philosophy was devoted to thorough understanding of the universe, unbounded by discipline or conventional knowledge. He believed that the comprehensivist was superior to the specialist. His unique way of looking at the world allowed him to make some key observations that helped him develop his inventions for the rest of his career. These observations spanned from broad claims about the fundamental nature of the universe such as "the universe is in tension” and “you have a tetrahedron, and that is the basic structure of the universe” to very specific processes for problem solving like efficient material use and his Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science. His personal mission statement for how he conducts himself in life is what he calls the Trim Tab, a small flap on the wings of planes and the rudders of large boats that makes steering possible; a small component that provides a massive change for the trajectory of the entire system. Bucky tried to be a trim tab for society, steering it in a more logical direction.
Archi
Fuller recognized that the human species had reached a point in its development where it was possible to produce more than we consumed, he claimed our global economy was in a state of surplus but we were still acting as though we were in a state of scarcity. His goal was to redesign society to make it 100% sustainable for 100% of the population; solving humanities issues with ingenuity and one of the first places he tried was with housing.
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Early in his career Bucky worked with his father-in-law's architecture firm to pioneer a building system akin to our modern insulated concrete forms (a variation of the material is still used today as sound eliminating panels). His building company completed over 240 houses using this method but the financial strain of innovation, the cost of patents, testing, and the difficulty of training workers in a new building method, ended up collapsing the company. Later he employed his design principles involving material and structural efficiency to develop multiple iterations of his Wichita house and his Dymaxion house. Eventually he even designed a house compatible with his most famous architectural creation: The Geodesic Dome.
Though Fuller did not invent the geodesic dome (that accomplishment is generally attributed to Walther Bauersfeld) he did more than anyone to develop it as a practical component in the modern builder's repertoire. In 1975 he claimed that there were over 100,000 geodesic domes worldwide in various applications from emergency shelters to children's play ground structures (like the one I climbed at my elementary school). One of the most famous geodesic domes (technically a sphere) associated with Bucky is Spaceship Earth, built in 1982 at the Epcot Center in Walt Disney World, Florida; it was not the direct product of Fuller but was named in his honor; Spaceship Earth was a term that he popularized with his 1968 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, the term is meant to remind us of our mutual dependence upon each other as fellow passengers on this planet in the vast emptiness of space; a concept that much of Bucky's philosophy is based upon.
Thanks to his many books and thorough documentation of all of his endeavors we have access to a rich description of Bucky’s life. A lecture series he recorded in 1975 called Everything I Know, was just that, a thorough dissertation of the many facts Bucky had accrued in his lifetime that help us to understand how he did the things that he did. The lecture series is 42 hours of publicly available audio and video that give us a more intimate understanding of an individual human’s philosophy than can be achieved with any but the best autobiographies. Watching the series is like having your grandfather explain to you the history (and mysteries) of the universe.
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Bucky’s ideas may not have revolutionized the world as he predicted; we have not yet switched over to a tensile way of building and we still think of a cube as the basic geometry of the universe instead of a tetrahedron; had he been given just a few more decades to work towards his goals the future may have been a very different place than it is now on track to be. Bucky Fuller is worth remembering for his unique perspective of the world that can help today's master builder's be more efficient, and by extension, more ethical.
