Buckminster Fuller

For the EP by Nerina Pallot, see Buckminster Fuller EP.

Buckminster Fuller
Born	Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-07-12)July 12, 1895 Milton, Massachusetts, United States
Died	July 1, 1983(1983-07-01) (aged 87) Los Angeles, United States
Education	Harvard University (attended)
Occupation(s)	Designer, author, inventor
Spouse	Anne Hewlett ​ (m. 1917)​

Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller (/ˈfʊlər/; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor.

Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres.

Fuller was the second World President of Mensa from 1974 to 1983.

Guinea Pig B:

I AM NOW CLOSE TO 88 and I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed.
— Bucky Fuller, 1983

Biography

As a young man

Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews, and grand-nephew of the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. He spent much of his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine. He attended Froebelian Kindergarten. He had trouble with geometry, being unable to understand the abstraction that a chalk dot on the blackboard represented a mathematical point, or that an imperfectly drawn line with an arrow on the end was meant to stretch off to infinity. He often made items from materials he found in the woods, and sometimes made his own tools. He experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats. By age 12, he had invented a 'push pull' system for propelling a row boat by use of an inverted umbrella connected to the transom with a simple oar lock which allowed the user to face forward to point the boat toward its destination. Later in life, Fuller took exception to the term "invention".

Years later, he decided that this sort of experience had provided him with not only an interest in design, but also a habit of being familiar with and knowledgeable about the materials that his later projects would require. Fuller earned a machinist's certification, and knew how to use the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment used in the sheet metal trade.

Education

Fuller attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and after that began studying at Harvard College, where he was affiliated with Adams House. He was expelled from Harvard twice: first for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe, and then, after having been readmitted, for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest." By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment.

Wartime experience

Between his sessions at Harvard, Fuller worked in Canada as a mechanic in a textile mill, and later as a laborer in the meat-packing industry. He also served in the U.S. Navy in World War I, as a shipboard radio operator, as an editor of a publication, and as a crash rescue boat commander. After discharge, he worked again in the meat packing industry, acquiring management experience. In 1917, he married Anne Hewlett. During the early 1920s, he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing light-weight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing—although the company would ultimately fail in 1927.

Depression and epiphany

Buckminster Fuller recalled 1927 as a pivotal year of his life. His daughter Alexandra had died in 1922 of complications from polio and spinal meningitis just prior to her fourth birthday. Fuller dwelled on her death, suspecting that it was connected with the Fullers' damp and drafty living conditions. This provided motivation for Fuller's involvement in Stockade Building Systems, a business which aimed to provide affordable, efficient housing.

In 1927, at age 32, Fuller lost his job as president of Stockade. The Fuller family had no savings, and the birth of their daughter Allegra in 1927 added to the financial challenges. Fuller drank heavily and reflected upon the solution to his family's struggles on long walks around Chicago. During the autumn of 1927, Fuller contemplated suicide, so that his family could benefit from a life insurance payment.

Fuller said that he had experienced a profound incident which would provide direction and purpose for his life. He felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke directly to Fuller, and declared:

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 stated that this experience led to a profound re-examination of his life. He ultimately chose to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."

Speaking to audiences later in life, Fuller would regularly recount the story of his Lake Michigan experience, and its transformative impact on his life. Historians have been unable to identify direct evidence for this experience within the 1927 papers of Fuller's Chronofile archives, housed at Stanford University. Stanford historian Barry Katz suggests that the suicide story may be a myth which Fuller constructed later in life, to summarize this formative period of his career.

Recovery

In 1927 Fuller resolved to think independently which included a commitment to "the search for the principles governing the universe and help advance the evolution of humanity in accordance with them... finding ways of doing more with less to the end that all people everywhere can have more and more." By 1928, Fuller was living in Greenwich Village and spending much of his time at the popular café Romany Marie's, where he had spent an evening in conversation with Marie and Eugene O'Neill several years earlier. Fuller accepted a job decorating the interior of the café in exchange for meals, giving informal lectures several times a week, and models of the Dymaxion house were exhibited at the café. Isamu Noguchi arrived during 1929—Constantin Brâncuși, an old friend of Marie's, had directed him there—and Noguchi and Fuller were soon collaborating on several projects, including the modeling of the Dymaxion car based on recent work by Aurel Persu. It was the beginning of their lifelong friendship.

Geodesic domes

Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the summers of 1948 and 1949, serving as its Summer Institute director in 1949. There, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began reinventing a project that would make him famous: the geodesic dome. Although the geodesic dome had been created some 30 years earlier by Dr. Walther Bauersfeld, Fuller was awarded United States patents. He is credited for popularizing this type of structure.

One of his early models was first constructed in 1945 at Bennington College in Vermont, where he lectured often. In 1949, he erected his first geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. It was 4.3 meters (14 feet) in diameter and constructed of aluminium aircraft tubing and a vinyl-plastic skin, in the form of an icosahedron. To prove his design, Fuller suspended from the structure's framework several students who had helped him build it. The U.S. government recognized the importance of his work, and employed his firm Geodesics, Inc. in Raleigh, North Carolina to make small domes for the Marines. Within a few years, there were thousands such domes around the world.

Fuller's first "continuous tension – discontinuous compression" geodesic dome (full sphere in this case) was constructed at the University of Oregon Architecture School in 1959 with the help of students. These continuous tension – discontinuous compression structures featured single force compression members (no flexure or bending moments) that did not touch each other and were 'suspended' by the tensional members.

Best-known work

For half of a century, Fuller developed many ideas, designs and inventions, particularly regarding practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. He documented his life, philosophy and ideas scrupulously by a daily diary (later called the Dymaxion Chronofile), and by twenty-eight publications. Fuller financed some of his experiments with inherited funds, sometimes augmented by funds invested by his collaborators, one example being the Dymaxion car project.

World stage

The Montreal Biosphère by Buckminster Fuller, 1967

Fuller's home in Carbondale

International recognition began with the success of huge geodesic domes during the 1950s. Fuller lectured at NC State University in Raleigh in 1949, where he met James Fitzgibbon, who would become a close friend and colleague. Fitzgibbon was director of Geodesics, Inc. and Synergetics, Inc. the first licensees to design geodesic domes. Thomas C. Howard was lead designer, architect and engineer for both companies.

Fuller began working with architect Shoji Sadao in 1954, and in 1964 they co-founded the architectural firm Fuller & Sadao Inc., whose first project was to design the large geodesic dome for the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. This building is now the "Montreal Biosphère".

From 1959 to 1970, Fuller taught at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIU). Beginning as an assistant professor, he gained full professorship in 1968, in the School of Art and Design. Working as a designer, scientist, developer, and writer, he lectured for many years around the world. He 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, which was, in his own words, devoted to "applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity." Later in his SIU tenure, Fuller was also a visiting professor at SIU Edwardsville, where he designed the dome for the campus Religious Center.

Fuller believed human societies would soon rely 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 referred to himself as "the property of universe" and during one radio interview he gave later in life, declared himself and his work "the property of all humanity". For his lifetime of work, the American Humanist Association named him the 1969 Humanist of the Year.

In 1976, Fuller was a key participant at UN Habitat I, the first UN forum on human settlements.

Honors

Fuller was awarded 28 United States patents and many honorary doctorates. In 1960, he was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal from The Franklin Institute. Fuller was elected as an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1967, on the occasion of the 50th year reunion of his Harvard class of 1917 (from which he was expelled in his first year). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968. In 1968 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1970. In 1970 he received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects. In 1976, he received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He also received numerous other awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented to him on February 23, 1983, by President Ronald Reagan.

Last filmed appearance

Fuller's last filmed interview took place on April 3, 1983, in which he presented his analysis of Simon Rodia's Watts Towers as a unique embodiment of the structural principles found in nature. Portions of this interview appear in I Build the Tower, a documentary film on Rodia's architectural masterpiece.

Death

Gravestone (see trim tab)

Fuller died on July 1, 1983, 11 days before his 88th birthday. During the period leading up to his death, his wife had been lying comatose in a Los Angeles hospital, dying of cancer. It was while visiting her there that he exclaimed, at a certain point: "She is squeezing my hand!" He then stood up, suffered a heart attack, and died an hour later, at age 87. His wife of 66 years died 36 hours later. They are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Philosophy and worldview

Buckminster Fuller was a Unitarian like his grandfather, Unitarian minister Arthur Buckminster Fuller, He was an early environmental activist. He was aware of the Earth's finite resources, and promoted a principle that he termed "ephemeralization", which according to futurist and Fuller disciple Stewart Brand, he coined to mean "doing more with less". Resources and waste from cruder products could be recycled into making more valuable products, increasing the efficiency of the entire process. Fuller also introduced synergetics, an term which he used broadly as a metaphor for communicating experiences using geometric concepts, and more specifically the empirical study of systems in transformation, with an emphasis on total system behavior unpredicted by the behavior of any isolated components. Fuller coined this term long before the term synergy became popular.

Fuller was a pioneer in thinking globally, and he explored principles of energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design. He cited François de Chardenedes' opinion that petroleum, from the standpoint of its replacement cost out of our current energy "budget" (essentially, the net incoming solar flux), had cost nature "over a million dollars" per U.S. gallon (US$300,000 per litre) 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. An encapsulation quotation of his views might be, "There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance."

Fuller was concerned about sustainability and human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet remained optimistic about humanity's future. 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" caused him to conclude that at a certain time during the 1970s, humanity had attained an unprecedented state. He was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of major recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had attained a critical level, such that competition for necessities had become unnecessary. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. He declared: "selfishness is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.... War is obsolete." He criticized previous utopian schemes as too exclusive, and thought this was a major source of their failure. To work, he thought that a utopia needed to include everyone.

Fuller was influenced by Alfred Korzybski's idea of general semantics. In the 1950s, Fuller attended seminars and workshops organized by the Institute of General Semantics, and he delivered the annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture in 1955. Korzybski is mentioned in the Introduction of his book Synergetics. The two shared a remarkable amount of similarity in their formulations of general semantics.

In his 1970 book I Seem To Be a Verb, he wrote: "I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe."

Fuller wrote 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. One confirming result was that the strongest possible homogeneous truss is cyclically tetrahedral.

He had become a guru of the design, architecture, and 'alternative' communities, such as Drop City, the community of experimental artists to whom he awarded the 1966 "Dymaxion Award" for "poetically economic" domed living structures.

Major design projects

A geodesic sphere

The geodesic dome

Fuller was most famous for his lattice shell structures – geodesic domes, which have been used as parts of military radar stations, civic buildings, environmental protest camps and exhibition attractions. An examination of the geodesic design by Walther Bauersfeld for the Zeiss-Planetarium, built some 20 years prior to Fuller's work, reveals that Fuller's Geodesic Dome patent (U.S. 2,682,235; awarded in 1954), follows the same design as Bauersfeld's.

Their construction is based on extending some basic principles to build simple "tensegrity" structures (tetrahedron, octahedron, and the closest packing of spheres), making them lightweight and stable. The geodesic dome was a result of Fuller's exploration of nature's constructing principles to find design solutions. The Fuller Dome is referenced in the Hugo Award-winning novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, in which a geodesic dome is said to cover the entire island of Manhattan, and it floats on air due to the hot-air balloon effect of the large air-mass under the dome (and perhaps its construction of lightweight materials).

Transportation

Main article: Dymaxion car

The Omni-Media-Transport:
With such a vehicle at our disposal, [Fuller] felt that human travel, like that of birds, would no longer be confined to airports, roads, and other bureaucratic boundaries, and that autonomous free-thinking human beings could live and prosper wherever they chose.
— Lloyd S. Sieden, Bucky Fuller's Universe, 2000

To his young daughter Allegra:
Fuller described the Dymaxion as a "zoom-mobile, explaining that it could hop off the road at will, fly about, then, as deftly as a bird, settle back into a place in traffic."

The Dymaxion car, c.1933, artist Diego Rivera shown entering the car, carrying coat

The Dymaxion car was a vehicle designed by Fuller, featured prominently at Chicago's 1933-1934 Century of Progress World's Fair. During the Great Depression, Fuller formed the Dymaxion Corporation and built three prototypes with noted naval architect Starling Burgess and a team of 27 workmen — using gifted money as well as a family inheritance.

Fuller associated the word Dymaxion with much of his work, a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension to sum up the goal of his study, "maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input."

The Dymaxion was not an automobile per se, but rather the 'ground-taxying mode' of a vehicle that might one day be designed to fly, land and drive — an "Omni-Medium Transport" for air, land and water. Fuller focused on the landing and taxiing qualities, and noted severe limitations in its handling. The team made constant improvements and refinements to the platform, and Fuller noted the Dymaxion "was an invention that could not be made available to the general public without considerable improvements."

The bodywork was aerodynamically designed for increased fuel efficiency and speed as well as light weight, and its platform featured a lightweight cromoly-steel hinged chassis, rear-mounted V8 engine, front-drive and three-wheels. The vehicle was steered via the third wheel at the rear, capable of 90° steering lock. Thus able to steer in a tight circle, the Dymaxion often caused a sensation, bringing nearby traffic to a halt.

Shortly after launch, a prototype crashed after being hit by another car, killing the Dymaxion's driver. The other car was driven by a local politician and was illegally removed from the accident scene, leaving reporters who arrived subsequently to blame the Dymaxion's unconventional design — though investigations exonerated the prototype. Fuller would himself later crash another prototype with his young daughter aboard.

Despite courting the interest of important figures from the auto industry, Fuller used his family inheritance to finish the second and third prototypes — eventually selling all three, dissolving Dymaxion Corporation and maintaining the Dymaxion was never intended as a commercial venture. One of the three original prototypes survives.

Housing

A Dymaxion house at The Henry Ford

Fuller's energy-efficient and inexpensive Dymaxion house garnered much interest, but only two prototypes were ever produced. Here the term "Dymaxion" is used in effect to signify a "radically strong and light tensegrity structure". One of Fuller's Dymaxion Houses is on display as a permanent exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Designed and developed during the mid-1940s, this prototype is a round structure (not a dome), shaped something like the flattened "bell" of certain jellyfish. It has several innovative features, including revolving dresser drawers, and a fine-mist shower that reduces water consumption. According to Fuller biographer Steve Crooks, the house was designed to be delivered in two cylindrical packages, with interior color panels available at local dealers. A circular structure at the top of the house was designed to rotate around a central mast to use natural winds for cooling and air circulation.

Conceived nearly two decades earlier, and developed in Wichita, Kansas, the house was designed to be lightweight, adapted to windy climates, cheap to produce and easy to assemble. It was to be produced using factories, workers, and technologies that had produced World War II aircraft. It looked ultramodern at the time, built of metal, and sheathed in polished aluminum. The basic model enclosed 90 m² (970 sq ft) of floor area. Due to publicity, there were many orders during the early Post-War years, but the company that Fuller and others had formed to produce the houses failed due to management problems.

In 1967, Fuller developed a concept for an offshore floating city named Triton City and published a report on the design the following year. Models of the city aroused the interest of President Lyndon B. Johnson who, after leaving office, had them placed in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.

In 1969, Fuller began the Otisco Project, named after its location in Otisco, New York. The project developed and demonstrated concrete spray with mesh-covered wireforms for of producing large-scale, load-bearing spanning structures built on-site, without the use of pouring molds, other adjacent surfaces or hoisting. The initial method used a circular concrete footing in which anchor posts were set. Tubes cut to length and with ends flattened were then bolted together to form a duodeca-rhombicahedron (22-sided hemisphere) geodesic structure with spans ranging to 60 feet (18 m). The form was then draped with layers of ¼-inch wire mesh attached by twist ties. Concrete was sprayed onto the structure, building up a solid layer which, when cured, would support additional concrete to be added by a variety of traditional means. Fuller referred to these buildings as monolithic ferroconcrete geodesic domes. However, the tubular frame form proved problematic for setting windows and doors. It was replaced by an iron rebar set vertically in the concrete footing and then bent inward and welded in place to create the dome's wireform structure and performed satisfactorily. Domes up to three stories tall built with this method proved to be remarkably strong. Other shapes such as cones, pyramids and arches proved equally adaptable.

The project was enabled by a grant underwritten by Syracuse University and sponsored by US Steel (rebar), the Johnson Wire Corp, (mesh) and Portland Cement Company (concrete). The ability to build large complex load bearing concrete spanning structures in free space would open many possibilities in architecture, and is considered as one of Fuller's greatest contributions.

Dymaxion map and World Game

Fuller, along with co-cartographer Shoji Sadao, also designed an alternative projection map, called the Dymaxion map. This was designed to show Earth's continents with minimum distortion when projected or printed on a flat surface.

In the 1960s, Fuller developed the World Game, a collaborative simulation game played on a 70-by-35-foot Dymaxion map, in which players attempt to solve world problems. The object of the simulation game is, in Fuller's words, to “make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

Appearance and style

Buckminster Fuller wore thick-lensed spectacles to correct his extreme hyperopia, a condition that went undiagnosed for the first five years of his life. Fuller's hearing was damaged during his Naval service in World War I and deteriorated during the 1960s. After experimenting with bullhorns as hearing aids during the mid-1960s, Fuller adopted electronic hearing aids from the 1970s onward

In public appearances, Fuller always wore dark-colored suits, appearing like "an alert little clergyman". Previously, he had experimented with unconventional clothing immediately after his 1927 epiphany, but found that breaking social fashion customs made others devalue or dismiss his ideas. Fuller learned the importance of physical appearance as part of one's credibility, and decided to become "the invisible man" by dressing in clothes that would not draw attention to himself. With self-deprecating humor, Fuller described this black-suited appearance as resembling a "second-rate bank clerk".

Quirks

Following his global prominence from the 1960s onward, Fuller became a frequent flier, often crossing time zones to lecture in international cities. In the 1960s and 1970s, he wore three watches simultaneously; one for the time zone of his office in Carbondale, one for the time zone of the location he would next visit, and one for the time zone he was currently in. In the 1970s, Fuller was only in 'homely' locations (his personal home in Carbondale, Illinois; his holiday retreat in Bear Island, Maine; his daughter's home in Pacific Palisades, California) roughly 65 nights per year—the other 300 nights were spent in hotel beds in the locations he visited on his lecturing and consulting circuits.

In the 1920s, Fuller experimented with polyphasic sleep, which he called Dymaxion sleep. Inspired by the sleep habits of animals such as dogs and cats, Fuller worked until he was tired, and then slept short naps. This generally resulted in Fuller sleeping 30-minute naps every 6 hours. This allowed him "twenty-two thinking hours a day", which aided his work productivity. Fuller reportedly kept this Dymaxion sleep habit for two years, before quitting the routine because it conflicted with his business associates' sleep habits. Despite no longer personally partaking in the habit, in 1943 Fuller suggested Dymaxion sleep as a strategy that the United States could adopt to win World War II.

Despite only practicing true polyphasic sleep for a period during the 1920s, Fuller was known for his stamina throughout his life. He was described as "tireless" by Barry Farrell in Life magazine, who noted that Fuller stayed up all night replying to mail during Farrell's 1970 trip to Bear Island. In his seventies, Fuller generally slept for 5–8 hours per night.

Fuller documented his life copiously from 1915 to 1983, approximately 270 feet (82 m) of papers in a collection called the Dymaxion Chronofile. He also kept copies of all incoming and outgoing correspondence. The enormous Fuller Collection is currently housed at Stanford University.

If somebody kept a very accurate record of a human being, going through the era from the Gay 90s, from a very different kind of world through the turn of the century—as far into the twentieth century as you might live. I decided to make myself a good case history of such a human being and it meant that I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record.

In his youth, Fuller experimented with several ways of presenting himself: R. B. Fuller, Buckminster Fuller, but as an adult finally settled on R. Buckminster Fuller, and signed his letters as such. However, he preferred to be addressed as simply "Bucky".

Language and neologisms

Buckminster Fuller spoke and wrote in a unique style and said it was important to describe the world as accurately as possible. Fuller often created long run-on sentences and used unusual compound words (omniwell-informed, intertransformative, omni-interaccommodative, omniself-regenerative) as well as terms he himself invented.

Fuller used the word Universe without the definite or indefinite articles (the or a) and always capitalized the word. Fuller wrote that "by Universe I mean: the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated (to self or others) Experiences."

The words "down" and "up", according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words "in" and "out" should be used instead, he argued, because they better describe an object's relation to a gravitational center, the Earth. "I suggest to audiences that they say, 'I'm going "outstairs" and "instairs."' At first that sounds strange to them; They all laugh about it. But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realize that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. And for the first time they begin to feel real 'reality.'"

"World-around" is a term coined by Fuller to replace "worldwide". The general belief in a flat Earth died out in classical antiquity, so using "wide" is an anachronism when referring to the surface of the Earth—a spheroidal surface has area and encloses a volume but has no width. Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition. Other neologisms collectively invented by the Fuller family, according to Allegra Fuller Snyder, are the terms "sunsight" and "sunclipse", replacing "sunrise" and "sunset" to overturn the geocentric bias of most pre-copernican celestial mechanics.

Fuller also invented the word "livingry," as opposed to weaponry (or "killingry"), to mean that which is in support of all human, plant, and Earth life. "The architectural profession—civil, naval, aeronautical, and astronautical—has always been the place where the most competent thinking is conducted regarding livingry, as opposed to weaponry."

As well as contributing significantly to the development of tensegrity technology, Fuller invented the term "tensegrity" from tensional integrity. "Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors. Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder."

"Dymaxion" is a portmanteau of "dynamic maximum tension". It was invented about 1929 by two admen at Marshall Field's department store in Chicago to describe Fuller's concept house, which was shown as part of a house of the future store display. They created the term utilizing three words that Fuller used repeatedly to describe his design – dynamic, maximum, and tension.

Fuller also helped to popularize the concept of Spaceship Earth: "The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: an instruction manual didn't come with it."

Concepts and buildings

His concepts and buildings include:

Dymaxion house (1928) Fuller Home - Carbondale, Illinois [2] Aerodynamic Dymaxion car (1933) Prefabricated compact bathroom cell (1937) Dymaxion deployment unit (1940) Dymaxion map of the world (1946) Buildings (1943) Tensegrity structures (1949)

Geodesic dome for Ford Motor Company (1953) Patent on geodesic domes (1954) The World Game (1961) and the World Game Institute (1972) Patent on octet truss (1961) Montreal Biosphère (1967), United States pavilion at Expo 67 Fly's Eye Dome Dewan Tunku Geodesic Dome, KOMTAR, Penang, Malaysia (proposed 1974, completed 1985) Comprehensive anticipatory design science

Influence and legacy

Among the many people who were influenced by Buckminster Fuller are: Constance Abernathy, Ruth Asawa, J. Baldwin, Michael Ben-Eli, Pierre Cabrol, John Cage, Joseph Clinton, Peter Floyd, Medard Gabel, Michael Hays, David Johnston, Robert Kiyosaki, Peter Jon Pearce, Shoji Sadao, Edwin Schlossberg, Kenneth Snelson, Robert Anton Wilson and Stewart Brand.

An allotrope of carbon, fullerene—and a particular molecule of that allotrope C₆₀ (buckminsterfullerene or buckyball) has been named after him. The Buckminsterfullerene molecule, which consists of 60 carbon atoms, very closely resembles a spherical version of Fuller's geodesic dome. The 1996 Nobel prize in chemistry was given to Kroto, Curl, and Smalley for their discovery of the fullerene.

He is quoted in the lyric of "The Tower Of Babble" in the musical "Godspell:" "Man is a complex of patterns and processes."

The indie band Driftless Pony Club named their 2011 album, Buckminster, after him. All the songs within the album are based upon his life and works.

On July 12, 2004, the United States Post Office released a new commemorative stamp honoring R. Buckminster Fuller on the 50th anniversary of his patent for the geodesic dome and by the occasion of his 109th birthday. The stamp's design replicated the January 10, 1964 cover of Time Magazine.

Fuller was the subject of two documentary films: The World of Buckminster Fuller (1971) and Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud (1996). Additionally, filmmaker Sam Green and the band Yo La Tengo collaborated on a 2012 "live documentary" about Fuller, The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller.

In June 2008, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented "Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe", the most comprehensive retrospective to date of his work and ideas. The exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2009. It presented a combination of models, sketches, and other artifacts, representing six decades of the artist's integrated approach to housing, transportation, communication, and cartography. It also featured the extensive connections with Chicago from his years spent living, teaching, and working in the city.

Robert Kiyosaki,'s 2015 book "Second Chance" is largely about Kiyosaki's interactions with Fuller, and Fuller's unusual final book "Grunch of Giants".

In 2012, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosted "The Utopian Impulse" – a show about Buckminster Fuller's influence in the Bay Area. Featured were concepts, inventions and designs for creating "free energy" from natural forces, and for sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. The show ran January through July.

Patents

(from the Table of Contents of Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller (1983) ISBN 0-312-43477-4)

• 1927 U.S. patent 1,633,702 Stockade: building structure
• 1927 U.S. patent 1,634,900 Stockade: pneumatic forming process
• 1928 (Application Abandoned) 4D house
• 1937 U.S. patent 2,101,057 Dymaxion car
• 1940 U.S. patent 2,220,482 Dymaxion bathroom
• 1944 U.S. patent 2,343,764 Dymaxion deployment unit (sheet)
• 1944 U.S. patent 2,351,419 Dymaxion deployment unit (frame)
• 1946 U.S. patent 2,393,676 Dymaxion map
• 1946 (No Patent) Dymaxion house (Wichita)
• 1954 U.S. patent 2,682,235 Geodesic dome
• 1959 U.S. patent 2,881,717 Paperboard dome
• 1959 U.S. patent 2,905,113 Plydome
• 1959 U.S. patent 2,914,074 Catenary (geodesic tent)
• 1961 U.S. patent 2,986,241 Octet truss
• 1962 U.S. patent 3,063,521 Tensegrity
• 1963 U.S. patent 3,080,583 Submarisle (undersea island)
• 1964 U.S. patent 3,139,957 Aspension (suspension building)
• 1965 U.S. patent 3,197,927 Monohex (geodesic structures)
• 1965 U.S. patent 3,203,144 Laminar dome
• 1965 (Filed – No Patent) Octa spinner
• 1967 U.S. patent 3,354,591 Star tensegrity (octahedral truss)
• 1970 U.S. patent 3,524,422 Rowing needles (watercraft)
• 1974 U.S. patent 3,810,336 Geodesic hexa-pent
• 1975 U.S. patent 3,863,455 Floatable breakwater
• 1975 U.S. patent 3,866,366 Non-symmetrical tensegrity
• 1979 U.S. patent 4,136,994 Floating breakwater
• 1980 U.S. patent 4,207,715 Tensegrity truss
• 1983 U.S. patent 4,377,114 Hanging storage shelf unit

Bibliography

• 4d Timelock (1928)
• Nine Chains to the Moon (1938)
• Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization (1962)
• Ideas and Integrities, a Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (1963) ISBN 0-13-449140-8
• No More Secondhand God and Other Writings (1963)
• Education Automation: Freeing the Scholar to Return (1963)
• What I Have Learned: A Collection of 20 Autobiographical Essays, Chapter "How Little I Know", (1968)
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968) ISBN 0-8093-2461-X
• Utopia or Oblivion (1969) ISBN 0-553-02883-9
• Approaching the Benign Environment (1970) ISBN 0-8173-6641-5 (with Eric A. Walker and James R. Killian, Jr.)
• I Seem to Be a Verb (1970) coauthors Jerome Agel, Quentin Fiore, ISBN 1-127-23153-7
• Intuition (1970)
• Buckminster Fuller to Children of Earth (1972) compiled and photographed by Cam Smith, ISBN 0-385-02979-9
• The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller (1960, 1973) coauthor Robert Marks, ISBN 0-385-01804-5
• Earth, Inc (1973) ISBN 0-385-01825-8
• Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975) in collaboration with E.J. Applewhite with a preface and contribution by Arthur L. Loeb, ISBN 0-02-541870-X
• Tetrascroll: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale (1975)
• And It Came to Pass — Not to Stay (1976) ISBN 0-02-541810-6
• R. Buckminster Fuller on Education (1979) ISBN 0-87023-276-2
• Synergetics 2: Further Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1979) in collaboration with E.J. Applewhite
• Buckminster Fuller – Autobiographical Monologue/Scenario (1980) page 54, R. Buckminster Fuller, documented and edited by Robert Snyder, St. Martin’s Press, Inc., ISBN 0-312-10678-5
• Buckminster Fuller Sketchbook (1981)
• Critical Path (1981) ISBN 0-312-17488-8
• Grunch of Giants (1983) ISBN 0-312-35193-3
• Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller (1983) ISBN 0-312-43477-4
• Humans in Universe (1983) coauthor Anwar Dil, ISBN 0-89925-001-7
• Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity (1992) coauthor Kiyoshi Kuromiya, ISBN 0-02-541850-5

See also

• The Buckminster Fuller Challenge
• Cloud Nine (tensegrity sphere)
• Design science revolution
• Emissions Reduction Currency System
• Noosphere
• Old Man River's City project
• Spome
• Bucky Ball
• Whole Earth Catalog

Further reading

• Applewhite, E. J. (1977). Cosmic Fishing: An account of writing Synergetics with Buckminster Fuller. ISBN 0-02-502710-7.
• Applewhite, E. J., ed. (1986). Synergetics Dictionary, The Mind Of Buckminster Fuller; in four volumes. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc. ISBN 0-8240-8729-1.
• Chu, Hsiao-Yun (Fall 2008). "Fuller's Laboratory Notebook". Collections. 4 (4). Lanham, MD: Altamira Press: 295–306.
• Chu, Hsiao-Yun; Trujillo, Roberto (2009). New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-6279-1.
• Eastham, Scott (2007). American Dreamer. Bucky Fuller and the Sacred Geometry of Nature. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press. ISBN 978-0-7188-3031-1.
• Edmondson, Amy (2007). A Fuller Explanation. EmergentWorld LLC. ISBN 978-0-6151-8314-5.
• Hatch, Alden (1974). Buckminster Fuller At Home In The Universe. New York: Crown Publishers. ISBN 0-440-04408-1.
• Hoogenboom, Olive (1999). "Fuller, R. Buckminster". American National Biography. Vol. 8. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 559–562. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Unknown parameter |short= ignored (help)
• Kenner, Hugh (1973). Bucky: a guided tour of Buckminster Fuller. ISBN 0-688-00141-6.
• Your Private Sky, R. Buckminster Fuller: The Art Of Design Science. Lars Mueller Publishers. 1999. ISBN 3-907044-88-6. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |editors= ignored (|editor= suggested) (help)
• McHale, John (1962). R. Buckminster Fuller. New York: George Brazillier, Inc.
• Pawley, Martin (1991). Buckminster Fuller. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company. ISBN 0-8008-1116-X.
• Potter, R. Robert (1990). Buckminster Fuller. Pioneers in Change Series. Silver Burdett Publishers. ISBN 0-382-09972-9.
• Robertson, Donald (1974). Mind's Eye Of Buckminster Fuller. New York: Vantage Press, Inc. ISBN 0-533-01017-9.
• Snyder, Robert (1980). Buckminster Fuller: An Autobiographical Monologue/Scenario. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-24547-5.
• Sterngold, James (June 15, 2008). "The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller". The New York Times (Arts section).
• Ward, James, ed., The Artifacts Of R. Buckminster Fuller, A Comprehensive Collection of His Designs and Drawings in Four Volumes: Volume One. The Dymaxion Experiment, 1926–1943; Volume Two. Dymaxion Deployment, 1927–1946; Volume Three. The Geodesic Revolution, Part 1, 1947–1959; Volume Four. The Geodesic Revolution, Part 2, 1960–1983: Edited with descriptions by James Ward. Garland Publishing, New York. 1984 (ISBN 0-8240-5082-7 vol. 1, ISBN 0-8240-5083-5 vol. 2, ISBN 0-8240-5084-3 vol. 3, ISBN 0-8240-5085-1 vol. 4)
• Wong, Yunn Chii (1999). The Geodesic Works of Richard Buckminster Fuller, 1948–1968 (The Universe as a Home of Man) (PhD thesis). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture.

External links

• The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller
• Buckminster Fuller Institute
• Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom – February 23, 1983
• Works by Buckminster Fuller at Open Library
• Buckminster Fuller, a portrait by Ansel Adams

Articles about Fuller

• 'Bucky' Gets Lucky with Stamp by Danit Lidor, Wired (July 12, 2004)
• Dymaxion Man: The Visions of Buckminster Fuller by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker (June 9, 2008)
• The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller New York Times article questioning Fuller's supposed consideration of suicide, (June 15, 2008)

Collections

• Buckminster Fuller Digital Collection at Stanford includes 380 hrs. of streamed audio-visual material from Fuller's personal archive
• Buckminster Fuller Papers housed at Stanford University Libraries
• Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York University – Archival photographs of Buckminster Fuller from the Toronto Telegram.

Everything I Know

• Everything I Know Session, Philadelphia, 1975 at Stanford University Libraries
• The Everything I Know 42-hour lecture session — video, audio, and full transcripts.

Audio

• The State of Things - discussion about Fuller

Documentaries

• The World of Buckminster Fuller at IMDb, a 1974 documentary
• Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud at IMDb, a 1996 episode of American Masters
• Critical Path: R. Buckminster Fuller at IMDb, a 2004 short animated documentary
• The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, a 2012 live documentary by filmmaker Sam Green

Other resources

• CJ Fearnley's List of Buckminster Fuller Resources on the Internet
• Buckminster Fuller at Pionniers & Précurseurs. Includes a bibliography
• "Buckminster Fuller's Experimental Finishing School", an excerpt from The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College by Eva Díaz