Buckminster Fuller: Thinking for Yourself and Benefit Humanity

. . . So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if I would never use me again for just me – each one of us is born of two, and we really belong to each other. I vowed to do my own thinking, instead of trying to accommodate everyone else’s opinion, credo’s and theories. I vowed to apply my inventory of experiences to the solving of problems that affect everyone aboard planet Earth.

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983)

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983)

Engineer, inventor, architect and philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller authored numerous popular books, held dozens of patents, and had a profound impact on subsequent generations of design. He is best known for his 1949 invention of the geodesic dome, which uses interconnecting triangular frames to form a lightweight but sturdy dome which needs no internal support. Described as futuristic in appearance even today, the geodesic dome provides maximum interior space with minimal use of land, raw materials, and construction labor, and is far more efficient than ordinary brick-and-mortar, wood-and-nail homebuilding.

As a designer, Fuller was driven by a philosophy of “more for less”, and vehemently opposed waste, superficial styling, and many manufacturers’ underlying philosophy of built-in obsolescence. He combined the words “dynamic” and “maximum” to coin the word “Dymaxion”, a brand applied to several inventions. The portable Dymaxion House (1929) resembled a large hockey puck, but its interior was breathtaking, with curving walls and windows. The Dymaxion Car (1933) was more like a lightweight bus, seating ten passengers in an aerodynamic body, with three wheels and excellent gas mileage.

Fuller studied mathematics at Harvard but was expelled for “lack of ambition”; he never obtained a college degree, and worked for many years at meat-packing plants until he was able to support himself and his family through teaching, writing, and his inventions. He suffered an extended bout of depression after the death of his daughter in 1922, while his family was near bankruptcy and living in public housing. In his memoirs he wrote that he overcame thoughts of suicide by deciding to make the rest of his life “an experiment to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”

Known to all as “Bucky”, his experiment ended on 1 July 1983; his wife of almost 66 years, Anne Hewlett Fuller, died two days later. Bucky left behind a meticulous record of his life on Spaceship Earth, the seventy-year Dymaxion Chronofile, and hours of extemporaneous, recorded lectures. He was a grandnephew of both feminist writer and publisher Margaret Fuller and US Supreme Court Justice Melville W. Fuller. His son-in-law, documentary filmmaker Robert Snyder, won an Oscar in 1950 for The Titan: Story of Michelangelo.

http://www.bfi.org/about-bucky

This is from the Buckminster Fuller Institute:

R. Buckminster Fuller was a renowned 20th century inventor and visionary born in Milton, Massachusetts on July 12, 1895. Dedicating his life to making the world work for all of humanity, Fuller operated as a practical philosopher who demonstrated his ideas as inventions that he called “artifacts.” Fuller did not limit himself to one field but worked as a ‘comprehensive anticipatory design scientist’ to solve global problems surrounding housing, shelter, transportation, education, energy, ecological destruction, and poverty. Throughout the course of his life Fuller held 28 patents, authored 28 books, received 47 honorary degrees. And while his most well know artifact, the geodesic dome, has been produced over 300,000 times worldwide, Fuller’s true impact on the world today can be found in his continued influence upon generations of designers, architects, scientists and artists working to create a more sustainable planet.

Bucky’s Big Ideas

Buckminster Fuller spent his life working across multiple fields, such as architecture, design, geometry, engineering, science, cartography and education, in his pursuit to make the world work for 100% of humanity. Fuller insisted on resisting monikers of specialization to describe his work, preferring instead to describe his output as that of a ‘comprehensive anticipatory design scientist ‘ – ‘an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.’ This approach resulted in the creation of numerous artifacts that cross boundaries and defy normal categorization. For the purposes of conveying Fuller’s work to the uninitiated , we have organized an overview of the major themes and resulting project ideas that occupied Fuller’s imaginative space:

Geodesic Domes

R. Buckminster Fuller spent much of the early 20th Century looking for ways to improve human shelter by applying modern technological know-how to shelter construction, making shelter more comfortable and efficient, and making shelter available to a greater number of people. Read more
Color Sketch of the Jitterbug Transformation (1948)

Synergetics

Synergetics is the system of holistic thinking which R. Buckminster Fuller introduced and began to formulate. Synergetics is multi-faceted: it involves geometric modeling, exploring inter-relationships in the facts of experience and the process of thinking. Read more see website.

The Fuller Projection Map

Dymaxion World

At the heart of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion concept is the idea that rational action in a rational world demands the most efficient overall performance per unit of input. His Dymaxion structures, then are those that yield the greatest possible efficiency in terms of available technology. Read more see website

World Game Report

World Game

In the 1960’s Buckminster Fuller proposed a “great logistics game” and “world peace game” (later shortened to simply, the “World Game”) that was intended to be a tool that would facilitate a comprehensive, anticipatory, design science approach to the problems of the world.
The details in the next blog