Buckminster Fuller

https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle/preview?article=1664628388853 S2K LogoBack SendFeedback 13 Books We Read This Week By Alec Nevala-Lee • wsj.com Buckminster Fuller next to a model of his Dymaxion house, ca.1930.Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images Buckminster Fuller believed in solving problems by design. In fact, he believed that all the problems, large and small, facing Spaceship Earth—the term he coined for our planet—could be solved by great minds, if only politicians got out of the way. For the futurist problem-solvers of the 20th century, Fuller was a touchstone, dreaming up inventions like the prefabricated Dymaxion House to address the world’s housing shortages. Grab a Copy Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller Dey Street Books 672 pages We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site. Buy Book Ever the optimist, ever the outsider, Fuller never tired of trying to pull humanity toward a better future. Alec Nevala-Lee’s authoritative biography, “Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller” tells Fuller’s story in greater detail than ever. Mr. Nevala-Lee, a sci-fi novelist who has also written extensively about that genre, dwells at length on Fuller’s inventions and innovative concepts. But his true interest seems to be in looking beyond Fuller the myth to Fuller the man. This biography takes the reader on a long and arduous journey, accompanying Fuller as he tirelessly dives into new ventures intended to change the world, never managing to make them commercially successful. The triumph and travails of online video, Buckminster Fuller’s strange genius, a remembrance of Hilary Mantel and more. Fuller was always bursting with ideas: He accumulated something over six tons of paper in manuscripts, notes and drawings over his lifetime. He was born in Milton, Mass., in 1895 and much of his youth was spent on Bear Island, off the coast of Maine. He was expelled from Harvard twice and served in the Navy in World War I as a shipboard radio operator. Later Fuller registered more than two dozen patents that never made money, started numerous corporations that failed, and devised innumerable projects that never materialized. In time Fuller became associated with Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, more as a celebrity than as a regular professor, and eventually found his calling in talking—very rapidly, for hours and hours on end, in venues far and wide—to all who would listen, like a troubadour of a better future. He died in 1983. Fuller was a self-educated engineer and architect who often meddled in fields in which his knowledge was superficial at best, but at heart he was a technologist with a flair for words. Here, for example, is his famous definition of a human being: “A self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-based biped; an electrochemical reduction-plant, integral with segregated stowages of special energy extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent actuation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps, with motors attached . . . guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range finders.” Unreadable, perhaps, and possibly erroneous in many ways, but certainly original. Why read about Fuller now? Mr. Nevala-Lee suggests that Fuller’s ideas were instrumental in shaping Silicon Valley culture, and that insight into his successes and failures may illuminate those of the current age. (We know little about the failures in today’s technology industries, though there are certainly many of them.) Advertisement - Scroll to Continue The eccentric inventor—although certainly a visionary—was a casualty of his biases and his unexamined assumptions about how the world of forms is created and recreated. Fuller’s particular intellectual biases tended to limit his technological explorations and undermine his proposed designs. For example, the Dymaxion House—developed as early as 1930—was a model for a mass-produced prefabricated circular dwelling, inspired by Henry Ford’s assembly line, that Fuller presented as a solution to the global housing problem. “Like many start-up founders to come,” Mr. Nevala-Lee notes, “Fuller was promoting an untested technology by making huge claims for its importance.” It failed to get any traction; trying to sell something so new and eccentric could hardly have been helped by the Depression. But attempts at industrializing housing production have failed again and again, largely because houses are highly differentiated goods. In 2022, for example, there were 435,000 home building businesses in the U.S. alone, compared to 14 automotive companies that produce the majority of cars worldwide. The Dymaxion Car—developed from an insight of Le Corbusier that an ovoid body minimizes wind resistance—was designed at the same time as the house, and imagined, as Mr. Nevala-Lee puts it, as “a piece of the house that could drive off on its own.” (“Dymaxion” is Fuller’s own portmanteau of DYnamic, MAXimum, and tensION; he used it not only for his designs but for his nap schedule and his diaries.) His automobile was a streamlined 19-foot three-wheeler, with a motor in the back and the rear wheel used for steering. Despite the best publicity imaginable—Fuller chauffeured Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart to the White House—the car never made it to a production line. But its chubby front somehow portends the VW bus, a lasting symbol of the hippie era, during which Fuller’s designs and ideas would be lionized. “Ephemeralization” was an idea that fared a bit better. The term, coined by Fuller in 1938, described how some technological progress made it possible to do more and more with less and less, thus making it possible for people to live comfortably on the planet without exhausting its resources. It is, according to Mr. Nevala-Lee, Fuller’s most enduring idea and one that he took to extremes: “Ephemeralization trends toward an ultimate doing of everything with nothing at all,” pronounced Fuller; today’s most important technological advances are a matter of coding, software and the internet, and we may be closer to ephemeralization than we realize. Geodesic domes, which Fuller began to sketch in 1948, were a new architectural form that celebrated the brilliance of postwar American engineering and established their inventor as an architect of the first rank. They are by far Fuller’s most successful actual invention and the one most frequently associated with his name. Typically, they are lightweight spherical structures made of triangles, squares, rhombuses or hexagons arranged along great circles in regular patterns, according to specifications describing their relation based on “chord factors.” “Although he emphasized its structural efficiencies,” Mr. Nevala-Lee writes, “its first real benefit was that it could be prototyped for almost nothing, and its triangulated framework evoked the technology of tomorrow, as much for its aesthetic qualities as for its actual strengths. As the architectural writer Lloyd Kahn, a fan turned harsh critic, observed later of the domes, ‘They appear exciting and revolutionary, they promise untold advantages, the simple geometric aspects have great appeal, and moreover, they photograph well.” Fuller also came up with the concept of “tensegrity”—a term he coined in the late 1950s to describe a structural principle in which “tensional integrity” sustains a carefully calibrated balance of construction materials, protecting them from shear. Because such structures are extremely lightweight, Fuller thought he could produce tensegrity-based domes that could cover entire cities. In 1959, he proposed a dome over Manhattan. No large tensegrity domes were ever built. Beyond these inventions and novel concepts, Fuller also toyed with larger ideas—like the Dymaxion Map and the World Game—aimed at designing solutions to the problems of the planet as a whole, from world hunger to climate change. But Fuller did not really understand that “design” means something altogether different at different scales. At the scale of a building or an industrial product, the designer or architect can exercise full control over its final form. And Fuller, as Mr. Nevala-Lee tells us, was obsessed with control. He knew better what was good for us than we did: This is doubtless why his Dymaxion House, where everything was built-in, left little flexibility for its occupant’s preferences. But that fact also made the domicile unfit for many of its potential inhabitants. Mr. Nevala-Lee’s account prompts some interesting speculations about the philosophical roots of Fuller’s outlook and agenda. There is good reason to believe that Fuller did not accept evolution and saw the world as the creation of an intelligent god. His biographer confirms that he believed that god is “a greater intellect than the intellect of man,” and he questioned Darwin’s assertion that “simple forms could develop into complex organisms.” In other words, I would suggest, Fuller assumed that Spaceship Earth had been brought about by the “intelligent design” of a higher being and that its problems could be solved by intelligent human design as well. Artist’s rendering of a Buckminster Fuller dome covering a section of Manhattan.Photo: The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller It is no wonder, therefore, that Fuller had little of use to say about cities and metropolitan areas, which also evolve as complex systems from simpler forms, seemingly without an overall grand design, and definitely without anyone “in control.” Unlike architectural design, which is maximalist in its demands, the planning of cities is minimalist at best, involving setting boundaries and providing support while relinquishing control. None of that would seem to be of any interest to Fuller, beyond his bemoaning the regulations that compromised his creative agenda. Fuller’s built forms—Dymaxion houses or geodesic domes—all have circular footprints and are at their best when positioned in the middle of an open field. Dense cities, on the other hand, are never made from circular footprints. Their forms are more or less rectangular, packed together along linear streets. People who live alone in the countryside can live in igloos or teepees. People who live in cities—where proximity and access to one another is at a premium—cannot. Fuller, in his quest for grand design, could not appreciate the self-organizing and highly creative capabilities of multitudes coming together to build rich, complex urban forms—just as he could not appreciate the coming together of self-organizing genes to create more complex natural forms. Buckminster Fuller’s technological insights, while impressive, are not what we need today. We do not need grand designs and we do not need controlling designers at the helm to direct our choices for the future. We need arrangements that will allow us to remain free to do as we please and pursue our dreams while abiding by rules, reached by common agreement, that ensure our freedoms do not result in harm to others or to our planet. We can think big about our common future, and we must welcome appropriate technologies, but only if they do not rely on greater and greater social controls by those who decide they know best how to make us safer and happier. Mr. Angel is a professor of city planning at New York University.