Richard Buckminster Fuller Jr (1895 - 1983)
Bucky to his friends, whose birth anniversary we mark on
12 July was born into one of New England's elite but
freethinking families. His great-great grandfather, the
Reverend Timothy Fuller was a delegate from
Massachusettes to the Convention which drew up the US
Constitution. He was so outraged at the Convention's
acceptance of slavery that he opposed ratification. His
grand aunt, Margaret Fuller, was the editor of the
transcendentalist journal The Dial, a close
colleague of R.W. Emerson and Thoreau.
As all the male members of his family, he began
university at Harvard but was expelled twice, being more
interested in women than in diplomas. He never received
a university degree but was self-taught in design,
mathematics and architecture. He brought all his ideas
together in what he called "The Law of Progressive
Order."
Today, he is best known for his geodesic domes which
have been widely used by relief agencies as shelters for
the uprooted and homeless as well as by the US Navy
during the Second World War as easily constructed and
inexpensive shelters or store areas.
Yet it took some experiences for Fuller to find his
role in life. He tells of the experience in 1927 with no
job and a wife and baby to support, he became depressed.
He was living in Chicago, and one day walking along Lake
Michigan, he was thinking of taking his life. Then time
seemed to stand still and a voice spoke to him "You do
not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not
belong to you. You belong to the Universe". From then
on, his life purpose was to see "what, if anything, an
individual could do on behalf of all humanity."
He was influenced by his reading of Mahatma Gandhi but
not by Gandhi's fear of science. Fuller thought of the
world in terms of flows of information and energy that
interact and exchange in a complex totality.
Fuller thought of his work as a reply to Mies van der
Rohe's "less is more" of luxurious simplicity by the
idea "more with less" stressing the need to conserve
natural resources by developing sustainable design
solutions. Fuller's vision of the designer was as an
agent of change, striving to solve the world's problems
by translating scientific and technological advances into
useful innovations. Fuller asked "How can we get more
energy, use less materials and use less time to provide
for our basic needs? What do we need?"
Fuller always kept his original aim of wanting to do
something of benefit for the whole of humanity. He
called himself a world citizen. In 1951, along with the
poet and editor of the Dark Sun Press, Carresse Crosby
(1891 -1970) he tried to set up a Citizen of the World
Center in Delphi, Greece where Carresse Crosby had bought
land. However, the US government put pressure on the
Greek government to ban their residence. Citizen of the
World sounded too much like Communist Internationalism in
the Washington of the early 1950s. A year later in 1952,
a World Man Center was created in Cyprus. Fuller built a
geodesic dome, but again US government fears prevented
any development of the World Man Center.
Fortunately, today the spirit of the 1950s has evolved
in Washington. World wide there is a increased interest
in Buckminster Fuller's designs, but as he always
stressed the physical designs and the non-material
thoughts are closely related - not to be separated.
