Buckminster Fuller Totally Explained

Everything about R Buckminster Fuller totally explained

Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, author, designer, futurist, inventor, and visionary. He was the second president of Mensa. He lends his name to a family of complex Carbon structures called Buckminsterfullerene also known as Bucky Balls.
   Throughout his life, Fuller was concerned with the question "Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?" Considering himself an average individual without special monetary means or academic degree, he chose to devote his life to this question, trying to find out what an individual like him could do to improve humanity's condition that large organizations, governments, or private enterprises inherently couldn't do.
   Pursuing this lifelong experiment, Fuller wrote more than thirty books, coining and popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetics. He also worked in the development of numerous inventions, chiefly in the fields of design and architecture, the best known of which is the geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes or buckyballs were named for their resemblance to a geodesic sphere.
   Late in his life, after working on his concepts for several decades, Fuller had achieved considerable public visibility. He traveled the world giving lectures, and received numerous honorary doctorates. Most of his inventions, however, never made it into production, and he was strongly criticized in most fields he tried to influence such as architecture, or simply dismissed as a hopeless utopian. Fuller's proponents, on the other hand, claim that his work hasn't yet received the attention that it deserves.

Biography

Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews, and also the grandnephew of the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. He attended Froebelian Kindergarten. Spending his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine, he was a boy with a natural propensity for design and for making things. He often made things from materials he brought home from the woods, and sometimes made his own tools. He experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats. Years later he decided that this sort of experience had provided him with not only an interest in design, but a habit of being fully familiar 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.
   Fuller was sent to Milton Academy, in Massachusetts. Afterwards, he began studying at Harvard but was expelled from the university twice: first, for entertaining an entire dance troupe; and second, for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest." By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment. where he'd spent a fascinating evening in conversation with Marie and Eugene O'Neill several years earlier. Fuller took on the interior decoration of the café in exchange for meals, and models of the Dymaxion house were exhibited at the café. Isamu Noguchi showed up in 1929 — Constantin Brâncuşi, an old friend of Marie's, had directed him there including the modeling of the Dymaxion car. It was the beginning of their lifelong friendship.
   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 work on the project that would make him famous and revolutionize the field of engineering, the geodesic dome. One of the early models was first constructed in 1945 at Bennington College in Vermont, where he frequently lectured. In 1949, he erected the world’s 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 aluminum aircraft tubing and a vinyl-plastic skin, in the form of a tetrahedron. To prove his design, Bucky and several students who helped build it hung from the structure’s framework to awe non-believers. The U.S. government recognized the importance of the discovery and employed him to make small domes for the army. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the world.
   For the next half-century Fuller contributed a wide range of ideas, designs and inventions to the world, particularly in the areas of practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. He documented his life, philosophy and ideas scrupulously in a daily diary (later called the Dymaxion Chronofile) and in 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.
   International recognition came with the success of his huge geodesic domes in the 1950s. Fuller taught at Washington University in St. Louis in 1955 where he met James Fitzgibbon a close friend and colleague. Fuller taught from 1959 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale as an assistant professor, receiving full professorship in 1968 in the School of Art and Design through 1970. Working as a designer, scientist, developer, and writer, for many years he lectured around the world on design. Fuller 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, that was in his own words devoted to "applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity."
   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 was awarded 28 US patents and many honorary doctorates. On January 16, 1970, Fuller received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects and also received numerous other awards. He died on July 1, 1983, at the age of 87, a guru of the design, architecture, and 'alternative' communities such as Drop City, the experimental artists community to whom he awarded the 1966 "Dymaxion Award" for "poetically economic" domed living structures. His wife was comatose and dying of cancer and while visiting her in the hospital he exclaimed at one point: "She is squeezing my hand!" He then stood up, suffered a heart attack and died an hour later. His wife died 36 hours later. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Philosophy and worldview

The grandson of a Unitarian minister (Arthur Buckminster Fuller), R. Buckminster Fuller was also Unitarian. Buckminster Fuller was an early environmental activist. He was very aware of the finite resources the planet has to offer, and promoted a principle that he termed "ephemeralization"—which in essence, according to futurist and Fuller disciple Stewart Brand, Fuller coined to mean "doing more with less." Resources and waste material from cruder products could be recycled into making higher value products, increasing the efficiency of the entire process. Fuller also introduced synergetics, a metaphoric language for communicating experiences using geometric concepts, long before the term synergy became popular.
   Fuller was one of the first to propagate a systemic worldview and explored principles of energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design. He cited Francois de Chardenedes' view that petroleum, from the standpoint of its replacement cost out of our current energy "budget", essentially the 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.
   Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet 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" led him to conclude that at a certain time in the 1970s, humanity had crossed an unprecedented watershed. Fuller was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of key recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had reached a critical level, such that competition for necessities was no longer necessary. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. "Selfishness", he declared, "is unnecessary and...unrationalizable...War is obsolete..."
   Fuller also claimed 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. Some confirming results were that the strongest possible homogeneous truss is cyclically tetrahedral.
His technologically oriented point of view can also be taken as a metaphor for what it's to be human generally. 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'm not a category. I'm not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe."

Major design projects

Fuller was most famous for his geodesic domes, which can be seen as part of military radar stations, civic buildings, environmental protest camps and exhibition attractions. Walther Bauersfeld was in all probability the source of this concept. In Chapter 3, of Buckminster Fuller's Book 'CRITICAL PATH', he writes:-
   "....I found a similar situation to be existent in World War II. As head mechanical engineer of the U.S.A. Board of Economic Warfare I'd available to me copies of any so-called intercepts I wanted. Those were transcriptions of censor-listened-to intercontinental telephone conversations, along with letters and cables that were opened by the censor and often deciphered, and so forth. As a student of patents I asked for and received all the intercept information relating to strategic patents held by both our enemies and our own big corporations,..."
   Supporting this view, an examination of the design by Dr. Walther Bauersfeld's geodesic design for the Zeiss Planetarium, reveals that it's an exact duplicate of Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome Patent.
   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 patent for geodesic domes was awarded in 1954, part 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, where a geodesic dome is said to cover the entire island of Manhattan, but, due to hot-air balloon effect of the large air-mass under the dome, (and perhaps its construction of lightweight materials), it floats on air.
   Previously, Fuller had designed and built prototypes of what he hoped would be a safer, aerodynamic Dymaxion car ("Dymaxion" is contracted from DYnamic MAXimum tensION, however it has also been reported that the name is a combination of the words dynamic, maximum, and ion, per the National Automobile Museum

.) He worked with professional colleagues over a period of three years beginning in 1932. Based on a design idea Fuller had derived from aircraft, the three prototype cars were different from anything on the market. They had three wheels, with two (the drive wheels) in front, and the third, rear wheel being the one that was steered. The engine was in the rear, with the chassis and the body being original designs. The aerodynamic, somewhat tear-shaped body (which in one of the prototypes was about 5.5 metres or 18 feet long), was large enough to seat 11 people. It resembled a melding of a light aircraft (without wings) and a Volkswagen van of 1950s vintage. The car was essentially a mini-bus in each of its three trial incarnations, and its concept long predated the Volkswagen Type 2 mini-bus conceived in 1947 by Ben Pon.
   Despite its length, and due to its three-wheel design, the Dymaxion Car turned on a small radius and parked in a tight space quite nicely. The prototypes were efficient in fuel consumption for their day. Fuller poured a great deal of his own money into the project, in addition to funds from one of his professional collaborators. An industrial investor was also keenly interested in the concept. Fuller anticipated the car could travel on an open highway safely at up to about 160 km/h (100 miles per hour). Due to some concept oversights, they were unruly above 80 km/h (50 mph), and difficult to steer. Research ended after one of the prototypes was involved in a collision resulting in a fatality.
   In 1943, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser asked Fuller to develop a prototype for a smaller car, and Fuller designed a five-seater which never went beyond development.
   Another of Fuller's ideas was the alternative-projection Dymaxion map. This was designed to show the Earth's continents with minimum distortion when projected or printed on a flat surface. Fuller's energy-efficient and low-cost Dymaxion House garnered much interest, but has never gone into production. 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 in Dearborn, Michigan. Designed and developed in 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 before, and developed in Wichita, Kansas, the house was designed to be lightweight and adapted to windy climes. It was to be inexpensive to produce and purchase, and easily assembled. It was to be produced using factories, workers and technologies that had produced World War II aircraft. It was ultramodern-looking at the time, built of metal, and sheathed in polished aluminum. The basic model enclosed 90 m² (1000 square feet) of floor area. Due to publicity, there were many orders in the early Post-War years, but the company that Fuller and others had formed to produce the houses failed due to management problems.

Words Coined (Bucky-isms)

Livingry is juxtaposed to weaponry and killingry and means that which is in support of all human, plant, and Earth life. "The architectural profession--civil, naval, aeronautical, and astronautica—has always been the place where the most competent thinking is conducted regarding livingry, as opposed to weaponry."—Critical Path, page xxv

Tensegrity is a contraction of 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" —Synergetics, page 372

Quirks

Fuller was a frequent flier, often crossing time zones. He famously wore three watches; one for the current zone, one for the zone he'd departed, and one for the zone he was going to.

Practical achievements

Certainly, a number of Fuller's projects didn't meet success in terms of commitment from industry or acceptance by a broad public. However, many geodesic domes have been built and are in use. According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute

Web site, the largest geodesic-dome structures (listed in descending order from largest diameter) are:

Fantasy Entertainment Complex: Kyosho Isle, Japan, 216 m (710 feet).

Multi-Purpose Arena: Nagoya, Japan, 187 m (614 feet).

Tacoma Dome: Tacoma, WA, USA, 162 m (530 feet).

Superior Dome: Northern Michigan Univ. Marquette, MI, USA, 160 m (525 feet).

Walkup Skydome: Northern Arizona Univ. Flagstaff, AZ, USA, 153 m (502 feet).

Poliedro de Caracas: Caracas, Venezuela, 145 m (475 feet).(External Link

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Round Valley High School Stadium: Springerville-Eagar, AZ, USA, 134 m (440 feet).

Former Spruce Goose Hangar: Long Beach, CA, USA, 126 m (415 feet).

Formosa Plastics Storage Facility: Mai Liao, Taiwan, 123 m (402 feet).

Union Tank Car Maintenance Facility: Baton Rouge, LA USA, 117 m (384 feet), destroyed in November 2007.(External Link

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Lehigh Portland Cement Storage Facility: Union Bridge, MD USA, 114 m (374 feet).

The Eden Project, Cornwall, United Kingdom (External Link

) Eden Project] Fuller's development of the dome and his roles as a philosopher and as a gadfly within the design and architectural communities left an important legacy. He introduced a number of concepts, and if every one wasn't entirely new, we can still say that he honed each one well.
More than 500,000 geodesic domes have been built around the world. Some notable ones include the 80.8-meter (265-foot) wide Epcot Center at Disney World in Florida, a 109.7-meter (360-foot) tall dome over a shopping center in downtown Ankara, Turkey, and a 85.3-meter (280-foot) high dome enclosing a civic center in Stockholm, Sweden. The world’s largest aluminum dome formerly housed the “Spruce Goose” airplane in Long Beach Harbor, California. However, domes are not an everyday sight in most places. Contrary to initial hopes, in practice, most of the smaller owner-built geodesic structures had drawbacks (see geodesic domes). As a home, many people have been put off by the domes' unconventional appearance.
An interesting spin-off of Fuller's dome-design conceptualization was the Buckminster Ball

, which was the official FIFA approved design for footballs (soccer balls), from their introduction at the 1970 World Cup until recently. The design was essentially a "Geodesic Sphere", consisting of 12 pentagonal and 20 hexagonal panels. This was used continuously for 34 years until it was replaced by a 14-panel version

in the 2006 World Cup.
While an envisioned widespread and common adoption of geodesic domes is yet to materialize, Fuller's ideas, teachings, and attitude to life and creativity, in combination, have prodded designers and engineers. What Fuller accomplished, in that sense, was to make professionals and students think "outside the box"; to question convention. Fuller was followed (historically) by other designers and architects (for example, Sir Norman Foster and Steve Baer) willing to explore the possibilities of new geometries in the design of buildings, not based on conventional rectangles. The English writer, playwright, and philosopher John Dryden wrote something quite relevant to the pioneering forays of Fuller still to be brought to full result: "We must beat the iron while it's hot, but we may polish it at leisure."

Facts and Figures

Fuller was friends with Boston artist Pietro Pezzati.

He experimented with polyphasic sleep, which he called Dymaxion sleep, and claimed that for two years he was able to sleep only two hours a day. (External Link

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He was a Unitarian-Universalist.

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 (or Soccer ball). The 1996 Nobel prize in chemistry was given to Kroto, Curl, Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes.(External Link

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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 on the occasion of his 109th birthday.

Fuller documented his life every 15 minutes from 1915 to 1983, leaving 80 meters (270 feet) of journals. He called this the Dymaxion Chronofile. That is said to be the most documented human life in history.

He dedicated the US Pavilion dome at Expo 67 to his wife Anne when they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary there.

Around 1979-1980, Bucky shared a lecture tour across America with philosopher Werner Erhard. � "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 couldn't be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record." (External Link

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Buckminster and John Denver were very close friends and the song "What One Man Can Do" on John's 1982 album "Seasons of the Heart" was written for Buckminster's 85th birthday. John dedicated the song to him.

He is quoted with saying "I think that we're clinging to a great many piano tops."

Use of language and neologisms

Buckminster Fuller spoke and wrote in a unique style and thought it crucial 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 coined. Fuller used the word 'Universe' without the definite or indefinite articles (a or the) and always capitalized the word. Universe to Fuller meant the sum of all experience.
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. 'World-around' is a term coined by Fuller to replace worldwide. The general belief in a flat Earth died out in the Middle Ages, 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. The terms sunsight and sunclipse are other neologisms, according to Allegra Fuller Snyder, collectively coined by the Fuller family, replacing sunrise and sunset in order to overturn the geocentric bias of most pre-Copernican celestial mechanics. Fuller also coined the phrase Spaceship Earth, and coined the term (but didn't invent) tensegrity. It has also been claimed that Fuller coined the phrase debunk in 1927, but many credit William Woodward for the term in 1923.

Concepts and buildings

R. Buckminster Fuller's 28 patents His concepts and buildings include:

Dymaxion house (1928) See autonomous building

Aerodynamic Dymaxion car (1933)

Prefabricated compact bathroom cell (1937)

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)

Bibliography

Further Information

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