Buckminster Fuller was, in many ways, a twenty-first century man: an achievement in itself, considering he was born in the nineteenth century and died in the twentieth. In fact, it may actually count as his defining achievement. For all the inventions presented as revolutionary that never really caught on — the Dymaxion house and car, the geodesic dome — as well as the countless pages of eccentrically theoretical writing and even more countless hours of talk, it can be difficult for us now, here in the actual twenty-first century, to pin down the civilizational impact he so earnestly longed to make. But to the extent that he embodied the faith, born of the combination of industrial might and existential dread that colored the postwar American zeitgeist, that technology can rationally re-shape the world, we’re all his intellectual children.
In the video above, Joe Scott provides an introduction to Fuller and his world in about ten minutes. After a much-referenced Damascene conversion, the once-dissolute Fuller spent most of his life “trying to solve the world’s problems,” Scott says, “specifically in finding ways to save resources and provide for everybody on the planet: to do more with less, as we would say.”
The title he gave himself of “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist” neatly represents both his globally, even universally scaled ambitions, as well as his compulsive knack for self-promotion. If the designs he came up with to achieve his utopian ends never took root in society (even geodesic domes ended up as something like “the hula hoop of twentieth-century architecture,” James Gleick writes, in that they were “everywhere, and then they were a bit silly”), the problem had in part to do with the tendency of his grand visions to outpace the functional technology of his day.
In his sensibility, too, “Bucky” Fuller can come off as a familiar type in our own time, even to those who’ve never heard of him. “There is no doubt whatever in Fuller’s mind that the whole development of modern science and technology has resulted from a willingness on the part of a very few men to sail into the wind of tradition, to trust in their own intellect, and to take advantage of their natural mobility,” wrote the New Yorker’s Calvin Tompkins in a 1966 profile. No wonder he appealed to the Whole Earth Catalog counterculture of that decade, which eventually evolved into the culture of what we now call Silicon Valley, where no declared intention to reinvent the way humans live and work is too ridiculously ambitious. Though few figures could have seemed more likely to turn permanently passé, Buckminster Fuller continues to inspire fascination — and in a way, as a patron saint of techno-optimism, he lives on today.
Related content:
Buckminster Fuller Tells the World “Everything He Knows” in a 42-Hour Lecture Series (1975)
The Life & Times of Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome: A Documentary
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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