Buckminster Fuller

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller

by Alec Nevala-Lee  · 1 Aug 2022  · 864pp  · 222,565 words

Nicks took the stage to sing “Dreams.” Fuller in the television commercial that introduced the Apple slogan “Think Different.” Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller Fuller died a month later, a half year before the release of the Macintosh, but his legacy at Apple endured. On September 28, 1997, a

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it has little meaning. Though you know they are gentle, sweet children, when they put on Hallowe’en monster masks, they “look” like monsters. —BUCKMINSTER FULLER, SYNERGETICS Richard Buckminster Fuller Jr. was born nearly blind. When he entered the world on July 12, 1895, at his family’s home in Milton, Massachusetts, his eyes

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seen wearing a necktie or even smoking a cigarette. Photo studio portrait of Anne, Fuller, and Anx (1916). Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller Fuller was attracted to Anne, but he contented himself for the moment with advising Phillips on how to court her. He had moved by then to

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and fliers of the early planes became men of marked importance” during the war. Fuller aboard the USS Inca. Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller Fuller was pleased to join their ranks in his lodgings at the Norfolk Country Club. Anne was there by Thanksgiving, and although they had to sleep

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under construction in Bridgeport, Connecticut (1933). Fuller is kneeling to examine the engine compartment at the far left. Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller Fuller’s mood improved when Anne and Allegra joined him in Connecticut, and he hoped to arrange for another reunion by enlisting Isamu Noguchi. “It seems

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shed water, and instead of a rear window, it had a periscope. Fuller with Dymaxion Car #1 (1933). Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller Fuller implied later that it was the first streamlined automobile, which was untrue. He liked to contrast it with a standard sedan, which resembled a horse

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divided each face edge into only four segments. A three-way grid is visible in the triangular faces. Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller Fuller was willing to move on. At the beginning of the year, he had built another prototype of the Dymaxion Deployment Unit for the US Army

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summer of 1948. A model of the thirty-one great circles of the icosahedron is visible on the ground. Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller Fuller said later that he had meant to fail in order to discover the “critical point” at which a dome would collapse. Penn backed him

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Eight Continuous Tension 1953–1959 The most economical relationships are geodesic, which means most economical relationships. Ergo, we have events and novents: geodesics and irrelevance. —BUCKMINSTER FULLER, SYNERGETICS After his confrontation with Jeffrey Lindsay in Dearborn, Fuller drove west with Anne, Sadao, and George Welch, a University of Michigan student who had

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. Fuller with the dome constructed by students from the University of Minnesota in Aspen, Colorado, in June 1953. Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller Fuller saw it as a trial run for a bomb shelter that he had designed at Princeton, based on the assumption that a curved surface would

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spherical model by Lee Hogden at North Carolina State. Discontinuous compression, continuous tension sphere at Princeton University (1953). Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller The Princeton project was considerably more ambitious. In the fall, Fuller supervised fifteen students in assembling a sphere forty feet in diameter, with steel aircraft

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History of Inventions: From Plough to Polaris. Translated by Anthony Lawrence. New York: Macmillan, 1963. Edmondson, Amy. A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987. Edwards, David. ArtScience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, W. H. Channing,

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Scott, Foresman, 1990. Friedman, B. H. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978. From the Library of R. Buckminster Fuller. New York: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2004. Fuller, Arthur Buckminster. Historical Notices of Thomas Fuller and His Descendants, with a Genealogy of the Fuller Family, 1638–1902. Cambridge, MA: 1902. Fuller, Margaret

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York: Collier Books, 1969. First published 1963 by Prentice-Hall (Englewood, NJ). ———. Intuition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972. ———. Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. ———. Nine Chains to the Moon. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938. ———. No More Secondhand God, and Other Writings. Carbondale

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the Fuller Research Foundation Canadian Division. Halifax, NS: Dalhousie Architectural Press, 2017. McHale, John. The Future of the Future. New York: Ballantine Books, 1969. ———. R. Buckminster Fuller. New York: George Braziller, 1962. McKibben, Bill, ed. American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. New York: Penguin, 2008. McLuhan, Marshall. Letters of Marshall McLuhan.

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of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. A Necessary Ruin. Directed by Evan Mather. Hand Crafted Films, 2010. Neder, Federico. Fuller Houses: R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Dwellings and Other Domestic Adventures. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2008. Nef, Evelyn Stefansson. Finding My Way: The Autobiography of an Optimist. Washington, DC

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Hewlett Fuller AMS R. Buckminster Fuller, An Autobiographical Monologue/Scenario Anthology R. Buckminster Fuller, Anthology for the Millennium BFR R. Buckminster Fuller, The Buckminster Fuller Reader “BV” Loretta Lorance, “Building Values: Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House in Context” (dissertation) CP R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path Discourse R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: Discourse EIK R. Buckminster Fuller, Everything I Know 4DT R. Buckminster Fuller, 4D Time Lock

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Harvard file Student folder of Richard Buckminster Fuller, Harvard University

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Materials 6–7) Lorance Loretta Lorance, Becoming Bucky Fuller Marks R. Buckminster Fuller and Robert Marks, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller RBF Richard Buckminster Fuller Sadao Shoji Sadao, Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi: Best of Friends SD R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics Dictionary: The Mind of Buckminster Fuller UOO R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion Wong Yunn Chii Wong, “The Geodesic Works of

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Richard Buckminster Fuller” (dissertation) PROLOGUE: GEODESIC MAN “I’ve got Bucky Fuller here”: Taylor

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accessed January 2021). page in his wallet: Rich Heinemeyer, interviewed by author, February 17, 2020. “We owe the notion”: Yves Béhar interview, “Buckminster Fuller: Utopia Rising,” https://www.nowness.com/story/buckminster-fuller-utopia-rising (accessed February 2021). “emergence through emergency”: RBF, Nine Chains to the Moon (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938), 240–46

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display sculptures by Isamu Noguchi, although it was never realized (Your Private Sky, ed. Krausse and Lichtenstein, 29, and Dana Miller, “Thought Patterns: Buckminster Fuller the Scientist-Artist,” in Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, ed. K. Michael Hays and Dana A. Miller [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2008], 26). “thinking

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RBF to William Osborn, February 27, 1936, B37-V56. his bathroom: Background and technical details drawn from Marks, 96–97, and Wigley, Buckminster Fuller Inc., 108–15. Architectural Record: Wigley, Buckminster Fuller Inc., 108–9. Richard Neutra: RBF to John Fistere, May 5, 1943, B55-F2. Jasper Morgan: RBF to William Osborn, December 20

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. “identical axial rotations”: RBF, “Dymaxion Kinetic Vector Structure,” December 15, 1947, reproduced as the frontispiece to Synergetics. “Atomic Buckalow”: Wong, fig. 2.05a, and Wigley, Buckminster Fuller Inc., 152. “triangular intertension”: Ibid. “spherical mast”: RBF, Inventions, 127. he tripped, shattering it: Cochrane, Sense of Significance, 128–29. “[Straus] didn’t believe”:

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Mountain College,” 202, and Lionel Wolberger, email to author, January 26, 2021. See also Caspar Schwabe, “Eureka and Serendipity: The Rudolf von Laban Icosahedron and Buckminster Fuller’s Jitterbug,” Proceedings of Bridges 2010: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture, 271–78. James Fitzgibbon: Edward S. Popko, Divided Spheres: Geodesics and the Orderly

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the plumbing”: Ibid., 244. “by indirection”: Ibid., 245. Necklace Dome: The account of the dome’s construction is based on Wigley, Buckminster Fuller Inc., 140–41. fiberglass panels: Pawley, Buckminster Fuller, 120. “When I showed him the sculpture”: Valentín Gómez-Jáuregui, Tensegrity Structures and Their Application to Architecture (Santander, Sp.: Cantabria University Press

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3. Robert Moses: Shyer, “O’Malley-Fuller Connection.” “energetic-synergetic geometry”: “Item—0: An Introduction to the Energetic-Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller,” reproduced in Daniel López-Pérez, R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern-Thinking (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2020), 72. tensional integrity, or “tensegrity”: The word tensegrity was RBF’s preferred term by 1958, when

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Form Givers at Mid-Century [New York: Time, 1959], 60–63). modernist emphasis on function: Maria Gough, “Backyard Landing: Three Structures by Buckminster Fuller,” in New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller, ed. Chu and Trujillo, 125–27. offending Bernie Kirschenbaum: Wong, 238n122. A dome that Kirschenbaum built for Frank Safford in Wading River, Long

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Times Magazine, August 23, 1959, 15. “weave” entire buildings: Gough, “Backyard Landing,” 128. “In effect, the city”: Ada Louise Huxtable, “Future Previewed? Innovations of Buckminster Fuller Could Transform Architecture,” New York Times, September 27, 1959, sec. 2, 21. “the greatest advance”: Ibid. “the newest look”: John Canaday, “Art: New Directions in

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”: Ibid., 33. Robert Snyder: Sketchbook: Three Americans (1960) featured RBF, Igor Stravinsky, and Willem de Kooning. Snyder’s later films included Buckminster Fuller on Spaceship Earth (1971) and The World of Buckminster Fuller (1974). Francis Thompson: “Experimental Movies Lecture Set at SIU,” Southern Illinoisan (Carbondale), November 9, 1960. “There is no reason”: RBF,

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the author by Norman Foster. “bizarre antics”: Thomas Turner to RBF, July 21, 1971, quoted in Hsiao-Yun Chu, “The Archive of R. Buckminster Fuller,” in New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller, ed. Chu and Trujillo, 20. “complete strangers to me”: Written statement by RBF, quoted in ibid. “I live on planet Earth”: “

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Applewhite, Cosmic Fishing, 62. H. S. M. Coxeter, “the geometer”: Dedication page in RBF with Applewhite, Synergetics. “after much deliberation”: Applewhite, “Account by R. Buckminster Fuller of His Relations with Scientists,” Series 8, B12-F23, 9. “foolhardy freedom to explore”: Ibid. “a remarkable discovery”: Roberts, King of Infinite Space, 179. whom

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Winters, “The World for a Classroom,” Baltimore Sun, April 7, 1974). “give the reviewers”: Applewhite, Cosmic Fishing, 141. “You’re very . . . universe”: Annie Dillard, “Buckminster Fuller,” in Brushes with Greatness: An Anthology of Chance Encounters with Celebrities, ed. Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, and David Young (Toronto: Big Bang, 1989), 29. “After

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, B370-F7. “intellectual curiosity”: Mary, email to author, April 19, 2021. swallowing difficulties: Allegra Fuller Snyder, “Notes on Anne and Bucky Fuller’s Deaths,” Buckminster Fuller Institute, https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/biography/notes-anne-and-bucky-fullers-deaths (accessed January 2021). “various seaweed things”: Roger Stoller, author interview, May

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Philadelphia Inquirer, November 19, 1978, 54-M. “not the blue star”: Ibid. “two very attractive offers”: Schumacher, “Area Colleges End Funds for Buckminster Fuller,” 1. financed with a large loan: “Buckminster Fuller Gets Loan to Continue Work Here,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 1, 1979, 2-B. RBF eventually moved his office into the Institute for

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, 1978, B374-F9. “I do have the know-how”: RBF to Charles Sachs, January 14, 1980, quoted in Chu, “Archive of R. Buckminster Fuller,” in New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller, ed. Chu and Trujillo, 21. owed to Werner Erhard: Jonathan Stoller, interviewed by author, May 14, 2019. “That’s fine”: Ibid. bank

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[accessed December 2020]). “warring factions”: Alexandra Snyder May, author interview, June 7, 2019. sold Fuller’s archives: Chu, “Archive of R. Buckminster Fuller,” in New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller, ed. Chu and Trujillo, 22. tetrahelix memorial: Sadao, 225. In the course of this project, it was discovered that RBF had described the

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House, 252, 259 Buck, Pearl S., 593n426 Buckley, William F., Jr., 382 Buckminster Fuller: An Autobiographical Monologue/Scenario (Fuller), 433 Buckminster Fuller: At Home in the Universe (Hatch), 398 Buckminster Fuller Institute, 468, 589n415 Buckminster Fuller Reader, The (Fuller), 370 Buckminster Fuller to Children of Earth (Fuller), 384 Buckminster Fuller’s Universe (Sieden), 16 buckminsterfullerene, 9, 462–467, 465fig Bucky (Kenner),

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, 318 International University of Art, 375 Interview, 425 Intuition (Fuller), 382 Inventions Board of the British Purchasing Commission, 174 Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller (Fuller), 445 Inventions: Twelve Around One, 600n445 isotropic vector matrix, 256, 366, 445, 456–457 J. P. Morgan Co., 74–75 Jackson, Jesse, 446 Jacobs,

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mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. FIRST EDITION Cover design by Paul Miele-Herndon Cover photograph: Buckminster Fuller, New York, October 28, 1969 by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation * * * Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nevala-Lee, Alec, author.

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Title: Inventor of the future : the visionary life of Buckminster Fuller / Alec Nevala-Lee. Description: First edition. | New York : Dey St., an imprint of William Morrow, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022018416

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

by Fred Turner  · 31 Aug 2006  · 339pp  · 57,031 words

Richard Brautigan, has been reprinted with the permission of Sarah Lazin Books. Portions of chapter 2 have been adapted from “Buckminster Fuller: A Technocrat for the Counterculture,” in New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller, edited by Hsiao-Yun Chu and Roberto Trujillo, © 2006 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University, forthcoming from

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military-industrial complex as a whole, as well as the political process that brought it into being, hippies from Manhattan to HaightAshbury read Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan. Introduction [ 5 ] Through their writings, young Americans encountered a cybernetic vision of the world, one in which material reality could be imagined

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Rauschenberg, embraced the systems orientation and even the engineers of the military-industrial research establishment. Together they read Norbert Wiener and, later, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller; across the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, they made those writings models for their work. At the same time, both the artists he

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was more than a performance team. It was a social system unto itself. Through it, Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller—all of whom would become key influences on the Whole Earth community—and began to imagine a new synthesis of cybernetic theory and countercultural politics

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.”19 In the final moments, the audience was to experience the mystical unity that ostensibly bound together USCO’s members. Comprehensive Designers: Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller By the mid-1960s, USCO’s performances marked the cutting edge of countercultural art. USCO had built multimedia backdrops for talks by Timothy Leary (whose

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and to new electronic communication technologies. These turns grew in large part out of USCO’s engagement with the technocentric visions of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. Each of these theorists depicted technology as a tool for social transformation. At the same time, both turned their backs on the bureaucratic world of

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] industrial society offered the keys to transforming and thus to saving the adult world. No one promoted this doctrine more fervently than the technocratic polymath Buckminster Fuller. Architect, designer, and traveling speechmaker, Fuller became an inspiration to Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth network, and the New Communalist movement as a whole across

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on to write to Fuller, to attend his lectures, and, in the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, to claim that “the insights of Buckminster Fuller are what initiated this catalog.” In retrospect, it is easy to understand Fuller’s appeal to cold war American youth. Like McLuhan, he simultaneously embraced

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an intellectual migrant. To a generation preoccupied with the fear of becoming lockstep corporate adults on the military model of Brand’s imagined Soviet Army, Buckminster Fuller offered a marvelously playful alternative. Fuller’s vision of the Comprehensive Designer carried with it, nonetheless, intellectual frameworks and social ideals formulated at the core

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put them to work as tools for the transformation of self and community. Although Brand later recalled that Kesey and the Pranksters were unfamiliar with Buckminster Fuller’s S t e w a r t B ran d M e e t s t h e C y b e r n

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felt a sense of communion with one another, the sensation was brought about by their integration into a single techno-biological system within which, as Buckminster Fuller put it, echoing Norbert Wiener, the individual human being was simply another “pattern-complex.” Brand himself had organized the event in keeping with the systems

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and sat shivering in a blanket sort of looking and thinking. . . . And so I’m watching the buildings, looking out at San Francisco, thinking of Buckminster Fuller’s notion that people think of the earth’s resources as unlimited because they think of the earth as flat. I’m looking at San

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in the first edition, and a similar portion in later editions, were books. At the front of the Catalog, in “Understanding Whole Systems,” works by Buckminster Fuller met books on geology and biology; a little later, in “Community,” the Merck Manual could be found alongside a chronicle of kibbutz life and a

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fo r m at i o n Te c h n o l o g y [ 83 ] local and one global, and both familiar from Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas and Integrities and, before that, Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. On the local level, the individual reader is like a god in having the

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for others in his own right. In this dizzying string of analogies, we can hear echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Norbert Wiener, and, of course, Buckminster Fuller. But for many of the readers of the Whole Earth Catalog, the analogies were more than the stuff of Romantic or cybernetic theory. They could

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to channel both the electrical currents running through his calculators and radios and the mystical currents of “The Way.” He is also to inhabit what Buckminster Fuller called an “outlaw area,” a place to experiment outside the strictures of everyday law.39 For the New Communalists, in keeping with the rhetoric of

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could “experiment undisturbed with the creation of radically new types of human beings, surpassing us in mental capacities as we surpass the apes.”40 In Buckminster Fuller’s “outlaw area,” and in Dyson’s social-Darwinist vision of space, we can glimpse the first intimations of the libertarian “cyberspace” of the early

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’s voice, Brand featured the voices of various reviewers and letter-writers and bits of text from the products themselves. A few items, such as Buckminster Fuller’s writings, received extra space, but virtually all of the rest received between one-quarter and one-half of a page. Although the section “Understanding

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tended to speak to the reader at one or both of the levels of self suggested by the Catalog’s statement of purpose. Some, like Buckminster Fuller’s writings, or books of maps and landscape pictures, or even the mystical fiction of Carlos Castañeda, tended to depict the world as a whole

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emblems of America’s cold war inventiveness and will to survive a nuclear attack had been transformed into symbols of a holistic way of life. Buckminster Fuller had built one for his own home in 1963. By 1965 Ken Kesey was rhapsodizing over building one in which to hold an Acid Test

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’s readers and even staffers took the Catalog and the communities it served to task. In the July 1969 Supplement, Brand printed a letter critiquing Buckminster Fuller for allowing only two classes in his work: elite designers and mass consumers. In the same issue, Brand reprinted an article from the San Francisco

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’s local role in maintaining universal systems. By acting on a small scale, the individual can imitate Norbert Wiener’s gunner, adjusting his fire, or Buckminster Fuller’s Designer, turning the energies of the universe to his own purposes. He can thereby change the large-scale system of which he is both

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the next few years, his office came to house both the computers he used in the schools and a technical-writing business called Dymax (after Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion principle). As a result of his work in the schools, Albrecht had long imagined computers as tools that could be used by individuals

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.” For Brand, Stanford’s AI Lab and the Defense Department–funded research rooms of Xerox PARC were the equivalent of what he and others, following Buckminster Fuller, had lately called “outlaw zones.” The hackers were Comprehensive Designers. Like the builders of geodesic domes, they drew on the funding and technology emanating from

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as it did on his reading of the mystical cybernetics of a former anthropologist, psychiatrist, and biological researcher, Gregory Bateson. Much as the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and Norbert Wiener had presided [ 122 ] Chapter 4 over the Whole Earth Catalog, Bateson’s cybernetic vision permeated CQ. In the late 1960s, Fuller and

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in 1974. In a series of articles and interviews over the next seven years, Brand presented Bateson to his readers much as he had presented Buckminster Fuller some years earlier. Brand’s Bateson was an intellectual seeker, an autodidact and polymath possessed of an orphic speaking style and a childlike curiosity. Just

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plans for MIT’s new Media Lab. Brand was dazzled. Negroponte was very much a showman-intellectual in the style of Brand’s earlier mentor Buckminster Fuller. A few months later, Brand wrote to Negroponte, asking for a short-term job. Negroponte offered Brand a three-month appointment at MIT’s Media

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their hands as they moved “past provable material into speculation, anticipating and overwhelming objection with manual dexterity.”7 Like McLuhan, and perhaps even more like Buckminster Fuller, Negroponte could make an emerging way of life visible to Brand in his speech. Moreover, like Kesey, Negroponte seemed to live the life he preached

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to build alternative communities. On the other hand, the technophilic orientation of cybernetics and information theory, together with the example of idiosyncratic technocrats such as Buckminster Fuller, offered the youth of the 1960s a solution to another dilemma as well. Although they had grown up under the shadow of the atomic bomb

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the power to destroy the world, a state in which they really were “as gods,” then its products could also enable individual youths to become Buckminster Fuller’s Comprehensive Designers. As Fuller suggested, and as Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog demonstrated, they could take up the goods of industrial society and

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, this account was enormously appealing. If all could be imagined as one, and if bodies themselves were no more than “pattern-complex function[s],” as Buckminster Fuller put it, then individuals could do away with the formal governance structures that had lately caused so much trouble and restore global harmony by relying

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shared mission and link them together with information and information technologies. To the extent that Ullman tries to change the world, she does so as Buckminster Fuller might suggest she should: by designing new technologies for the management of information and the transformation of society’s resources into knowledge on which others

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Young.” [ 270 ] N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 5 _ 7 2 26. Fuller quoted in Fuller and Snyder, R. Buckminster Fuller, 12. 27. Emerson quoted in Kenner, Bucky, 149 –50. 28. Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, 35 – 43. 29. Ibid., 173. 30. Ibid., 176. 31. Ibid., 63

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. 32. Brand, “Buckminster Fuller,” 3, 249. 33. Fuller quoted in Fuller and Snyder, R. Buckminster Fuller, 38. By the early 1960s, Fuller was traveling more than two-thirds of every year. Kenner, Bucky, 290. 34. Brand

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one of the many gatherings attended by Whole Earth subscribers or staffers between 1968 and 1971 and reported on in Whole Earth publications. Others included Buckminster Fuller’s World Game at Southern Illinois University (see Norman and Shugart, Whole Earth Catalog $1) and Brand’s own experimental production of the Catalog from

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Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Brand, Stewart. “Buckminster Fuller.” In Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Stewart Brand, 3. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1968. ———. “Civilization and Its Contents.” In Rheingold, Millennium Whole Earth Catalog

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.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/ Resources/Primary/Manifestos/FSM_fold_bend.html (accessed January 8, 2005). Fuller, R. Buckminster. Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Fuller, R. Buckminster, and Robert Snyder. R. Buckminster Fuller: An Autobiographical Monologue Scenario Documented and Edited by Robert Snyder. New York: St. Martin’s

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/j071560.htm (accessed May 15, 2005). B i b l i o g ra p h y [ 303 ] Kenner, Hugh. Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller. New York: Morrow, 1973. Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Kesey, Ken. “Ken Kesey Was a Successful Dope

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Free Speech Movement, 1–2, 11–13, 16, 17, 31, 34, 35, 63, 240, 242 – 43 Free University, 70 freeware, 137 French, Gordon, 102, 115 Fuller, Buckminster, 55 –56; Comprehensive Designer, 56 –57, 58, 244; Dymaxion principle, 113; geodesic dome, 65, 94; Ideas and Integrities, 56, 57, 83; imprint of cold war

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities

by Howard P. Segal  · 20 May 2012  · 299pp  · 19,560 words

the landmark World of Tomorrow exhibit at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair or, of course, George Orwell’s nightmare 1984 (1949). With Buckminster Fuller’s Utopia or Oblivion (1969) came the elimination of any delay: the future was now. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14

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of Dertouzos, who died in 2001) greatly respected. By contrast, the last major visionary who, as noted, was not “in it for the money” was Buckminster Fuller. If it is true that Fuller endured decades of indifference and sometimes ridicule before he obtained respect, influence, relative affluence, and a devoted following, it

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, “Tech Lab: $100 Netbook Not Quite a Prescription for Success,” Boston Globe (September 23, 2010), B1, B11. See James Sterngold, “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller,” New York Times, Architecture, June 15, 2008, 26; and Howard P. Segal, “Getting Bucky Fuller Right: A Review Essay,” Technology and Culture, 51 (October 2010

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longer duration, was Drop City, a community established in the hills of southern Colorado in the late 1960s and inspired by the work of R. Buckminster Fuller. Singled out by the media as “exemplary” of the contemporary counterculture, Drop City became known for its dome style of architecture. Drop City integrated Fuller

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, 2009, G8. See my review in Technology and Culture, 28 (July 1987), 697–698 of R. Buckminster Fuller, Inventions: The Patented Works of Buckminster Fuller (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983) and James Ward, ed., The Artifacts of Buckminster Fuller: A Comprehensive Collection of His Designs and Drawings, 4 vols. (New York: Garland, 1985). Both were

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posthumous publications. The large literature on Buckminster Fuller includes Amy C. Edmondson, A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Boston: Birkh€auser, 1987); Martin Pawley, Buckminster Fuller (New York: Taplinger, 1990); Robert

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R. Potter, Buckminster Fuller (Englewood Cliffs: Silver Burdett, 1990); J. Baldwin, Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today (New York: John Wiley

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, 1996); Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe (Cambridge: Perseus, 2000); Thomas T. K

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. Zung, ed., Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium (New York

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: St. Martin’s, 2001); and Michael John Gorman, Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility (New York: Rizzoli, 2005). See Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very

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not diminish this monumental achievement. In 2008 and 2009 two major museums, New York’s Whitney and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, successively exhibited “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe.” This was the first major retrospective on Fuller since his death in 1983 and, like the New York Public Library exhibit

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essay in Horizon magazine entitled “Which Guide to the Promised Land? Fuller or Mumford?” Without taking sides, Temko insightfully compared the differing visions of contemporaries Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) and Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), both then at the height of their power and influence. Despite their vastly differing viewpoints, each had become

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The Future of Utopias and Utopianism not prevent future, more critical reassessments. Revealingly, however, in the introduction to his Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller (1983), written shortly before he died, Fuller provided an illuminating end-of-life reflection entitled “Guinea Pig B.” Here the normally bombastic, inscrutable, and self

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“discontinued items” on this planet or anywhere else in [the] Universe.27 Here, then, might be an appropriate starting point for reconsidering the place of Buckminster Fuller and other twentieth- and twenty-first-century utopians. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, utopian communities continue to be established and maintained

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Society in the Western World,’ New York Public Library,” Journal of American History, 88 (June 2001), 152–155. “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe.” The Whitney Museum, New York, http://www.whitney.org/www/buckminster_ fuller. Temporary exhibit, June 26 to September 21, 2008. Also The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, http://www.mcachicago

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, 1990), but Fuller’s have not. Partial reconsideration have now been remedied by Hsiao-Yun Chu and Roberto G. Trujillo, eds., New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). One of the catalog’s essays—by K. Michael Hays—includes a photo of that dome’s construction but doesn

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See Howard P. Segal, Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 152. Richard Buckminster Fuller, Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), xxxii, xx. James Dator, “Will You Surf the Tsunamis of Change?” Lecture before the Pacific Islands

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Brende, Eric, Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). Chu, Hsiao-Yun and Roberto G. Trujillo, eds., New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Cornish, Edward, Futuring: The Exploration of the Future (Bethesda, MD: World Future Society, 2004). Ezrahi, Yaron, Everett Mendelsohn, and

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Utopianism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Three Twentieth-Century Leading Visionaries Chu, Hsiao-Yun and Roberto G. Trujillo, eds., New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Hughes, Agatha and Thomas, eds. Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Smith, David C., H

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–26, 27 Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Delano) 254–255 Brooklyn Bridge 139 Brooks, David 124 Bryan, William Jennings 29 Bryant, Howard 191 Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe (exhibition) 245 buckminsterfullerene 247 Buddhist eschatological traditions 21 Bundy, McGeorge 104, 106 Bunji, Suzuki 20 Burma (Myanmar) 19 Burns, William 236

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to the Moon (Verne) 8 From the Legend of Biel (Staton) 92 Fukushima Daiichi plant, Japan 152, 242 Fukuyama, Francis 188 Fuller, Margaret 247 Fuller, R. Buckminster 14, 245–249 influence 195–196, 207 and “limits of growth” 237–238 sense of social responsibility 163 as visionary 162 Fuller Archives 245–246

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102 Internet 2, 186, 187, 199, 243, 253 intractable social problems, problems termed “wicked” 112–113 intraorganizational individualism 122 Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller (Fuller) 249 iPads 187, 193, 219, 222 iPhones 187, 219 iPods 2, 163, 187, 193, 219, 220, 238 Iran 189 Iraq War of 2003 11, 140

Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture

by Deyan Sudjic  · 1 Sep 2010

an echo of the first city of the future that Norman Foster explored with his adolescent imagination growing up in Manchester. Long before he met Buckminster Fuller, he never missed an instalment of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future. As a young teenager Foster read the comic strip, with its intricate depiction

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predicted would be the personal transport of the very near future. As portrayed by the Eagle’s artists, these vehicles bear a close resemblance to Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car, shaped like tear drops and driven on three invisible wheels. The cities of the future were going to look like modular collections

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direction that their work had taken. He was especially interested in Louis Kahn, who managed to be both monumental and fascinated by the thinking of Buckminster Fuller. For any young architect who wanted to get close to the centre of energy for their subject, America was an essential destination in a way

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’s the way that he explained himself to his cautious and financially careful mother. Just as twenty years later he would, taking his lead from Buckminster Fuller, compare the high-tech solution of launching a communications satellite to the apparently cheaper but actually much more profligate strategy of laying 2,000 miles

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a brick to be what a brick wanted to be. Foster certainly learned lessons from Kahn, who had begun to explore what the impact of Buckminster Fuller’s approach to geometry might be on high-rise architecture. Foster and Rogers made the first halting steps towards starting an architectural practice together while

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, Willis Faber’s curves are two-dimensional, but Foster had already begun to explore the idea of a building with three-dimensional curves designed with Buckminster Fuller, the American disciple of the geodesic dome who was to have a profound influence on Foster. They called the project the Climatroffice. Taking the Willis

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elegance of the Sainsbury Centre had moved him. The Sainsbury Centre weighs 5,619 tons. Norman Foster knows that now, but on the day that Buckminster Fuller asked him the question, Foster had to go home and do some calculations. I wrote a letter back to him. I made some very interesting

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clients, giving him the chance to prove himself, they played a part in his personal life as something close to surrogate parents. But it was Buckminster Fuller – the man who spontaneously let slip the phrase ‘spaceship earth’ in a speech in 1951, long before there were any spaceships – who gave him the

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no zeitgeist expressed here, no world feeling, one sees one of the best possible solutions to a set of questions. It is another version of Buckminster Fuller’s vision of architecture based on performance, not formalism. Foster was shaken by Aicher’s death in 1991. In the week before he died suddenly

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’s-eye dome, twelve feet across, that Fuller produced in the 1970s and which is now kept at Foster’s home in Switzerland. Typically a Buckminster Fuller dome is composed of rods, sometimes combined with cables. It produces something that is incredibly strong with very little mass, very little weight, and extraordinary

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that requires an entirely businesslike approach. But more than that he has always looked for ways to respond to the challenge that Fuller set him. Buckminster Fuller speculated about a dome over Manhattan. To judge by Masdar, the zero-carbon city for 100,000 people that Foster is building in Abu Dhabi

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to politics is more concerned with the tactics of building in a complex world. At a philosophical scale, he has the utopian streak inherited from Buckminster Fuller, complete with all the attendant inherent paradoxes. He is patently sincere about the green imperative, but he nevertheless leaves a conspicuous carbon footprint as he

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in a climate that sees temperatures plummet to thirty degrees below zero. Both the Crystal City and Khan Shatyry can be interpreted as inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Manhattan: utopian visions of a bubble of urbanity in the midst of a hostile climate, though in the form of a vast

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an off-the-shelf system used for cowsheds, an idea that would not have gone down well with the occupants, had they known. Foster and Buckminster Fuller worked together on a plan for a solar-powered house taking the form of a dome within a dome, so as to create a highly

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serve to define the tastes of their owners. Most of the time the Great Portland Street version of the table had a large model of Buckminster Fuller’s solar house sitting on top of it. Foster staff who made the transition from Fitzroy Street remember Great Portland Street with affection. At Fitzroy

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not an easy moment. Foster’s pride collided with his determination to survive at all costs. James Meller, who had made the first introduction to Buckminster Fuller, was among those sacrificed. Foster kept Jan Kaplicky on for as long as he could, keeping him busy on a series of make-work tasks

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typically have in a more energy-efficient way. Foster’s next mission is to follow in the footsteps of Le Corbusier and Jean Prouve and Buckminster Fuller, all of whom tried and failed to create mass-produced homes. Except that Foster, with his connections with Indian industrialists, international bankers and high-tech

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Architects Oral History Project, The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings, Department of Architecture, The Art Institute of Chicago, Copyright 2002 p. 146 Buckminster Fuller, quoted in Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future, MIT, 2003 p. 146 Nigel Whitely, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future, MIT

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Abbot (© Su Rogers) Reliance Controls Creek Vean (© Richard Einzig) Drawing for Creek Vean Sketch of Creek Vean Photograph of Creek Vean (© Camera Craft) Foster with Buckminster Fuller (© Ken Kirkwood) Foster with Wendy Cheeseman (© Tim Street Porter) Section Two Olsen building under construction (© Tim Street Porter) Architectural Review cover Foster with a light

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aeroplanes and air travel; Aicher, Otl; education; employment; Foster, Elena (wife); Foster, Lillian (mother); Foster, Robert (father); Foster, Wendy (1st wife); Foster + Partners; Foster Associates; Fuller, Buckminster; Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank; Olsen, Fred; politics in architecture; Rogers, Richard; Sainsbury, Robert and Lisa; Team Four; Yale University Foster, Robert (father), 11, 14

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, Fred; Sainsbury, Robert and Lisa Francis, Martin, 116–17, 258 Fragrant Hills Hotel, Beijing, 227 Fred. Olsen Line, Millwall see Olsen, Fred Fulbright scholarships, 53 Fuller, Buckminster, 143–6, 272 Dymaxion projects, 10, 144, 154 NF influenced by, 57, 90, 125, 246, 291 NF’s relationship with, 141–2, 149–51, 154

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industrial buildings. The breakthrough projects were the offices for Willis Faber in Ipswich, and the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, of which Buckminster Fuller (top) memorably asked, ‘How much does your building weigh, Norman?’ The success of the Olsen building in London’s docks, with its at that time

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eroded corners is a striking new approach to tower-building in Manhattan, which provides a strength-to-weight ratio that would have been endorsed by Buckminster Fuller, to whom it owes a debt. The interior has a remarkable art work by Richard Long (above), painstakingly placed by hand, using mud. This photograph

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

by Jill Lepore  · 14 Sep 2020  · 467pp  · 149,632 words

beach. It had a fireplace made of stones from Long Island Sound. Next door, another of Frank Safford’s friends, the visionary and eccentric architect Buckminster Fuller, would build for the Saffords one of his early geodesic domes, a shell of struts of aluminum and triangles of glass and porcelain, intricately balanced

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father, sat in on some of their meetings, watching them pore over endless reams of computer printouts.82 Then they reconvened at Wading River, where Buckminster Fuller was just beginning work on the geodesic dome he was building for Frank Safford, next to Ed and Patty Greenfield’s house.83 They’d

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’s sweet, artistic, and much-neglected wife, set about readying her family’s beach house for a retreat, and readying, too, the house next door: Buckminster Fuller had finished work on the geodesic dome. It had a plywood floor and triangular windows, overlooking Long Island Sound. Inside, it was like a honeycomb

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in 1960 and, after serving in the army, had joined a movement known as the New Communalism, which was powerfully influenced by the eccentric visionary Buckminster Fuller, the same man who, for his friend Frank Safford, Patty Greenfield’s father, had built the geodesic dome, where the scientists of Simulmatics had met

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machine. In 1968, from his base in Menlo Park, California, Brand launched the Whole Earth Catalog, with the motto “access to tools.” (“The insights of Buckminster Fuller are what initiated this catalog,” Brand wrote in its inaugural issue.)40 In 1972, when ARPANET made its debut, Brand celebrated the liberation of the

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in the 1970s and 1980s, the machine became the New Left’s salvation, the coming Internet an engine of personal liberation, a computer version of Buckminster Fuller’s idea of the world as Spaceship Earth, a free, universal, online commune, a Whole Earth experiment.43 In one of the stranger ironies of

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, $45 million building designed by I. M. Pei and named after Jerome Wiesner, a building that represented nothing so much as a newer version of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. Brand didn’t so much conduct research at the Media Lab as promote its agenda, as in his best-selling 1987 book

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Archives and Special Collections Folder names are given only for folders that lack numbers. Prologue: What If? The dome, although never finished, was built by Buckminster Fuller for Frank Safford; Safford later gave it to his son, Edwin (b. 1936). Edwin Safford, interview with the author, April 23, 2018. The Simulmatics Corporation

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, November 6, 1972. For samples of these conversations, see https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/dialogues.html. R. Buckminster Fuller, “Prime Design,” Bennington College Bulletin, May 1960. From R. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2009), 329, quoted in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture

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–98, 199, 210, 234, 255 Friedan, Betty, 82, 238 Friedman, Milton, 308 Friedman, Saul, 306 Frost, Robert, 135 Fulbright, J. William, 210, 288–89, 295 Fuller, Buckminster, 13, 118, 143, 311–12, 313, 317, 337n Fuller, Margaret, 311 Fund for the Republic, 14, 174 Fun in Bed (McPhee), 143 Gaither, H. Rowan

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E., 280–82 Gallup, George, 21, 104 Gallup polls, 21, 63, 104 Galouye, Daniel F., 4, 187–88 Gellhorn, Martha, 225–26, 256 geodesic domes    — Buckminster Fuller, 13, 118, 143, 311, 317, 337n    — Safford’s dome on Long Island, 1, 5, 13, 118, 337n George, Peter, 174, 175, 364n Gingrich, Newt, 318

Carbon: The Book of Life

by Paul Hawken  · 17 Mar 2025  · 250pp  · 63,703 words

could understand a fraction of what is happening in our body, its complexity and intelligence, we would realize we are in the presence of mystery. Buckminster Fuller once observed that Spaceship Earth is so well designed that we don’t know we are on one. Our body is so well designed that

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a direct outcome of what we choose for food. Seven Bucky and Bing God is a verb, not a noun. Buckminster Fuller Spaceship Earth was a metaphor that architect and engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller used to guide human activity. A long-distance voyage in space would require maintenance, cooperation, teamwork, fairness, and a profound

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, or air; and be sure the spaceship doesn’t get too crowded with passengers. And an important rule: Don’t touch the thermostat. I used Buckminster Fuller’s metaphor to lead a workshop for the management of a world-famous chemical company that took pride in its thousands of products, particularly its

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own and control nearly half of all planetary wealth, resources, energy, food, and land. Half of the population controls 1 percent of land and resources. Buckminster Fuller’s most famous design, the geodesic dome, was inspired by water. When he was an ensign on a naval crash boat, Fuller stood at the

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a hollow molecule, the most symmetrical and aesthetically beautiful molecule known. Physicists named the new configuration a fullerene, or buckyball, because of its similarity to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. The 1985 discovery riveted chemists around the world. It was like discovering a planet hiding behind Jupiter. Carbon is by far the

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them in various arrangements at the nanoscale, exploiting their properties however we like.” This is prototypical of the cloistered, dissociative beliefs of Western science. Would Buckminster Fuller want to see the commercialization and distribution of fullerenes, buckyballs, and nanotubes in the Spaceship? Those questions tend to be quickly dismissed with assurances that

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and engineering at Stanford. When one speaks and listens to Bing, there is something similar to his way of seeing the world to that of Buckminster Fuller. In my short time with Fuller, the best way I could describe his mind is brilliant innocence. Bing looked at wood the way

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Buckminster Fuller looked at bubbles. Why was cellulose so strong? He went small to find out. When studied with an electron microscope, the cellulosic fibers in wood

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. How quickly it is taken up and utilized is to be determined. We see imagination and practical genius here, much like what people saw in Buckminster Fuller. The US Department of Energy considers it genius, too. In November 2022, it awarded Bing’s company $20 million to build a pilot factory in

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, 164 plants and, 86 replacement of, 6 Fourier, Joseph, 13 Four Pests Campaign, in China, 139–40 Fowler, Willy, 24–25, 27 Franklin, Aretha, 189 Fuller, Buckminster, 57, 71–84 geodesic dome of, 73, 75 Hu and, 81–84 fullerenes, 75–77, 80 fungi, 103–15 ants and, 160 blindness to, 113

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

by John Markoff  · 22 Mar 2022  · 573pp  · 142,376 words

funding, with no tangible results. He tried to hold a seminar at Esalen on the project, bringing together big names, including Adams, Udall, and even Buckminster Fuller; he tried to exploit a Ford Foundation grant Raymond had gotten to explore the possibilities of suburban utopias; he wanted to display a roomful of

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he had once been interested in Ayn Rand, he added, he increasingly viewed her laissez-faire capitalist worldview as old thinking. Now the ideas of Buckminster Fuller—pro-technology, with a deep faith that the coming of computerization and automation would result in an infinite abundance that would arrive shortly—were increasingly

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found another directory and sent buttons to NASA officials, United Nations officials, Russian scientists, and even members of the Soviet Politburo. He sent buttons to Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan for good measure, and to his surprise, Fuller responded that his campaign was in vain because it would never be possible see

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became a close friend of the Brands’. When they arrived, Brand wrote in his journal that he had returned “to let my technology happen here.” Buckminster Fuller had opened his eyes, and he was spending his time reading widely with the intent of giving himself a “world technology education.” The consumer electronics

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after it opened, the Portola Institute served as the umbrella for Albrecht’s publishing company, Dymax, a for-profit spinoff that took its name from Buckminster Fuller’s term Dymaxion—the blend of dynamic and maximize. It was a word coined by Marc LeBrun, a teenager who had grown up in Portola

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equipment makers, each willing to spend $50 and $300 for booth space. It would also spotlight the ideas of two men in particular. One was Buckminster Fuller, whom Brand and Nixon approached at Esalen about the idea and who agreed to become a featured speaker. The other was Douglas Engelbart, the idealistic

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copyright license and that was that. In July, Brand produced a prototype of the Catalog—a four-page typed “Partial Preliminary Booklist” that began with Buckminster Fuller’s No More Secondhand God under the heading “Understanding Whole Systems” and concluded with descriptions of two magazines, the Modern Utopian and the Realist. In

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. Why should the Manhattan phone book make a difference?” “What’s important about a product is you can get it,” Baldwin replied. A disciple of Buckminster Fuller like Brand, Baldwin was a stickler for the notion that design ideas actually work. He had made a rubber stamp that read “Bring it around

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build a home in Big Sur employing giant thirty-foot-long bridge timbers. It was nicely designed, but it was also remarkably heavy. That winter Buckminster Fuller had come to lecture at Esalen and spoke about building geodesic domes. Kahn was struggling with immense timbers that weighed as much as half a

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casting about for what to do with his life. Brand fantasized that perhaps he could reconstitute himself as a “private statesman” or public intellectual like Buckminster Fuller, Ralph Nader, or David Brower. But how? Robert Frank had been Brand’s guide for understanding where photography was heading. Earlier, Frank had told him

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the rain in a tent. Trapped in a downpour, he found an upside: it was the moment when he discovered Gregory Bateson, who would supplant Buckminster Fuller as his intellectual guiding star. He had with him a copy of Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, published earlier that year, a

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Catalog, it was his close encounter with Bateson that would shake him loose from his devotion to the engineering-oriented world of geodesic domes and Buckminster Fuller. Bateson’s assertion in Steps to an Ecology of Mind that the three interwoven systems of the individual, society, and ecosystem form a cybernetic system

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-ranging group of thinkers to a speaker’s series for Brown and his staff called What’s Actually Happening. Among those he roped in were Buckminster Fuller, Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan, Jacques Cousteau, E. F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich, Gregory Bateson, Ken Kesey, Amory Lovins, and Herman Kahn. (Brand decided that the intelligent

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a series of big names on both sides of the issue, including Lynn Margulis, Wendell Berry, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, E. F. Schumacher, Lewis Mumford, Buckminster Fuller, Ernest Callenbach, David Brower, Carl Sagan, Gary Snyder, and Russell Schweickart. None of the attacks were more bitter than Berry’s, whose writings on agriculture

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Brand left San Francisco and began to both live and work on Richardson Bay in 1977, he was still attracted by the romance of what Buckminster Fuller described as “outlaw areas.” Fuller had noted that human habitation of the Earth was concentrated on a tiny portion of the Earth’s surface and

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, Brand’s message is not merely about blind devotion to tools. The evolution in his thinking has been in his departure from his devotion to Buckminster Fuller’s engineering-centric approach and his embrace of Gregory Bateson’s grasp of the significance of paradox and the importance of understanding “whole systems.” Brand

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, 175 From Bauhaus to Our House (Wolfe), 304–5 “Fruits of a Scholar’s Paradise” (Brand; unpublished), 45–46, 208 Fukushima nuclear disaster, 355–58 Fuller, Buckminster, 134, 147, 162, 169, 175, 176, 217 SB influenced by, 132, 138, 146, 150, 168–69, 222, 243–44, 363–64 Fulton, Katherine, 318 futurists

From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture

by Theodore Roszak  · 31 Aug 1986

issue. SAN FRANCISCO ORACLE for quotes from issues #6, 1967, and #12, 1967. Reprinted with permission of Allan Cohen, Editor. ST. MARTIN'S PRESS for Buckminster Fuller, An Autobiographical Monologue!Scenario by Robert Snyder, copyright 1970. ST. MARTIN'S PRESS copyright 1978. for Children of Prosperity by Hugh Gardner, The Times They

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could do that job. which it Catalog found the And of all the voices to gave a forum, none was to become more prominent than Buckminster Fuller, the formed a generation that it spaceship called Planet Earth, and write its who presumed to "operating manual" Now, Buckminster career. man who in- was

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page of the Catalog, the full corpus of Fuller's works was generously presented under the inscription: "the insights of itiated this catalog." became From Buckminster Fuller in- that point forward, Fuller the necessary presence at New Age confer- ences, symposia, and workshops: a sort of peripatetic global wizard audience down who

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modern tradition of thought that links back to the likes of Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and H.G. Wells. For these Utopian dustrialists, as for Buckminster Fuller the cure for our industrial things past, but in Things be found What is at the ills will not after them, be found To Come

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Holy, Healthy, Happy - Organization, a transplanted Indian Sikh group) invited me to participate in a ''planetary symposium" would be held simultaneously that in three major (Buckminster Fuller would, of course, be the cities. keynote speaker.) The themes of the event would be such simplicity ("Small spiritual would it participative sort of planet

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for the Protection of All Beings, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1961. 2. Resurgence, No. 59, Nov. -Dec, 1976, London, p.12. 3. Robert Snyder, Buckminster Fuller, graphical Monologue! Scenario, New An Autobio- Martin's Press, York, 1970, p. 38. 4. Bill Voyd, "Drop City", Sources, Harper 5. St. Hugh Press, & Row

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson  · 6 Oct 2014  · 720pp  · 197,129 words

once more can become a creative force, renewing and creating his own life.”9 A technotribalism began to emerge. Tech gurus such as Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan became required reading in communes and dorms. By the 1980s the LSD evangelist Timothy Leary would update his famous mantra “Turn on

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gravelly rooftop in San Francisco’s North Beach enjoying the effects of 100 micrograms of LSD. Staring at the skyline, he ruminated on something that Buckminster Fuller had said: our perception that the world is flat and stretches indefinitely, rather than round and small, is because we have never seen it from

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his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began, “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.” The first edition featured such items as Norbert

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cohort of community organizers and peace activists who learned to love computers as tools for bringing power to the people. They embraced small-scale technologies, Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and many of the tools-for-living values of the Whole Earth crowd, without being enthralled by psychedelics or

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, ref1 Free Software Foundation, ref1 Free Speech Movement, ref1, ref2, ref3 French, Gordon, ref1, ref2 French Revolution, ref1 Fuchs, Klaus, ref1, ref2 Fulghum, Robert, ref1 Fuller, Buckminster, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Fylstra, Dan, ref1 Galaxy Games, ref1 Gale, Grant, ref1 Galison, Peter, ref1 GameLine, ref1, ref2 Garcia, Jerry, ref1 Gates, Bill, ref1

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians

by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman  · 21 Mar 2017  · 441pp  · 113,244 words

half century, we shouldn’t be incredulous that sea stations can float on water. Seasteading should have started soon after 1967, when designer and architect Buckminster Fuller revealed his detailed vision of Triton City, a floating city for five thousand residents designed to encourage people to share resources and conserve energy. Triton

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possibility of acquiring such floating cities. Chances of one being inaugurated are now improving.” Heartbreakingly, municipal and federal regulators stalled the project, which languished until Buckminster Fuller died in 1983. A great idea from one of humanity’s greatest geniuses was never tested because old rules prevented the innovation. No matter. Sea

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cities produce waste. What if cities cleaned up waste? Today cities degrade ecosystems. What if cities created ecological habitats? “My favorite quote is by Richard Buckminster Fuller,” Rutger says, referring to the systems designer who envisioned floating cities. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a

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on the first floating city. By 2020, we plan to float the first small seastead and model of future governance. Humanity is poised to fulfill Buckminster Fuller’s dream of a floating city. To solve humanity’s most pressing problems, we need millions to climb aboard. To explain the reasons why, we

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production, as well as cleaning them through ‘bioremediation.’ ” Bioremediation is sciencespeak for the process of culturing microorganisms to metabolize the resources that humans consider pollution. Buckminster Fuller said, “Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.” Bioengineering

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Mariculture Research Project team commissioned Ocean Farm Technologies to build 132-cubic-meter AquaPods: futuristic underwater fish pens with a geodesic design that would make Buckminster Fuller proud. These spherical screen cages float just below the surface and allow a constant inflow of fresh ocean water without flushing out the fish. Occasionally

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set up four FLIPs, throw a platform over the top of them, and you have a stable platform with which to build your town.” As Buckminster Fuller envisioned, the platform could be held high above the waves. “Oil companies already demonstrated the basic concept. You’d have a helicopter pad. You’d

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Dhaka, Bangladesh: www.unesco-ihe.org/sites/default/files/floating_city_apps.pdf. “seadromes”: Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927 (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2013). Buckminster Fuller revealed his detailed vision of Triton City: http://cup2013.wordpress.com/tag/triton-city/. There are three types of floating cities

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: Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 332–33. The Maldives, a nation of 1,300 or so islands, may soon be submerged: Maldives

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, Milton, 7, 8, 190, 205, 207, 300, 301 Friedman, Rose, 7, 207 Friendster, 28 Fruit Roll-Ups, 266 Fukushima disaster, 175 Fukuyama, Francis, 188 Fuller, Richard Buckminster, 24–25, 48, 59, 84 Gallico, Paul, 272 Gallup World Poll, 199, 299, 301 game theory, 279 gas emissions, 136 Gates, Bill, 158 General Mills

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Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business

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Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

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Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates

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Secrets of the Millionaire Mind

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Years of the City

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Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

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Stephen Fry in America

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The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

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The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman

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New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

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Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History

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Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

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Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

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The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

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The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

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How the Mind Works

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Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High

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Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism

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Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

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Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

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Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects

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The Lost Art of Running: A Journey to Rediscover the Forgotten Essence of Human Movement

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Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

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The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (And Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor

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The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

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Clock of the Long Now

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A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings

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User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play

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Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth

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Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History

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The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single)

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The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

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QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

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The Fourth Industrial Revolution

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Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext

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The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans

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Code Complete (Developer Best Practices)

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The Rough Guide to New York City

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Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

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Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

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The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture

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City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age

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Galactic North

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The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters

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Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy

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Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage

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Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design

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Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI

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Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century

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The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era

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Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

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The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

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World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

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Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America

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The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life

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Thinking in Systems: A Primer

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The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary

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Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

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The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity

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Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World

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Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

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Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia

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Icehenge

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The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen

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Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

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Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence

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Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth

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Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

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50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know

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The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square

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The Best of Best New SF

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The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future

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The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True

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Toast

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Wireless

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Computer: A History of the Information Machine

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Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders

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Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis

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The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number

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To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

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To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

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Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration

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Immortality, Inc.

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