Buckminster Fuller Quotes,
When working on a problem, I never think about beauty; I think only of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know that it is wrong.
Quoted in D MacHale, Comic Sections (Dublin 1993)
I am a passenger on the spaceship, Earth.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York 1969)
Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
Don't fight forces, use them.
Quoted in Des MacHale, Wisdom (London, 2002).
I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.
Quoted in Des MacHale, Wisdom (London, 2002).
Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
Quoted in Des MacHale, Wisdom (London, 2002).
Pollution is nothing but resources we're not using.
Quoted in Des MacHale, Wisdom (London, 2002).
God, to me, it seems
is a verb
not a noun
proper or improper.
No More Secondhand God
Biography
Fuller was born on July 12, 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews. The Fuller family in particular produced noted New England non-conformists. Buckminster Fuller's father died when the boy was 12. Spending his youth on Bear Island 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 he even sometimes made his own tools. Notably, he experimented with designing a new apparatus for the human-powered propulsion of small boats. Years later he decided that this sort of experience had provided him not only an interest in design, but a habit of being fully familiar and knowledgeable about the materials that his ambitious later projects would require for actualization. Indeed, Fuller earned a machinist's certification, and he also knew how to fabricate using the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment relied upon 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. Later in life, Fuller received a Sc.D. from Bates College in 1969.
Between his sessions at Harvard, he worked for a time in Canada as a mechanic in a textile mill, and later as a laborer working 12 hours a day in the meat-packing industry. He married in 1917, and he also served in the U.S. Navy in World War I. In the Navy he was employed as an aboard-ship radio operator, as an editor of a publication, and as a crash-boat commander. After discharge, he again worked for a period in the meat-packing business, where he acquired management experience. In the early 1920s he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing light-weight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing — though ultimately the company failed.
In 1927 at the age of 32, bankrupt and jobless, living in inferior housing in Chicago, Illinois, he saw his beloved young daughter Alexandra die of the complications of polio and spinal meningitis. He felt responsible, and this drove him to drink and to the verge of suicide. At the last moment he decided instead to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."
Fuller accepted a position at a small college in North Carolina, Black Mountain College. 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. Using lightweight plastics in the simple form of a tetrahedron (a triangular pyramid) he created a small dome. He had designed the first building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. 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 Buckminster 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 and in 28 publications. Fuller financed some of his experiments with inherited family money, sometimes augmented by funds invested by his professional collaborators, one example being the Dymaxion Car project.
His international recognition was established by the success of his huge geodesic domes in the 1950s. Fuller taught at Southern Illinois University Carbondale from 1959 – 1970 (Assistant Professor 1959 – 68, full Professor in 1968) in the School of Art and Design. Working as a designer, scientist, developer, and writer, for many years he also lectured all over 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. This was (in his own words) devoted to "applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity."
Fuller believed human societies would soon be relying 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 ultimately awarded 25 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 at the age of 88, a guru of the design, architecture, and 'alternative' communities (such as Drop City, an 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 massive heart attack and died an hour later. His wife died 36 hours later. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston, Massachusetts
Fuller's geodesic spheres and domes emerged synergetically from his philosophical " explorations in the geometry of thinking". In this self-discipline, the variably frequenced icosasphere links up with the jitterbug and sphere packing concepts (see dome geometry).
The spherical high frequency icosahedron also suggests a grid of triangles which may be used to transfer global data from a sphere to an unfoldable icosahedron (another concept that would have excited Bauersfeld). The geodesic dome and the Fuller Projection both derive from the same general principles
