Why The High-Tech Ideas of Bucky' Fuller Are Back in Vogue - Aeon Essays

10/29/2016
Why the high-tech ideas of Bucky Fuller are back in vogue | Aeon Essays
Buck to the future

Hes a forgotten hippie idol, a sage of 1960s
counterculture. What can we learn from Bucky Fullers
faith in technology?
Samanth Subramanian
The old mill town of Winooski in Vermont gets an average of 75 inches of snow per
year, and temperatures in January fall below -10C. In 1979, in the clutch of a global oil
shock, Winooskis 7,500 citizens found themselves paying an annual $4 million for
heating around $13 million in todays money. Desperate to spend less and still keep
warm, the city council approved a tremendous plan: to build a dome over Winooski.
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Manufactured out of clear plastic, and held aloft by metal cables, the dome would
enclose a square mile in area. Fans would pull in fresh air, to be cooled or heated as
necessary. To leave or enter, cars would have to pass through a double-doored airlock,
as if Winooski had turned into a space station. Within the controlled climate under the
dome, heating expenses would fall by 90 per cent; you could, one planner exulted,
grow tomatoes all year round. A federal government agency promised research
funding. e next year, R Buckminster Fuller, the designer and inventor who had
popularised the geodesic dome, came to Winooski to bless the project.
rough the preceding decades, Fuller had become a darling of the counterculture. He
deed disciplinary boundaries, describing himself as a comprehensive anticipatory
design scientist working across architecture, science and economics. Marshall
McLuhan, that other great hippie hero, heralded Fuller as the Leonardo da Vinci of
our time. It wasnt just in his work that Fuller described a famously eccentric orbit. He
wore three watches, and his diet consisted for years of steak, prunes, Jell-O and tea. He
compiled many of his sage-like musings as well as his laundry bills and other
irrelevancies in 4.5 tonnes worth of scrapbooks, known as the Dymaxion
Chronole; in this manner, he recorded his life in 15-minute chunks for more than 60
years.
Fuller wasnt the rst person to dream of domed cities theyd featured for decades in
science ction, usually as hothouses of dystopia but as an engineering solution, they
feel thoroughly Fullerian. Implicit in their concept is an acknowledgement that human
nature is wasteful and unreliable, resistant to xing itself. Instead, Fuller put his faith in
technology as a means to tame the messiness of humankind. I would never try to
reform man thats much too dicult, Fuller told e New Yorker in 1966. Appealing
to people to remedy their behaviour was a folly, because theyd simply never do it. Far
wiser, Fuller thought, to build technology that circumvents the aws in human
behaviour that is, to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in
preferred directions. Instead of human-led design, he sought design-led humans.
The Montreal Biosphere designed by Fuller for the 1967 Worlds Fair, Expo 67. Courtesy Wikipedia
Winooskis grand dome never went into construction. By the end of 1980, after the
election of Ronald Reagan as president and a summer of stormy criticism over the cost
and visual impact of the project, the mood had shifted. But Fuller, who had rst
advanced the idea of a domed city in 1959, continued to champion it until his death in
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1983. e way consumption curves are going in many of our big cities, it is clear that
we are running out of energy, he wrote. It is important for our government to know if
there are better ways of enclosing space in terms of material, time, and energy. e
most ambitious of his urban lids was the dome he wanted to lower over midtown
Manhattan, a mile high and two miles in diameter. As well as a perfect climate, Fuller
said, the dome could protect New Yorkers against the worst eects of a nuclear bomb
going o nearby.
In the great ux of postwar United States, Fuller was convinced that the world was
marshalling its resources poorly and unsustainably, and that change was a burning
imperative. e world nds itself again passing through a Fullerian moment a phase
of political, environmental and technological upheaval that is both unsettling and
exhilarating. Within this frame, Fullers life and ideas the sound ones but also those
that were tedious or absurd ring with a new resonance.
A side from the Chronole, Fuller made another extraordinary record of his life and
work. In 1975, when he was nearly 80, he spent two weeks in a spare television studio
in Philadelphia taping a set of 12 lectures <https://b.org/aboutfuller/resources/everything-i-know> lasting 42 hours in total. He sits in a white chair,
in front of an audience of 10 or 12 young acolytes. He uses no notes, and sips from a
glass of water perhaps six times in the course of the whole series. His vowels are as
broad and at as prairies scaa-yence instead of science and his sentences are
punctuated by an odd glottal sound, halfway between a chuckle and a clearing of the
throat. In his favourite pose, Fuller shuts his eyes and brings his palms and ngers
together just below his chin. He speaks in this manner for minutes on end; with the
sound muted, he resembles a televangelist inviting us to join him in prayer.
e very title of his lecture series, Everything I Know <https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=o6yaSLipeWg> , reveals a Fullerian audacity a belief in the rmness of his
knowledge and the power of his reason, a conviction that everything in his head was
worth preserving. He maunders across mathematics and architecture, history and
economics, engineering and education, even God and love. He spends hours on the
properties of the tetrahedron and other shapes, discussing them in tones of nearmystic reverence. He seems enamoured by the power of geometry, maps, drawings
and diagrams to capture and distill the relationships between elements in a system.
Fullers own designs feature heavily, of course: the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion
House, the Dymaxion Car, even the Dymaxion Bathroom, all built for hyper-eciency.
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Dymaxion, an amalgam of dynamic, maximum and tension, was coined for Fuller
by a couple of advertising executives, and he slathered the adjective over almost
everything he thought up. He was a keen neologist, believing in the capacity of new
words and phrases to create fresh imaginative possibilities, using his terms like struts
to hold up his ideas.
A replica Dymaxion car. Courtesy Wikipedia.
Some of Fullers ris are bizarre, and he can be dead wrong. He reads history as one
vast, uniform progression of warring elites, and claims that the human race was
planted by some unknown force upon the islands of the South Seas. He ascribes a
common etymological root, and a profound numerological signicance, to nine and
none. (I keep alive superstitions, he explains, because there might be something
there some day.) At one point he sings a ballad of his own composition, Roam Home
to the Dome, whose lyrics are frankly awful but, in his rendition, impossibly
endearing.
Always a careful guardian of his image, Fuller used these lectures to burnish his
personal mythology. To rescue humanity from itself through design and technology
was, in Fullers view, his responsibility as well as his calling.
e dramatic fulcrum of Fullers career came one winter evening in 1927. He was 32,
broke and jobless in Chicago. His rst daughter had died from polio ve years earlier,
and his wife had just delivered another baby girl. e whole arc of his life, from his
birth in Massachusetts to his expulsion from Harvard to the failure of his construction
company, pointed to a waste of a life.
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Long before Occupy Wall Street, Fuller noted that the richest 1 per
cent of people grew even richer at the expense of the other 99 per cent
Fuller walked to the shore of Lake Michigan to throw himself in. en, as he recounted
later, he heard a voice: You do not have the right to eliminate yourself You belong to
the universe. e voice, Fuller said, informed him of his higher purpose. Chastened
and inspired, he returned home, became vegetarian, and spent the next two years
scribbling down his ideas, the foundation of the work to come.
At least, this was how Fuller described the momentous evening. e philosopher
Jonathon Keats knows better. In his book
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/you-belong-to-the-universe9780199338238?cc=gb&lang=en&> about Fuller, You Belong to the Universe (2016),
Keats notes that theres nothing in the Dymaxion Chronole to suggest that Fuller
attempted suicide, that he changed his diet, or that he reached a state of despair about
nding work. It was as if, having decided that all his cogitation ought to bend towards
the broadest possible service of humanity, Fuller retrospectively produced this fable.
His own life was the only force that unied the disparate elds in which he proceeded
to dabble.
As Fuller described it, the world was broken. Governments focused too much on the
waging of wars, and they gave in too easily to the demands of the wealthy. Long before
Occupy Wall Street, Fuller noted that the richest 1 per cent of people grew even richer
at the expense of the other 99 per cent. So much was invested in the status quo that no
one designers, industrialists, nanciers, scientists worked hard enough at the
fundamental task of original thinking. Meanwhile, the planet was tumbling towards a
crisis, running out of energy and fouling up the environment. In other words, were in
for an absolute revolution of humanity, as Fuller put it in Everything I Know. Unless
the world works out how to pull everybody up to a higher standard of living within
the next 10 years, I think humanity is all through.
T he bedrock of Fullers worldview was a near-theological belief in the manifest destiny
of humankind, which drew on his early exposure to transcendentalism via his greataunt Margaret. Fullers mission to renovate how people lived recalled Ralph Waldo
Emersons summons to stop conforming to the past, to develop an original relation to
the universe. For Fuller, this was an urgent instruction. As a young man, he had
absorbed the precepts of the economist omas Malthus, who warned that a
population growing without check would inevitably nd itself starved of food and
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other resources. at dark age of insuciency, Fuller thought, was just around the
corner. ere wasnt much time; the future had to get here tomorrow.
But as easily as Fuller found a niche within the counterculture, he placed himself
within the currents of the US mainstream too. e Dymaxion House, one of his earliest
inventions, typied how Fuller wedded the culture to its counter-narratives. Fuller
wanted, above all, to reimagine the notion of a house itself, as not a property to be
owned, but a mechanical arrangement to be used. In its cross-section, the Dymaxion
House looked like a deck of hexagonal oors hanging from a central mast. A system of
vents pushed a channel of cool air through the house in summers and could be
stoppered up to conserve heat in winters. A shower sucked up a mere pint of water,
mixed it with air, and sprayed it out at high speed in the manner of a fog gun. e toilet
packaged waste neatly in plastic and sent it to an on-site digester, which converted it
into fuel. e house, which cost $6,500 and weighed three tons, didnt have to be
hooked up to municipal lines for electricity, sewage or water. In a world without
borders an ideal world, in Fullers view the Dymaxion House could be airlifted to a
fresh location on a whim.
Fuller imagined that ecient, modular construction would liberate its

residents to spend their newfound free time learning and thinking
e Dymaxion House was still an artefact of technocratic capitalism, dreamed up in
response to the housing shortage in the US. In the early 1930s, Keats nds, Fuller
demanded $100 million from investors to build the rst prototype, observing that
Henry Ford needed $43 million to create his Model A car. e house was to be massproduced on factory oors, out of plastic and metal, each unit indistinguishable from
the other as a matter of principle and to keep the cost down. But throughout the
1930s, most of the processes and materials required to build the house light, strong
plastics; high-tension alloys; bioreactors didnt yet exist. After the Second World
War, Fuller made some prototypes, but his collaboration with the Beechcraft aviation
company to manufacture houses for sale went nowhere. Even at the height of Fullers
fame, the Dymaxion House never went into production.
Interior view of the Dymaxion House at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit. Courtesy Nic Redhead/Flickr
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e Dymaxion House remained perpetually imminent, a Fullerian prophecy of how

people could and should live. Fuller imagined that ecient, modular construction
would liberate its residents, so that they could spend their newfound free time learning
and thinking. But the design made no allowance for the owners preferences, or for
how topography and weather varied from place to place. For an avidly industrialised
society, the home, and the human within it, had become pure machine.
F ullers career seemed to evolve in reaction to failure. at winter in 1927, hed been
determined to drown himself after his business venture went under. en, when he
failed to commit suicide, he became an inventor. And when his inventions the house,
the car, the bathroom proved stillborn, he became a futurist. In the 1960s, he
stopped building things he thought the world required and started forecasting those
requirements instead.
As a result, Fullers attentions started to span the entire planet. If, earlier, he was
boiling down his ideas into the design of a showerhead, now he was scaling them up
into abstract global systems: international power grids; simulation games that played
for world peace; supply chains for metals, minerals and other planetary resources.
(Admittedly, the technology for a global information network didnt exist at the time.
Fuller would have been thrilled by the internet, and its capacity to trace and accelerate
the allocation of goods.) is kind of comprehensivist approach, Fullers clunker of a
term, was the only means to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity, in the
shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological oence
or the disadvantage of anyone.
Fuller maintained that he was apolitical, but in the postwar US, these vast diagnoses
hooked the counterculture. His maxims spoke to the young and the unemployed, to
the protestors of the Vietnam War, to the anti-nuke and environmentalist movements.
In Drop City, a hippie commune founded in Colorado in 1965, Fullers geodesic domes
bloomed like warts, constructed out of material salvaged from scrapyards. His concept
of Spaceship Earth, an attempt to convey the fragility and celestial loneliness of the
planet and its ecosystem, was an inspiration for the publication of the Whole Earth
Catalog, the magazine that became the countercultures manifesto-in-progress. Early
editions often devoted themselves to Fuller. No one had the kids eating out of his
hand like he did, the architect Philip Johnson observed.
Yet there was nothing pastoral or socialist about Fullers vision for the future. e
answer to the problems induced by technological excess was not less technology, but
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more more, and dierent, technology. Fortunately, an eorescence of innovation

was also at hand. With a nimble system of education, environmental design and
ecient planning, Fuller was convinced that scientists and corporations could do more
with less. His thinking was analogous, in some ways, to that of McLuhan, who
celebrated the way mass media was extending the notion of the human being.
A belief in technology as salvation is really a belief in humankinds

capacity to use it as such, to not bend it to damaging ends
Fullers advocacy of technology as a salve for the wounds of modernity found a erce
critic in the sociologist Lewis Mumford, who longed for a more organic humanism. e
two men proposed such contrasting versions of the future that Horizon magazine
wondered, in 1968: Which guide to the Promised Land? Fuller or Mumford?
Mumford deplored the sterility of the sort of future that techno-faddists wanted for the
human race. In an acid passage from 1956 that might have been aimed squarely at
Fuller and his bubble-domed cities, Mumford wrote:
If the goal of human history is a uniform type of man, reproducing at a
uniform rate, in a uniform environment, kept at a constant temperature,
pressure and humidity, like a uniformly lifeless existence, with his uniform
physical needs satised by uniform goods most of the problems of human
development would disappear. Only one problem would remain: why should
anyone, even a computer, bother to keep this kind of creature alive?
e allure of Fullers prophecies persisted. Technology had just assisted in the

wreaking of two awful wars, and many liberal intellectuals were tapping into veins of
misery and forlornness. e visions of novels such as Aldous Huxleys Brave New World
and Orwells 1984 transformed utopia from something to be yearned for to something
to be dreaded, as the historian Howard Segal wrote in 2009. In the midst of that
climate, it was reassuring to hear from a sage such as Fuller that technology could be a
force for peace after all. For the rst time in history, Fuller wrote in 1969, Utopia is, at
least, physically possible of human attainment.
In the years after Fullers death, the worlds faith in technology faded. Globalisation
and the emergent neoliberal consensus accompanied environmental crises, the
failures of assorted technological panaceas, and a mistrust of ocials and experts. We
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are emerging only now from the shadow of these other, deeper disappointments, into
the bright, confusing light of a new technological boom.
Perhaps this is why there is a certain reassurance to be mined from Fullers principles.
A belief in technology as salvation is really a belief in humankinds capacity to use it as
such, to not bend it to damaging ends. Fuller was a tireless optimist when it came to
his species. We have been endowed with intelligence, he thought, so we occupy a
special place in the universe. Nature was, he wrote, clearly intent on making humans
successful. is was the quintessential Fuller paradox: he doubted our ability to mend
our imperfections, but he was condent in our facility to develop technologies that can
outwit them.
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10/29/2016

Buck to the future

A replica Dymaxion car. Courtesy Wikipedia.

Fuller imagined that ecient, modular construction would liberate its

e Dymaxion House remained perpetually imminent, a Fullerian prophecy of how

more more, and dierent, technology. Fortunately, an eorescence of innovation

A belief in technology as salvation is really a belief in humankinds

e allure of Fullers prophecies persisted. Technology had just assisted in the

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