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Born 12 July 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts, United States.
First invention: a playpen for Rosie.
1912 -- Became the 5th generation of Fullers to be accepted at Harvard.
1913 -- Harvard University... two expulsions.
1917 -- Married Anne Hewlett on 12 July.
1919 -- First daughter Alexandra born. Died in 1923.
1927 -- 2nd daughter Allegra born. Fuller resolves to do his own thinking.
1928 -- '4-D' prefabricated house.
1929 -- 'Dymaxion House', duralumin and plastic.
"He used to drink like a fish. He had become a God-possessed man, like a Messiah of ideas. He was a prophet of things to come. Bucky didn't take care of himself, but he had amazing strength. He often went without sleep for several days, and he didn't always eat either." --Noguchi.
1930 -- Developed a full-size model of the Dymaxion bathroom.
1933 -- Dymaxion car. Plaster models made by Noguchi. Sterling Burgess, chief engineer.
1936 --
1946 -- 'Wichita' house [see "Fuller's House" in Fortune , April 1946].
1948 -- Summer professor at Black Mountain College.
1951 -- Allegra Fuller marries Robert Snyder.
1954 -- 'Geodesic Dome' patented.
"Over the course of... his lifetime, R.Buckminster Fuller became perhaps the best known American thinker of the twentieth century. Sometimes called 'the planet's friendly genius', Bucky gained renown as an inventor and designer (of the Dymaxion House, the Dymaxion car, the Dymaxion map), the creator of the Geodesic Dome, the man who coined the term 'Spaceship Earth' and organized the World Game, the mathematician who discovered Synergetics, and as a dogged individualist whose genius has been felt throughout the world for over half a century." [publisher's bumpf]
"Buckminster Fuller has been consultant to governmental and private agencies, and advisor to a wide range of intellectual and political leaders." [publisher's bumpf]
"The connection of high and low tech can, in part, be traced to the influence of Buckminster Fuller, an architect-cum-inventor-cum-engineer who preached a gospel of technological humanism that resonated with a generation more familiar with the technological oppression of war. Fuller claimed that there were quite sufficient resources to serve all humanity, the only problem lay in their deployment. As a response to this he developed the concept of Dymaxion, a contraction of the words 'dynamic', 'maximum' and 'ion' that to him summarized the need to develop resource-efficient, self-sustaining technologies. He developed the Dymaxion ideal by inventing a host of devices, from lightweight homes through streamlined cars to the geodesic dome that, thanks to Disney's EPCOT theme park, has since become a symbol of futurism.
"He also produced what he called the World Game. Based on his Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map, which was the size of a basketball court, it entailed trying to distribute world resources in a way that ensured that everyone would 'win'. This very whole earth entertainment drew the attention of a number [of] Californian programmers and philosophers, who managed to implement a version of it using a computer [see World Game Institute --ed.], perhaps in the process creating the world's first world simulator and setting a precedent that was to make the idea of virtual worlds more accessible -- at least, to California's free-thinking programmers". --Benjamin Woolley (in Virtual Worlds , 1992).
Honors:
Fuller wrote more than twenty books, held twenty-seven patents for his inventions and received 47 honorary doctorate degrees plus numerous awards.
Died 1983, at age 88. [At his wife's bedside immediately after she died.]
"The Leonardo da Vinci of our time". --Marshall McLuhan.
"As much engineer as architect, his enthusiasm and radical thought made him the guru of a generation of architects and designers." -- [jacket blurb, Design Heroes: Buckminster Fuller by Martin Pawley, UK pbk, 1992]
Very influential.
Full name: Richard Buckminster Fuller. Pseudonym: 4D.
Brother: Wolcott Fuller.
Sisters: Leslie and Rosie Fuller.
Great-aunt: Margaret Fuller.
Son-in-law: Robert Snyder.
"Anyway, by 1928 I was back in New York and I began to hang around in the Village. I used to go to Romany Marie's, a restaurant I was introduced to by a friend even before I went to Chicago. It was probably the last of the really great Bohemian cafés I know of in the world -- very much like the Paris of the 20s. The Village was loaded then with great artists and great intellectuals, and Marie had by far the best place in town. That's where I carried on and developed my ideas. Certainly, in Greenwich Village they took me and my ideas seriously." --R.Buckminster Fuller.
"I sold all my life insurance and took over a magazine called T-Square . I changed its name to Shelter , and published it for the next two years." --R.Buckminster Fuller.
"I was asked to go into research at Phelps Dodge, the third largest copper company in the world." --R.Buckminster Fuller.
"It was at Black Mountain that I met John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who were there, Bill de Kooning and his wife Elaine, Arthur Penn, the Alberses, of course, Ruth Asawa, Albert Lanier, who later married Ruth, and Ken Snelson.
"That group decided they wanted to put on a play and they wanted me to be in it. And I said, 'I can't act; I never have. All I can do is talk spontaneously, but I can't do anything where you have to rehearse'.
"And they said, 'You must try. You're going to be the star of this thing, The Ruse of Medusa by Erik Satie -- and you're going to be the Medusa'." --R.Buckminster Fuller.
Distinguished University Professor at Southern Illinois University since 1959.
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University.
The Royal Gold Medal for Architecture.
United States Pavilion at the Montreal World's Fair, Expo '67
The 1968 Gold Medal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
The American Institute of Architects' 1970 Gold Medal.
United States Medal of Freedom.
Newly-discovered third form of carbon (C60) named buckminsterfullerene in his honor [see Perfect Symmetry by Jim Baggott].
Some personal comments:
"I had the good fortune of meeting Buckminster Fuller many times and getting to know him as a person and a gifted genius. He had a profound devotion and commitment to humanity in his world view into the future as well as in our time."His desire and purpose, through a Design Science Revolution, was to improve the quality of life on the planet. His was a revolution for integrating and enhancing human systems rather then taking them apart.
"As we celebrate the Centennial of Buckminster Fuller's birth, we share in his memory and in the opportunity to study his philosophy as expressed in his work, to learn from this great contemporary master how to make a more livable world.
"Bucky's ideas will continue to nourish us all and will help us know what to do with the option that is ours to improve our home planet Earth." --Dr Jonas Salk (in a letter on the occasion of R.Buckminster Fuller's Centennial Symposium and Celebration 14-16 July 1995, San Diego, California).
"I was priviledged to meet Bucky Fuller just once at a lecture sponsored by the former Queen Juliana in Den Haag, Holland. The lecture was private and I had to contact Queen Juliana's private secretary to get tickets. I explained my deep regard for Fuller's work and was pleasantly surprised to receive enough tickets to get a carload of people into the lecture. After the talk, I got to shake Fuller's hand -- this was the equivalent of shaking hands with history. After all, Fuller was the Leonardo da Vinci of our times. Some years later, I wrote to Fuller and asked him to participate in a symposium I was planning, called The Conference of Eutopian Constructivists. Despite his extremely busy schedule and fragile health, Fuller had agreed to appear at this event. Unfortunately, the conference got bogged down in red tape and subsequently Fuller died. It is my hope that his input will be represented in some future (possibly online) version of this conference." --Henry W.Targowski.
R.Buckminster Fuller
(brief bio and links to other sites... external page... interesting connection to world transformation pages)
Websites
(Anachron Library entry... list of links to other Buckminster Fuller pages on the net)
World Game Institute
(one of Fuller's brilliant ideas to make the world work better for everyone... includes the world resources inventory)
And:
Fullerene Group Home Page
(molecular science... University of Sussex)
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