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These are strong words, but Bucky Fuller goes in for strong ideas. A Washington official, who got so sick of hearing about Fuller's extraordinary house that he finally took a plane to Wichita to see the one Beech Aircraft had build, was taken into the carefully locked building where the prototype was hidden, and gasped, "My God! This is the house of the future!" Later, when he had regained his composure, he announced that the house was going to precipitate an industrial revolution or the most monumental flop in history, and that he was betting on the former. He then jammed on his hat, got back on the plane, and fled to the secure familiarity of his pre-Fuller office building and his solid walnut desk. Bucky Fuller's ideas often have this effect on people.
Fuller's house, which has been developing for nearly twenty years, shows devastatingly rigorous logic and astonishing technical ability. It probably never would have come into existence save for the fortuitous interaction of a Puritan conscience with the atomic age. When Bucky was a little boy, he gradually became aware of an environment not unlike that of The Late George Apley (J.P.Marquand is his cousin). And, since ancestors are taken seriously around Boston, he quickly learned that his forebears were solid, God-fearing, and occasionally distinguished people. They were, like so many of their New England contemporaries, a rather stern lot, rigidly repressed in there emotions but violent crusaders for their own concepts of justice and morality. Also, the Fullers had been Harvard men for four generations, and it was taken for granted by his father, a prosperous tea and leather merchant, that Bucky and his brother Wolcott should represent the fifth. The year 1913 saw Bucky at Harvard, where he anticipated the war one year by going off in a series of personal explosions that produced two expulsions and a number of other events. While his activities did not differ radically from the usual student shenanigans, their scale indicated that he already had a penchant for doing things in a big way. The first collision with authority occurred when he skipped examinations to escape to New York, where he took out the entire chorus of a musical comedy on a champagne party. The arm of the law caught up with him three days later at the old Waldorf, where he was confronted with a mountain of unpaid bills, and his mother's deputy arrived and the heels of the sheriff. As a disciplinary measurer Mrs. Fuller exiled him to Quebec, where he was apprenticed to a machine installer in a cotton mill. The punishment seems hardly to have fitted the crime, for Bucky was crazy about the job and wanted to stay, but his mother again intervened. Bucky obediently trotted back, but there was presently a second expulsion -- again for dipping to deeply into the fleshpots -- and he was turned over to Armour & Co., where he was given the privilege of working on the 3:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. shift.
Considering the background, there is nothing particularly surprising in any of this, and Fuller's later career often repeats the alternating pattern of conformity and rebellion. His own explanation is that playing around made more sense than the Harvard curriculum.
Richard Buckminster Fuller Jr. is a chunky, powerful little man with a build like a milk bottle, a mind that functions like a cross between a roll-top desk and a jet-propulsion motor, and one simple aim in life: to remake the world. Into a mere fifty years he has crammed enough technical careers to staff the faculty of a sizeable engineering school, and by way of extracurricular activity has managed to write several books, publish a magazine, and create a system of mathematics. As a cartographer he is unique: he is the first man to be granted a U.S. patent for a basically new method of map projection. These achievements, however, may all fade into relative obscurity if his current venture -- a house -- succeeds, for his "dwelling machine" is likely to produce greater social consequences than the introduction of the automobile.