Buckminster Fuller: A 20th-Century Leonardo da Vinci
"Life is a game from which you extract the utmost to serve the world and those around you."
This motto encapsulates the ethos of R. Buckminster Fuller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller), a polymath who was a designer, architect, philosopher, and systems theorist. His life spanned from 1895 to 1983.
Fuller maintained an optimistic outlook on the future and significantly reshaped the landscape of design by advocating for the efficient utilization of resources and the integration of sustainability principles.
Throughout his lifetime, he authored a remarkable 30 books and filed applications for 28 patents.
His technological and societal ideal centered on achieving more with less, a concept he passionately championed.
In 2022, Alec Nevala-Lee penned a fresh biography of Fuller.
Challenging Beginnings
Buckminster Fuller, born into a prosperous New England family in the late 19th century, faced the challenge of near blindness. Despite this, he attended a kindergarten rooted in the teachings of educator Friedrich Fröbel, where children engaged with various geometric shapes.
Navigating Life's Twists
In 1922, tragedy struck as his young daughter succumbed to pneumonia. This event thrust Fuller into a profound state of depression, resulting in his separation from his wife.
Five years elapsed before he rekindled his resolve to craft a better world. In an act of profound transformation, he transcended his own ego, finding inspiration in the efficiency and regenerative capacities of nature as a blueprint for solving societal issues.
While Fuller eventually achieved remarkable success, skepticism about his endeavors lingered, necessitating an extended effort to overcome his dubious reputation.
The Dymaxion Dilemma
The term Dymaxion fuses "dynamic" and "maximum tension," a concept that captivated Fuller for two decades, even as it nearly precipitated his financial downfall.
The Dymaxion house, conceived as a solution to housing shortages, envisioned cost-effective prefabricated dwellings. However, these plans never came to fruition.
The Dymaxion car, a collaboration between Fuller and Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, also failed to reach the market. This innovative vehicle boasted a fuel consumption rate of under 8 liters per 100 km and accommodation for 11 passengers. Sadly, an accident deterred potential investors.
His Magnum Opus: The Geodesic Dome
In 1940, Fuller erected the inaugural geodesic dome, a structure that harnessed sunlight effectively and relied on minimal building materials. In 1954, he obtained a patent for this innovation.
Presently, approximately 300,000 of these domes grace various landscapes. One of the most renowned is the Montreal Biosphere, originating in 1967.
The Biosphere in Montreal. Source: Jeff3000 auf Wikimedia. License: CC BY-SA 3.0
Fuller as a Vanguard of Societal Change
Numerous inspirational quotes attributed to Fuller proliferate across the Internet, underscoring his capacity to engender unconventional thinking and challenge prevailing norms.
We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I’ve been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That’s a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.
Source of both quotes: sofoarchon.com
