Foreword
3"Wasn’t he the dome guy?" will likely be the only response from a typical young audience asked to describe the work of R. Buckminster Fuller. If the audience is pressed to explain why geodesic domes are uniquely strong and economical of material and energy, the probable result will be uneasy silence.
4 Bucky was "the dome guy", but there is a lot more to his story than simplified architectural history. Geodesic domes are the strongest structures known per unit of material, and, unlike conventional structures, they get stronger as they get bigger. It is possible to make a permanent geodesic dome that weighs less than the air inside it!
5 Estimates show there are more than 100,000 geodesic domes in use in the world today (about 300,000 counting play structures)—far more examples of a basic design than the work of any other architect. Why, then, is Bucky so little known today? Why are geodesics and synergetics not taught in every college architecture and design department or in mathematics and physics classes? What is the secret of their amazing performance and the pedagogy supporting the principles involved?
6 Amy Edmondson asked these questions about 20 years ago. She concluded that the problems stem from the difficulty many people have in dealing with Bucky’s exquisitely accurate, but distressingly awkward version of the English language. Even more distressing, his geometry seemed to violate the centuries-old, universally taught rules of geometry.
7 Unfortunately, the most complete exposition of Fuller’s many essential discoveries is found in his two most linguistically difficult books: Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking [FA75] and Synergetics 2: Further Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking. [FA79] Their 1468 pages are an obstinate barrier to most people seeking to understand Bucky’s timeless concepts, and remain a challenge even to highly-educated specialists. For example, can you explain this sentence from Synergetics 345.00? (Synergetics is marked by section and paragraph to facilitate study) ‘‘Entropy is not random: it is always one negative tetrahedron.’’ With nobody to help, it took me years to figure out what that important claim means and implies. Ms. Edmondson does not confront that baffling sentence directly, but she does provide the tools necessary to inform a reader’s intuition sufficiently to do so. Her unusually detailed table of contents eases the investigation of specific subjects and serves as a focus for a study of Bucky’s major discoveries.
8 This book can be regarded both as a translation and as a key. The clarifying explanations refer to the numbered paragraphs of the two Synergetics books, allowing the reader to switch easily back and forth between Fuller and Edmondson until things become clear. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do: in the three years Amy worked in Bucky’s office, she became adept at employing his logic and vocabulary. His unconventional way of addressing classical geometry and other "givens" no longer seemed outrageous to her, even if his writings were disparaged, ignored or worse, misunderstood by other authors. Her book also served me as a concise review when I was doing the research for BuckyWorks (Wiley, 96) [Bal96].
9 This new edition of A Fuller Explanation arrives at a time of increasing interest in Bucky. Just ten years ago, an on-line search under "Geodesics", "Fuller", or "Domes" brought up about a half-dozen Websites, not all of which provided reliable information. A decade later, there are hundreds of sites, many hundreds of links and an increasing bevy of blogs. The Buckminster Fuller Institute has become much more active (www.bfi.org). The advent of Carbon-60, Buckminsterfullerene (popularly known as "Buckyballs") and the consequent nanotubes and their kin have helped ignite a new and rapidly growing interest in synergetics. (Bucky did not discover Carbon-60, but the visible geometry of his huge dome at Montreal did help the scientists who did so to identify the molecule’s configuration).
10 Most of Bucky’s insights and discoveries have aged gracefully; they represent experience-based scientific generalizations that are essentially eternal. What has changed and is still changing is a deeper understanding of what they mean, and especially how his way of thinking can inspire further synergetic discovery.
11 Bucky often said that he was working fifty years ahead, developing the know-how and hardware that humans would need to be a success on Earth. Re-reading the Synergetics books while preparing to write this Foreword, I find them still astonishingly cogent and appropriate for solving many of the problems facing humanity today—about 50 years after their basic principles were discovered and 30 after being published. With them, A Fuller Explanation continues to provide the most useful access to the mind and heart of Buckminster Fuller.
12 —J. Baldwin, February 2007