27 Frank Lloyd Wright and Nine Chains to the Moon
2 R. Buckminster Fuller’s first major publication was Nine Chains to the Moon (1938), and the book was reviewed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Saturday Review of Literature. Wright and Fuller remained friends throughout their lives. Wright once described Fuller as an engineer who loved architecture and himself as an architect who loved engineering.
3 I recall Anthony Puttnam, now vice president of Taliesin Architects, relating to me how sensitive Bucky was to the Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice fellows after the death of Frank Lloyd Wright. One evening at Taliesin West in 1960, a small exhibit was on display of Wright’s original drawings. Bucky took in the drawings as if seeing them fresh, each a living presence, looking directly at the ‘‘creator’’ showing through Wright. Later that evening, Bucky was sitting on a long bench that faced Mrs. Wright’s swimming pool terrace in the house’s garden. Overhead was a bright full moon. He gestured and asked Tony Puttnam to sit by him. He wanted Tony to see, from his vantage point, the moonlight filtering through the cloth awning above. Tony told me that Bucky’s kindness to him and the Taliesin fellows and his sharing with them of his poetic vision left an indelible impression and made a connection he will remember always.
4 Posthumously, R. Buckminster Fuller received the Frank Lloyd Wright Creativity Award from Wright’s widow, Oglivanna Hizenberg Wright, in a ceremony attended by Fuller’s grandson, Jaime Snyder, and myself. The Buckminster Fuller Institute reciprocated by presenting to Frank Lloyd Wright via Mrs. Wright the R. Buckminster Fuller Dymaxion Award.
5 Buckminster Fuller—you are the most sensible man in New York, truly sensitive. Nature gave you antennae, long-range finders you have learned to use. I find almost all your prognosticating nearly right—much of it dead right, and I love you for the way you prognosticate. To address you directly will be a hell of a way of reviewing your book—I know. I should write all around you, take you apart, and put you together again to show—between the lines—how much bigger my own mind is than yours and how much smarter than you I can be with it and leave the essence of your thought untouched.
6 But I couldn’t do it if I would and I wouldn’t if I could. To say that you have now a good style of your own in saying very important things is only admitting something unexpected. To say you are the most sensible man in New York isn’t saying much for you—in that pack of caged fools. And everybody who knows you knows you are extraordinarily sensitive….
7 Faithfully, your admirer and friend, more power to you—you valuable ‘‘unit.’’
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13 Excerpt from a review by Wright of Fuller’s book Nine Chains to the Moon (Lippincott, 1938). The passage quoted was published in the Saturday Review of Literature, September 17, 1938.
14 Thomas T. K. Zung, Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright, and Jaime Snyder (Bucky's grandson) at Taliesin West