1 Acknowledgments

1  Acknowledgments

2As the bibliography of this book indicates, Fuller is only one of a large number of books written with and about Richard Buckminster Fuller, in addition to magazine special issues, articles, features and transcribed speeches over the last 50 years, most of which are based on a deeper personal knowledge of the subject. With the exception of one encounter that is described here, I lacked this advantage and so Fuller is a book based on secondary sources. In this respect, like all writers on Fuller, I owe a profound debt to three predecessors: Robert Marks, whose Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller opened mine, as well as many other students’ eyes thirty years ago; John McHale, whose 7?. Buckminster Fuller has rested on my bookshelves for almost as long, and James Meller, whose The Buckminster Fuller Reader first showed me how rewarding Fuller’s own difficult writing could be. I must also mention Lloyd Steven Sieden’s extraordinarily detailed Buckminster Fuller’s Universe: an appreciation which I have leaned on heavily, particularly for my account of the demise of the ‘Wichita’ house project in 1946.

3 Last but not least, this book would have been impossible to research or illustrate without the generous and friendly help of John Ferry, Janet Brown and Michael Hines of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, Los Angeles, California.