A Grain of Salt
3To keep things clear, I’d better present my credentials: Buckminster Fuller entered my life while I was a freshman design student at the University of Michigan in 1952. His stunning fourteen-hour lecture questioned the validity of everything I’d been taught, yet reinforced what I’d learned on my own. That inspired me to live my life as a grand experiment with myself as the guinea pig—just as he did, but following my own interests. So far, things have gone well.
4 
Over thirty-one years, I attended many of his marathon lectures, seminars, and World
Game workshops, taught for him one year at Southern Illinois University, and have had a hand in
designing and building thirty-six experimental domes, including one on the Fuller family’s Bear
Island off the Maine coast. The hours of one-on-one time I had with him were mostly spent in
limits-testing argument.
5 Fig. 0-2
6 Bucky and the author at the opening ceremony for the New Alchemy Institute’s ‘‘Pillowdome’’ bio-shelter, 1982.
7 By example, he encouraged me to think for myself comprehensively, to be disciplined, to work for the good of everyone, and to have a good time doing it. I can’t remember looking at life any other way. The above certainly does not make me a protege, but I may well be one of his artifacts. Please keep that in mind as you read.
8 Note that this is not a biography or a scholarly, footnoted critique of Bucky’s work. Other authors have already done that well. I do not presume to speak for Bucky; after all, he took nearly thirteen-hundred pages to explain just one of his concepts (synergetics). My quotations and paraphrases are mosty from notes taken at his lectures and during our talks, but all of these ideas appear repeatedly in various forms throughout his writings and taped lectures. This book is intended to get you interested in finding out more. Nobody does Bucky better than Bucky.
9 —JB