14 Notes

14  Notes

2Introduction

1.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Guinea Pig B: The 56 Year Experiment, repr. ed. (Clayton, CA: Critical Path Publishing, 2004).

2.

The size of the archive is conservatively estimated at fourteen hundred linear feet of paper-based materials, manuscripts, and recordings.

3.

Reinhold Martin, ‘‘Forget Fuller?’’ ANY magazine, no. 17 (Jan. 1997): 15–55,15.

4.

Barry M. Katz, in his chapter in this volume, points out that Fuller ‘‘cultivated his personal narrative to what can only be described as mythic proportions.’’ Maria Gough recounts in her piece that by the 1950s ‘‘the proper name Fuller referred as much to a corporation as to an individual.’’

5.

For example, in the 1930s Frank Lloyd Wright proposed creating affordable, single-story homes for middle-income Americans. His so-called Usonian houses would be used to populate small suburban or semirural planned communities.

6.

Joachim Krausse, in this volume, references William Kuhns’s remark that ‘‘Richard Buckminster Fuller is a nineteenth-century inventor with twenty-first-century ideas. The fact that he lives in the twentieth century seems a dual anachronism.’’ See William Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1971), 220.

7.

R. Buckminster Fuller, in What I Have Learned (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 73.

3 Chapter 1

1.

Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe: An Appreciation (New York: Plenum, 1989), 70.

2.

The modifier Dymaxion was probably added later since the term was coined by a public relations professional at Marshall Field’s department store when one of Fuller’s model homes was exhibited there in 1929. Dymaxion is a synthesis of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension.

3.

Sieden, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe, 70.

4.

R. Buckminster Fuller, citing Oregon Lecture #9, July 12,1962, in R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics Dictionary: The Mind of Buckminster Fuller (New York: Garland, 1986), 1:263.

5.

Fuller, Synergetics Dictionary, 1:647.

6.

Bonnie Goldstein DeVarco, ‘‘Life, Facts and Artifacts,’’ available online at www .thirteen.org/bucky/devarco.html (accessed Sep. 29,2008).

4 191

7.

R. Buckminster Fuller, The R. Buckminster Fuller Archives, to Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, May 1,1965, R. Buckminster Fuller Collection, M1090:2:236, Stanford University Libraries (hereafter cited as Fuller MSS).

8.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Bucky (1966), Fuller MSS, M1090:1:2.

9.

Ibid.

10.

Isamu Noguchi, Marshall McLuhan, Shoji Sadao, Constantine Doxiadis, Henry Dreyfuss, and Charles Eames are just a few of the people with whom Fuller corresponded.

11.

Sieden, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe, 2.

12.

There is some confusion about the exact date that the so-called Dymaxion Chronofile was started. In a July 1995 taped interview, the then-archivist of the Fuller Archive, Bonnie Goldstein DeVarco, suggested that the Chronofile was started in 1927, and all volumes prior to that were retroactive compilations. Fuller’s 1965 document clearly states 1917 as the date of conception of the Chronofile, although it would not be known by that name until later. (The name ‘‘Dymaxion Chronofile’’ was likely given during or after 1929, when the word Dymaxion was coined for an exhibition of Fuller’s 4D house at Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago.) In either case, it is clear that Fuller had been saving significant amounts of correspondence, clippings, and other materials since even before 1917.

13.

The papers include but are not limited to correspondence, telegrams, receipts, notes, telephone messages, and newspaper clippings.

14.

Sieden, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe, 7.

15.

The Stockade Corporation manufactured lightweight building blocks made of compressed fibers and had a system for quickly erecting structures using the blocks. The company failed to make a profit and was bought out by Celotex Corporation in 1926; in the reorganization Fuller lost his position as president and ultimately was pushed out of the company.

16.

Fuller, Bucky, n.p.

17.

Ibid.

18.

See Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), 3.

19.

Hal Aigner, ‘‘World Game,’’ Mother Earth Magazine 6 (Nov./Dec. 1970), available online at

5 In the same article the author explains Gabel’s qualification: ‘‘Gabel, a 24-year-old design science student at Southern Illinois University, was later to amend his remarks, noting that ‘proof’ is an ambiguous term—some people won’t have anything proven to them no matter how much evidence is presented—and much of his reference material was in files and would take a couple of months to assemble.’’Robert W. Marks, ‘‘Bucky Fuller’s Dymaxion World,’’ Science Illustrated (reprint, pages unnumbered), in Fuller MSS, M1090:3:l.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Everything I Know’’ lecture series (Jan. 1975). Transcript available online at www.bfi.org/our_programs/who_is_buckminster_fuller/online _resources/session_06 (accessed Dec. 8,2008).Becker, The Denial of Death, 3.Ibid., 15.Fuller typically charged from $2,000 to $5,000 as a speaking fee per engagement. Particularly during the later part of his career, he was generally unwilling to negotiate his fee. See also Fuller MSS, M1090:3:l.Roald Dahl, Going Solo (New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), n.p (front matter).R. Buckminster Fuller to Ralph McCoy, Oct. 3,1960, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:136.Ralph McCoy to R. Buckminster Fuller, May 5,1965, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:136.Gerald Cross, Annual Progress Report, R. B. Fuller Archives, May 1965, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:136.Southern Illinois University Special Research Project Allotment Fiscal Year 1964–65. Fuller MSS, M1090:7:19.Marleen Trout, ‘‘Remembering SIU’s Legend,’’ Daily Egyptian 86, no. 111 (2001).Thomas Turner to R. Buckminster Fuller, July 21, 1971, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:235.Thomas Turner to Herman Wolf, Aug. 23,1971, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:235.R. Buckminster Fuller, written statement, 1972, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:236.R. Buckminster Fuller to Ralph McCoy, Sep. 8,1972, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:236.Fuller to McCoy, Feb. 11,1971, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:216.Ed Applewhite to Gerard Dickler, April 5,1971, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:216.Fuller, written statement, 1972, Fuller MSS, M 1090:2:236.R. Buckminster Fuller to Charles Sachs, Oct. 5,1979, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:517.Fuller to Sachs, Jan. 14,1980, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:517. Chapter 2

6 R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Later Development of My Thought,’’ in Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure, ed. Robert Marks (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 45.Ibid.‘‘My work was initiated in 1927 and was designed to become effective in 1952’’ (‘‘Design Strategy,’’ in R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity [New York: Bantam, 1969], 318). On his supposed vow of silence see Fuller, ‘‘Later Development of My Thought,’’ 47.These short passages are culled from R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), 124; from his notes archived in the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection, M1090:8:89:6 and M1090:8:89:8, Stanford University Libraries (hereafter cited as Fuller MSS); and from his essay ‘‘The Music of the New Life’’ (1964), published in Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion, 42, respectively.Fuller MSS, M1090:8:89:6.In the midst of the crisis year of 1927, ‘‘there came to my assistance the logic and fundamental sense, inherent from my long association and natural love of the sea and its boats’’ (R. Buckminster Fuller to Vincent Astor, Aug. 28,1928, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:20:35).The packing house—Armour & Co.—also gave this blue-blooded New Englander his first exposure to the ‘‘sacrilegious’’ jabbering of ‘‘jews & polaks,’’but this indignity does not appear among the ‘‘ideas and integrities’’ that marked his later recollections (R. Buckminster Fuller to Anne Hewlett Fuller, Jan. 12,1916, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:45:2).R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Influences on My Work’’ (1955), in Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographic Disclosure (New York; Macmillan, 1963), 14.Fuller to George N. Buffington, Aug. 31, 1928, Fuller MSS, M 1090:2:20:35.Fuller to Anne Hewlett Fuller, March 17, April 1, May 3,1927.The preceding passages are drawn from, respectively, Fuller, ‘‘Later Development of My Thought,’’ 61; R. Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), xi; Fuller MSS, M1090:89:8 (1973); Fuller, ‘‘Later Development of My Thought,’’ 59; and ‘‘Guinea Pig B,’’ Introduction to Inventions: The Patented Works ofR. Buckminster Fuller (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), xiii.A model of his first Dymaxion house was displayed at the Modern Decorative Arts Exhibition, sponsored by the Marshall Field’s department store in April 1928. The announcement of the exhibit, ‘‘which introduces scientific application of space-time principles and harmonics into modern building construction,’’ concludes: ‘‘Mr. Fuller cordially invites you to hear his short lecture, which will be given daily, each hour from 12 PM to 5 PM.’’ It is possible that Fuller later conflated his profound depression of 1922 with the events of 1927.Fuller to Buffington, Aug. 31, 1928, Fuller MSS, M 1090:2:20:35. The fact that Fuller offers dramatically different accounts of this defining moment casts further doubt on the reliability of the mature Fuller as a source for his younger self. See Robert Snyder, Buckminster Fuller: An Auto-biographical Monologue Scenario (New York: St. Martin’s, 1980), 35.Fuller MSS, Ml090:2:20:34, April 11,1928.Fuller MSS, M1090:2:20:35, July 16,1928.The manuscript went through three phases: first came an initial, seventy-three-page draft, entitled ‘‘Lightful Houses,’’ which was completed by January or February of 1928.4D was produced in April and was the version that Fuller distributed in a privately printed edition of two hundred; a final version, later that year, incorporates correspondence and feedback.In July Anne finally sublet their New York apartment and joined Bucky in Chicago, where, most obligingly, she began to keep a diary. In an entry for January 30, 1928, she noted that ‘‘RBF read Le Corbusier until very late at night’’ (Fuller MSS, M1090:2:15:30). Vers une architecture had just been translated into English and seems a likely inspiration for Fuller’s thinking. Further links to Le Corbusier and other European modernists are explored by Michael John Gorman, Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility (New York: Rizzoli, 2005), chap. 1.Fuller MSS, M1090:2:15:30.The typescript of 4D was produced in great haste and is full of misspellings, grammatical curiosities, and terminological inconsistencies. This applies to the title itself, which at times is rendered 4D and at times 4-D, often on the same page. The observation by Marshall Field’s branding expert, Waldo Warren, that this sounded more like an apartment number than a proposal for the restructuring of civilization led in the following year to the term Dymaxion.See R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, the Art of Design Science, ed. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (Baden: Lars Muller, 1999), referenced hereafter as vol. 1 of YPS; R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, Discourse, ed. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (Baden: Lars Muller, 2001), referenced hereafter as vol. 2 of YPS; J. Baldwin, Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today (New York: Wiley, 1966); Robert Marks, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller (New York: Reinhold, 1960); Martin Pawley, Buckminster Fuller (London: Grafton, 1992); Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe: An Appreciation (New York: Perseus, 2000).Fuller to Buffington, Aug. 31,1928, Fuller MSS, M 1090:2:20:35.Fuller MSS, M1090:2:20:35 (1928): 4D, p. 2.Fuller’s comment about ‘‘assininic [sic] aesthetics’’ comes from a letter to Victor Astor, Aug. 8, 1928 (Fuller MSS, M 1090:2:20:35); the ‘‘rhythmical contemplation of life’’ is from 4D Time Lock, 35. In a letter to Buck/s bewildered brother, Wolcott, who, despite the sincerest filial sympathies was unable to make ‘‘head or tail out of the book,’’ Anne explained that ‘‘we both feel it will be the entire solution of so many things…. The effects on land values, politics, almost all the manners and customs of today will be tremendous’’ (Anne Hewlett Fuller to Wolcott Fuller, Aug. 10,1928, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:46:10).Introduction to 4D Time Lock, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:20:35, May 21,1928.Fuller to Vincent Astor, May 21,1928, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:20:35.‘‘Cities Becoming ‘Peas of One Pod,’ Architects Warn,’’ St. Louis Star, May 17,1928. One can hardly miss the overtones of the famous duel between Henry Van de Velde and Hermann Muthesius on ‘‘Typisierungf that took place at the Cologne exhibition of the German Werkbund in 1914. For the texts see Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 28–31. For a nu-anced reading of their epochal exchange see Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 147–50. See also the classic formulation by Kenneth Frampton, ‘‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,’’ in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 16–30.Donald Deskey to Fuller, Feb. 25, Aug. 7,1930, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:22:37; see also his acerbic remarks on ‘‘the myth of Industrial Design’’ in ‘‘The Comprehensive Man,’’ in Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, 76–78. In a similar vein the Bauhaus would be curtly dismissed as the ‘‘foolish nonsense’’ of European stylists whose ‘‘superficial irrelevancies’’ did not touch underlying science (Fuller, ‘‘Influences on My Work,’’ 27). On the Technocracy movement see Karl Markley Conrad, ‘‘Buckminster Fuller and the Technocratic Persuasion’’ (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1973); see also the scholarly appraisals of Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 252–53; Edward T. Layton Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), chap. 10.[Harvard University office of the president] to R. Buckminster Fuller, May 28, 1928, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:20:34.Bruce Barton to Lawrence Stoddard, June 8,1928, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:20:34.Fuller to J. M. Hewlett, May 21,1928, Fuller MSS, Ml090:2:46:7; Fuller to Buffington, Aug. 21, 1928, Fuller MSS, M 1090:2:20:35.Fuller to Victor Astor, Aug. 28,1928, Fuller MSS,M 1090:2:20:35.In an intimate letter to Evelyn Schwartz (n.d. but presumably late 1931 or early 1932) he refers to ‘‘his nervous breakdown of the previous year’’ (Chronofile vol. 39 [1931]). Evelyn Stefansson Nef (n£e Schwartz) writes bitterly of her adolescent relationship with Fuller during that period in her autobiography, Finding My Way (Washington, DC: Francis Press, 2002), 47–58.In an interview conducted in 1970 this charge was still able to evoke an intense reaction: ‘‘Don’t talk to me about failure,’’ he thundered back to Martin Pawley. ‘‘Failure is a word invented by men, there is no such thing as a failure in nature’’ (Pawley, Buckminster Fuller, 26).The allusion here is to Jurgen Habermas’s pivotal thesis on ‘‘the unfinished project of modernity.’’ See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).Hugh Kenner, Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller (New York: Morrow, 1973), 156.Fuller, ‘‘Later Development of My Thought,’’ 42 (Fuller’s emphasis).Kenner, Bucky, 200.Chapter 3

7 See Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).See Howard P. Segal, ‘‘Eighteenth-Century American Utopianism: From the Potential to the Probable,’’ Utopian Studies 11 (2000): 5–13.R. Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), xiv.For an early analysis of just the Tofflers and Naisbitt and Aburdene, see ‘‘High Tech and the Burden of History,’’ chap. 12 in Howard P. Segal, Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 163–202.See Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976).Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York: Overlook Press, 1969), 289–90,292.See my review of R. Buckminster Fuller, Inventions: The Patented Works ofR. Buckminster Fuller (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983); and of James Ward, ed., The Artifacts of Buckminster Fuller: A Comprehensive Collection of His Designs and Drawings (New York: Garland, 1985), in Technology and Culture 28 (July 1987), 697–98. Both books were posthumous publications.To his credit, Gerard O’Neill makes no claims that his societies witness the literal perfection of the species and admits that human beings are by nature flawed. His colonies offer opportunities to pursue happiness but do not guarantee it. See his The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), 272–73; and his 2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 61–75.See ‘‘Lewis Mumford’s Alternatives to the Megamachine: Critical Utopianism, Regionalism, and Decentralization,’’ in Segal, Future Imperfect, 152.This paragraph and its quotations come from The Center for Land Use Interpretation, available at http://ludb.clui.Org/ex/i/CO3134/ (accessed Oct. 1,2008); see also Timothy Miller, ‘‘The Farm: Roots of Communal Revival, 1962–1966,’’ available at www .thefarm.org/lifestyle/root2.html (accessed Oct. 1,2008).Mumford, Findings and Keepings: Analects for an Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 373.See the still very illuminating comparison by architectural critic Allan Temko, ‘‘Which Guide to the Promised Land? Fuller or Mumford?’’ in Horizon 10 (summer 1968): 25–30.See Simon Ramo, Cure for Chaos: Fresh Solutions to Social Problems Through the Systems Approach (New York: David McKay, 1969); and David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972).‘‘Star Wars’’ is commonly understood in its basic structure and operation. On the far less familiar supercollider see ‘‘Preface, 1995: The Death of the Superconducting Super Collider in the Life of American Physics,’’ in Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (1977; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), ix-xlii.For an extended discussion of the fate of the Technocracy movement see my new introduction to Harold Loeb’s Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996; orig. published 1933).Fuller, Inventions, xxxii, xx. Chapter 4

8 See R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, Discourse, ed. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (Baden: Lars Muller, 2001), 84–103; hereafter Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, Discourse is referenced as vol. 2 of YPS.R. Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation: Freeing the Scholar to Return to His Studies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), 8.R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1975–79).R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Omnidirectional Halo,’’ in No More Secondhand God and Other Writings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 137; see also Synergetics, 1:237.Synergetics, 2:31.Ibid., 2:127.Ibid., 2:31.E. J. Applewhite, Cosmic Fishing: An Account of Writing Synergetics with Buckminster Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 47.The author has edited three books with writings of R. Buckminster Fuller in German translation between 1968 and 1973.William Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets (New York- Weybright and Talley, 1971), 220.R. Buckminster Fuller, Cosmography, ed. Kioshi Kuromiya (New York Macmillan, 1992).See Gerald Holton, Einstein, die Geschichte und andere Leidenschaften [Einstein, History and Other Passions] (Braunschweig, Wiesbaden: Vieweg-Verlag, 1998), 4:107.See Harold W. Kroto, ‘‘Macro, Micro, and Nano-scale Engineering,’’ in Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium, ed. Thomas K. Zung (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001), 226.Harold W. Kroto, ‘‘Die Entdeckung der Fullerene,’’ in Von Fuller bis zu Fuller- enen, ed. Wolfgang Kratschmer and Heike Schuster (Braunschweig, Wiesbaden: Verlag Vieweg, 1996), 59–60; Joachim Krausse, ‘‘Buckminster Fuller und seine Modellierung der Natur,’’ in ibid., 25–51.R. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure, ed. Robert Marks (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 75–76.See Hugh Kenner, Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller (New York: Morrow, 1973), 7–8.See Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London; Architectural Press, 1960), chap. 22.Reyner Banham, ‘‘The Dymaxicrat’’ (1936), in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 93–94.See Kenner, Bucky, 129.See R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, the Art of Design Science, ed. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (Baden: Lars Muller, 1999), 80–87; hereafter Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, the Art of Design Science is referenced as vol. 1 of YPS; see also YPS 2:62–74.See YPS 1:114–15,126–27,134; YPS 2:92–96.Compare the illustrations in YPS 1:83.YPS 1:78–79.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Vertical Is to Live, Horizontal Is to Die,’’ in YPS 2.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Lightful Houses’’ (1928), in YPS 2:70.See Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein, ‘‘Earthwalking-Skyriding: An Invitation to Join Buckminster Fuller on a Voyage of Discovery,’’ in YPS 2:23–31; R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Noah’s Ark #2,’’ in YPS 2:176.Anne Hewlett Fuller, ‘‘Diary starting August 7th when I came out to Chicago with Bucky,’’ Dymaxion Chronofile, vol. 30 (1927–28), R. Buckminster Fuller Collection, Stanford University Libraries (hereafter cited as Fuller MSS).See illustration in YPS 1:84.R. Buckminster Fuller,‘‘Lightful Houses,’’ in YPS 2:70 (Fuller’s emphasis).R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Mistake Mystique’’ (1979), in YPS 2:296.See images in YPS 1:85–87; YPS 2:63.Fuller, ‘‘Lightful Houses.’’R. Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1938), 43.See Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment (London: Architectural Press, 1969); Joachim Krausse, ‘‘Environment Controlling—fur eine Welt der Vielen: Buckminster Fullers Wirkung in GroGbritannien,’’ in Norman Foster: Architecture Is About People, ed. Susanne Anna (Kbln: Museum of Applied Arts, 2002), 97.R. Buckminster Fuller, Designing a New Industry (Wichita: Fuller Research Institute, 1946), 35.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘The 90% Automatic Cotton Mill’’ (1951), in YPS 1:336–39.Fuller, Designing a New Industry, 35.Ibid.Ludwig Bertalanffy, General System Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1968).See Joachim Krausse, ‘‘Architektur der Hochtechnologie: Buckminster Fullers Dymaxion Haus 1929,’’ in 1929: Beitragezur ArchaologiederMedien,ed.Stefan Andri- opoulos and Bernhard J. Dotzler (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2002), 192–223.R. Buckminster Fuller to Rosamond Fuller, June 13, 1928, in 4D Time Lock (1928) (repr. Albuquerque: Lama Foundation, 1972), 79, quoted in YPS 1:77.R. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 69.Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (London: John Rodker, 1927).R. Buckminster Fuller, 4D, copy no. 1, Appendix 1, References, manuscript 5 pp. Dymaxion Chronofile, vol. 35 (1928), Fuller MSS.Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, 70.

9 Chapter 5

10 Fuller’s first name for his housing project was ‘‘Lightful Houses’’ (Feb. 1928); he altered it to ‘‘4D’’ (spring 1928). In 1929 a Chicago advertisement specialist proposed to Fuller the keyword Dymaxion, which Fuller used until ca. 1950. These projects were all closely related, encompassing a general progression and evolution of a housing project that developed over several decades.Fuller mentioned later that he had ideally foreseen a circular plan for the 4D house, but he replaced that plan owing to reasons of viability (bending of metal tubes) by a hexagonal scheme; see R. Buckminster Fuller, Designing a New Industry (Wichita: Fuller Research Institute, 1946), 22.R. Buckminster Fuller, 4D Time Lock (1928; repr. Albuquerque, NM: Lama Foundation, 1970).Fuller, Designing a New Industry, 16.R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, Discourse, ed. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (Baden: Lars Muller, 2001), 48; hereafter referenced as vol. 2 of YPS.Ibid.What is coined ‘‘international style’’ in the Anglo-Saxon countries is in Germanspeaking countries ‘‘neues Bauen’’ (or ‘‘neue Sachlichkeit’’); in France ‘‘la construction nouvelle’’; in Italy ‘‘1’architettura razionale.’’ABC—Beitrdge zum Bauen (Basel: Thalwill, 1926), 1:8.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Doing the Most with the Least,’’ Shelter, no. 4 (1932): 36; depicted in R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, the Art of Design Science, ed. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (Baden: Lars Muller, 1999), 166; hereafter referenced as vol. 1 of YPS.‘‘Das Bauen hat aufgehort, eine Sache der Kunst zu sein, es hat uberall…die Arbeitsweise der Technik iibernommen, die eindeutig aus dem Material und seinen Mbglichkeiten, aus dem Vorgang des Bauens aus den Anforderungen an das fertige Bauwerk heraus gestaltet.’’ [Building is no more an artistic issue; it has thoroughly …adopted the methods of engineering which require to design according to the materials and their potentials and along the building process, obeying the demands of the planned building.] Hans Schmidt, ‘‘Das Bauen ist nicht Architektur,’’ Werk (Zurich), May 1927, 141 (my translation).

11 R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Dymaxion House,’’ lecture presented to the Architectural League, New York City, July 1929, in YPS 2:84–103.Fortune, July 1932; repr. in YPS 1:136–37.This aspect is discussed by Federico Neder in his doctoral dissertation on R. Buckminster Fuller, submitted in Geneva in 2003 (Ecole d’Architecture, unpublished).The name ‘‘Stockade’’ for Hewlett’s and Fuller’s building system seems to fit this interpretation.YPS 2:87. Andrd Corboz, ‘‘Non-Cit/ Revisited,’’ in Die Kunst, Stadt und Land zum Sprechen zu bringen (Basel: Birkhauser, 2001), 123–39. R. Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1938), 34.Joachim Krausse suggests that the label ‘‘4D’’ might possibly also refer to (Henry) Ford.For Fuller’s complete array of arguments and exhaustive description of his project see the transcription of his 1929 lecture delivered at the Architectural League, New York City (YPS2:84–103).R. Buckminster Fuller, No More Secondhand God (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 52.Fuller, 4D Time Lock, 18.Le Corbusier, ‘‘Appel aux industriels’’ (1924), in Le Corbusier and Pierre Jean- neret, Oeuvre complete, vol. 1 (1910–29) (Zurich: Girsberger, 1929), 77.Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (1869; repr. Hartford, CT: Stowe-Day Foundation, 1975), 25.Ibid., 58.See YPS 1:239–45.Beecher and Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home, 43.Ibid., 49. See also Reyner Banham, Architecture and the Well-tempered Environment (London: Architectural Press, 1969), 96–99. Banham correlated Beecher’s design with Fuller’s, emphasizing the physical aspect of climate control. The Dymaxion house was just mentioned, not discussed.Fuller, 4D Time Lock, 12.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Can’t Fool Cosmic Computer,’’ from Grunch of Giants, repr. in Thomas T. K. Zung, Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001), 275. Chapter 6

12 1. For an overview see David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 217—48.

13 R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Guinea Pig B,’’ in Thomas T. K. Zung, Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001), 312.R. Buckminster Fuller, interview transcript from ‘‘Energy and Technology,’’ WOSU-AM-FM-TV, April 2,1979, R. Buckminster Fuller Collection, M1090:8:182:2:29, 31–32, Stanford University Libraries (hereafter cited as Fuller MSS).The classic discussion on the problems of the Newtonian synthesis is in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). See also Sherry H. Olson, The Depletion Myth: A History of Railway Use of Timber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).Nikola Tesla, ‘‘The Problem of Increasing Human Energy with Special Reference to the Harnessing of the Sun’s Energy,’’ Century Magazine, May 1900,175.R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 258.Ibid., 256.R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (Har- mondsworth: Penguin, 1969).R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), xviii.R. Buckminster Fuller, keynote speech, Conference on Energy and the Future of America’s Communities, Fuller MSS, M 1090:8:181:2:1.Ibid.Ibid., 9. See also Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion, 178–79; and R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘The Age of Astro Architecture,’’ Saturday Review, July 13,1968.Fuller, keynote speech, 10.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Comprehensive Designing,’’ in Zung, Buckminster Fuller, 73.Glenn A. Olds, ‘‘R. Buckminster Fuller: Cosmic Surfer,’’ in ibid., 61.Transcripts of R. Buckminster Fuller’s comments at the International Conferences on Environmental Future, Sep. 1977, Fuller MSS, M1090:8:176:4.Fuller, Synergetics, 533.See James Miller, ed., The Buckminster Fuller Reader (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 38–41.Horatio Greenough, Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design, and Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 116–29. On Henry Ford and Ralph Waldo Emerson see David E. Nye, Henry Ford: "Ignorant Idealist’’ (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 93–95,106.‘‘Frank Lloyd Wright and Nine Chains to the Moon" in Zung, Buckminster Fuller, 366–68.Fuller, Critical Path, 253. ‘‘No single move can bring us more swiftly in the direction of complete overall desovereignization, unblocking the free flow of technologies and resources, than that of instituting the world-around integrated electrical-energy network’’ (ibid., 309).Charles Steinmetz, ‘‘Effect of Electrical Engineering on Modern Industry,’’ Scientific American, suppl. no. 2002, vol. 77, May 16,1914,314. www.geni.org/globalenergy/issues/overview/grid.shtml (accessed Dec. 20,2008).On Fuller’s involvement with Ohio University students see transcription of conversation between Fuller and John McHale, Fuller MSS, M1090:8:19:5:6.On this industrial tourism see David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), chap. 5.Jeffrey Meikle, Design in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 117.The restored Dymaxion house can be seen at www.hfrngv.org/museum/dy maxion.aspx (accessed Dec. 20,2008).An investor, William Gordon, purchased the only two prototypes of this round, aluminum house, and in 1948 he inserted one of them into his family’s home, where it remained until ultimately bought, restored, and exhibited in the Henry Ford Museum.Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion, 410.Ibid., 412–13.Fuller, Critical Path, 315.Buckminster Fuller received a U.S. patent for the geodesic dome. However, at least one dome of a similar nature preceded his. Dr. Walter Bauersfeld of the Carl Zeiss Optical Company in Germany built between 1919 and 1922 a hollow globular structure made from 3,480 metal struts that were pieced together as a series of triangles. It was then covered with a thin layer of concrete for use as a planetarium with Zeiss projection equipment. The design proved successful and was widely adopted. One, the famous Adler Planetarium, was erected in Chicago in 1930. See www.telacommunications.com/ geodome.htm (accessed Dec. 20,2008); and Werner Helmet, From theArratus Globe to the Zeiss Planetarium (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer, 1957). In addition, elements of Fuller’s work were independently anticipated by Alexander Graham Bell when he was building kites and airplane wings. See Dorothy Harley Eber, prologue to Genius at Work: Images of Alexander Graham Bell (New York: Viking, 1982).Zung, Buckminster Fuller, 39.Fuller, Critical Path, 317–22.Ibid., 320.Sylvia Hart Wright, Sourcebook of Contemporary North American Architecture: From Postwar to Postmodern (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1989), 33.‘‘Geodesic Structures,’’ from The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, repr. in Zung, Buckminster Fuller, 40.Chapter 7

14 The seminal instance of this approach is Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960).The 4D Time Lock manuscript can be found in R. Buckminster Fuller Collection, M1090:8:l-2, Stanford University Libraries (hereafter cited as Fuller MSS). Privately published in a mimeographed edition of approximately two hundred copies in 1928, the treatise was reissued, with the addition of drawings Fuller made during 1927 and 1928, as R. Buckminster Fuller, 4D Time Lock (Albuquerque, NM: Lamas Foundation, 1972). Many of the ideas in 4D Time Lock first appeared in a manuscript titled ‘‘Lightful Houses’’ (1928), Fuller MSS, M1090:8:2.R. Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, rev. ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1971), 89.Calvin Tomkins, ‘‘In the Outlaw Area,’’ New Yorker, Jan. 8,1966,35–97,40.For a survey of Western sumptuary regulation see Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (New York St. Martin’s, 1996).See Jonathan Massey, ‘‘New Necessities: Modernist Aesthetic Discipline,’’ Per- specta: The Yale Architectural Journal 35 (2004): 112–33.R. Buckminster Fuller, with Kiyoshi Kuromiya, Critical Path (New York St. Martin’s, 1981), chap. 4, ‘‘Self-Disciplines of Buckminster Fuller.’’R. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure, ed. Robert W. Marks (New York Collier, 1963), 30; see also Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2000), chap. 4, ‘‘Years of Deterioration.’’See Fuller to Anne Hewlett Fuller, July 31, 1932, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:47; and Sieden, Buckminster Fidler’s Universe, 87.Fuller, ‘‘Lightful Houses,’’ 59,65.Fuller, 4D Time Lock, 1.Fuller, ‘‘Motion Economics and Contact Economies,’’ unpublished TS (1942), Fuller MSS, M 1090:8:5. ‘‘Technocracy aspires to exercising political power,’’ Fuller explained to Technocracy, Inc., member Tom Gibbins in 1976, ‘‘in contradistinction to what I call exclusive preoccupation with reducing to practice, and by proving and developing artifacts by comprehensive design science initiatives’’ (Fuller to Gibbins, Dec. 12, 1976, Fuller MSS, M 1090:2:330).Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, 175.In the 1970s, for instance, Fuller described the energetic-synergetic geometry he developed with E. J. Applewhite as the only coordinate system capable of representing nature’s four spatial dimensions. Dismissing the temporal conception of the fourth dimension as a myth developed by scientists to avoid confronting their incapacity to model higher-dimensional shapes, Fuller gave energetic-synergetic geometry four axes at sixty degree angles to one another, like the four sides of a tetrahedron. According to Fuller, this allowed the system to model ‘‘fourth-order problems,’’ four-dimensional shapes that could not be modeled using a three-dimensional Cartesian geometry. See Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York Bantam, 1969), 84, 97. The tetrahedron, he explained in another context, was ‘‘the fundamental minimal structure of the universe’’ because ‘‘nature is inherently four dimensional and sometimes more’’ (Fuller to Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Oct 2,1979, quoted in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modem Art [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983], 235). In his early work, by contrast, Fuller more often emphasized the temporal fourth dimension. In 1928, for instance, he characterized ‘‘4D’’ as ‘‘only the enigmatic term for time’’ (‘‘Time Lock’’ MS, 39, in Fuller MSS,M1090:8:l).Riemann’s 18541ecture‘‘UberdieHypothesen,welchederGeometriezuGrunde liegen,’’ which first presented his theory of n-dimensional space, was published in German in 1868, then in English in 1873. See Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1969), esp. 151–52.Since the 1970s, however, Riemann space has enjoyed a resurgence owing to its use in superstring theory, which speculates that as many as ten dimensions of space, along with an eleventh consisting of time, might make up our universe. See Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: Vintage, 2000); and Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York: Vintage, 2005).

15 See Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, 185. Fuller also used the fourth dimension to link time and space. He believed that all bodies were essentially spherical, their deformations from that ideal shape being produced by the pressure of their interaction with other adjacent bodies. ‘‘Everything is round in its perfect state,’’ he explained in an early Time Lock draft, even if it could be compressed and distorted by contact with other bodies much like a pneumatic tire encountering a rock or other object. These spherical bodies expanded radially over time, and the rate of this ‘‘radiation’’ helped explain the relative size of things. ‘‘Matter takes time" he stated. ‘‘That’s 4th Dim’’ (‘‘Lightful Houses,’’ 65). Fuller used the term relativity to describe the varying ‘‘wave length and frequency’’ of this expansion along the ‘‘radiant time dimension,’’ which manifested itself to normal human perception as growth and longevity (‘‘Lightful Houses,’’ 44). See also Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, 117–18; and Fuller, Time Lock, 36–38.In June 1928 Fuller discussed his understanding of the fourth dimension with his father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett. ‘‘After I had worked out my own time laws of relativity,’’ he explained, ‘‘I decided to study the books by Albert Einstein.’’ Simultaneously claiming that Einstein’s ideas corresponded closely to his own conceptions and admitting that he found them ‘‘obscurantist,’’ Fuller concluded that ‘‘Time and Relativity are essential components of CONSTRUCTION DESIGN and HARMONIC COMPOSITION. …The abstract starting point must be consistently adhered to in the complete subjection of materialism to the will of the unselfish or spiritual man’’ (Fuller to James Monroe Hewlett, June 28,1928, transcribed in Time Lock, 5–6).Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, 134.Fuller, in 4D; Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, exhibition catalog (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, June 1929), n.p.Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, 181, 185. In a further application of relativity theory to scientific management, Fuller compared the various kinds of ‘‘therblig,’’ the sixteen maximally efficient human work actions identified in 1919 by Taylorist efficiency engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, to Einstein’s c², ‘‘i.e., TOP efficient speed’’ (Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, 80).Fuller, Time Lock, 36. ‘‘In consideration of the fact that no matter can exist without time, else it would not exist; and that the time dimension is the most important dimension of all matter; and that all our industry is but a time saving institution; that all sport is but a time controlling demonstration; and that all art is but an harmonic division, composition, and projection of time; and that we are fast approaching a time standard (men dollar hours) instead of a gold standard…In full consideration of this new economic law must the new era home be designed and its plans of industrialization evolved,’’ Fuller asserted.For Taylor’s outline of scientific management practice see Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911). Regarding Taylor’s ‘‘one best way’’ philosophy see Robert Kanigel, One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997).Fuller, Time Lock, 51.For an overview of the Technocracy movement see William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). After continuing to develop through the 1920s, technocracy gained widespread attention in 1932, when the Depression made the concept of rational planning by disinterested experts seem like an urgently needed alternative to laissez- faire capitalism. Although 1933 and 1934 saw an explosion of societies and chapters dedicated to technocratic ideals, the movement rapidly lost momentum to Roosevelt’s New Deal reform program, which co-opted many of its arguments.Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream, 10.Technocracy, Inc., Technocracy Study Course, 5th ed. (New York: Technocracy, 1940 [1934]), vii. See also Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream, 34–41.Veblen’s 1919 Dial essays were collected in his book The Engineers and the Price System (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1921).Fuller to John Omdahl, Sep. 16, 1970, in Fuller MSS, M1090:2:205. See also Fuller to Gibbins, Dec. 12,1976.Fuller’s work on Shelter was supported by a thousand-dollar grant from the Architects’ Emergency Relief Committee of New York, the same organization that funded Scott’s energy survey. See Fuller to Gibbins, Dec. 12, 1976; and Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream, 62.Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, 88–89. Fuller later recalled that he had diverged from the organization when it ‘‘rather alarmingly adopted blue military uniforms and blue-grey Technocracy staff cars which were reminiscent of other colored shirt movements of the Nazis’’ (Fuller to Gibbins, Dec. 12,1976); see also Fuller to Omdahl, Sep. 16,1970.Shelter, vol. 2, bulletin 3, June 22,1932,88.Fuller, ‘‘Motion Economics and Contact Economies,’’ unpublished TS (1942), in Fuller MSS, M1090:8:5. ‘‘Technocracy aspires to exercising political power,’’ Fuller explained to Technocracy, Inc., member Tom Gibbins in 1976,‘‘in contradistinction to what I call exclusive preoccupation with reducing to practice, and by proving and developing artifacts by comprehensive design science initiatives’’ (Fuller to Gibbins, Dec. 12,1976).Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, 195; and Tomkins, ‘‘In the Outlaw Area,’’ 64. In discussing the aims and methods of his work, Fuller frequently cited as a model the nautical ‘‘trim tab,’’ a small flap on a ship’s rudder that initiates steering motions. Like the tiny trim tab, the ‘‘unsupported individual’’ who lacked—or rejected—the authority of a command structure could best stimulate large-scale change by establishing incentives for people to modify their behavior. ‘‘In a dynamic universe,’’ Fuller would later explain, ‘‘everything is always moving in the direction of least resistance…If that’s the case, then it should be possible to modify the shapes of things so that they follow preferred directions of least resistance.’’ For a longer discussion of the ‘‘new forms rather than reforms’’ principle see R. Buckminster Fuller and John McHale, World Design Science Decade 1965–1975 Phase I (1963) Document 1: Inventory of World Resources Human Trends and Needs (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), Appendix A, 51–58.Quoted in Tomkins, ‘‘In the Outlaw Area,’’ 85.Walter Peters, ‘‘Buckminster Fuller and the Indlu Geodesic Dome Project, South Africa, 1958,’’ paper presented at the 58th annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vancouver, April 9,2005.See the report on the 90 percent Automatic Cotton Mill studio Fuller conducted at North Carolina State College, Jan. 2 to Feb. 2,1952, grouped with other student project files in Fuller MSS, M1090:18:107.In this he followed nineteenth-century house reformer Orson Fowler, who had promoted octagon houses in similar terms. On Fowler and Fuller see Michael J. Auer, ‘‘The Dymaxion Dwelling Machine,’’ in H. Ward Jandl, Yesterday’s Houses of Tomorrow (Washington, DC: Preservation Press, 1991), 83–99.For a comparison of the 4D/Dymaxion house to other prefabricated housing proposals see Alfred Bruce and Harold Sandbank, A History of Prefabrication (New York: John B. Pierce Foundation, July 1943).Fuller, ‘‘Lightful Houses,’’ 50.Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, 17.Fuller to George N. Buffington, Aug. 31, 1928, incorporated into Time Lock, 120–48.Fuller, Time Lock, 123.Fuller, ‘‘Lightful Houses,’’ 56–58. ‘‘As time is saved by individuals for other individuals, so shall that individual control capital in the direct equivalent of man hours saved, less cost of equipment and its maintenance,’’ Fuller explained. ‘‘But inversely …having proven his (or her) worth per hour in time saving, when he indulges the bestial stomach so shall he lose capital control proportional per hour and as he influences and wastes other individuals time thereby.’’ Using Henry Ford as an example, Fuller outlined how his system might operate in practice. Assuming that Ford was worth a million dollars a day to the world, he should be compensated at that rate for all time spent sleeping, eating, exercising, and cleaning himself. Every minute Ford spent ‘‘in self indulgence’’ such as gossip, however, would be debited from his compensation.See Claude Bragdon, Projective Ornament (Rochester NY: Manas Press, 1915). For a comprehensive account of Bragdon’s work see Jonathan Massey, Crystal and Arabesque: Claude Bragdon, Ornament, and Modern Architecture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).Bragdon also employed another technique for generating geometric patterns: tracing ‘‘magic lines,’’ the lines created by tracing in ascending numerical order the numbers in a ‘‘magic square,’’ an arrangement of sequential numbers into a square, each column, row, and diagonal of which sums to the same number.Bragdon, Projective Ornament, 63–64.See, e.g., Bragdon, ‘‘New Concepts of Time and Space,’’ The Dial, Feb. 1920, 187–91.Fuller, Time Lock, 46. Bragdon’s copy is listed as number 66 in the handwritten list ‘‘Registration of Copies’’ included in the Chronofile, vol. 35 (1928), in Fuller MSS, M 1090:2:20.Bragdon, Projective Ornament, 64.See Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, 18–22; and Bragdon, Four-Dimensional Vistas (1914), 2nd ed. (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), 116.Fuller, Time Lock, 35.Fuller, ‘‘Ballistics of Civilization,’’ MSS (1939), in Fuller MSS, M1090:8:4.

16 Chapter 8

17 Cranston Jones to Buckminster Fuller, Sep. 23, 1959; in R. Buckminster Fuller Collection, M1090:2:106, Stanford University Libraries (hereafter cited as Fuller MSS).Based on corrugated iron grain-storage bins, the Dymaxion Deployment Unit (DDU) was a prefabricated bomb shelter or ‘‘defense house’’ comprising two cylindrical metal units; see Beatriz Colomina,‘‘DDU at MoMA,’’ ANYmagazine, no. 17 (Jan. 1997): 49–53.‘‘By erecting in its Garden from time to time exhibition houses or demonstration structures, the Museum has been able to make clear to the layman many points on architecture, design and construction’’ (Today and Tomorrow [New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1960], 22; in Fuller MSS, M1090:3:6).Peter Blake, No Place like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 138.‘‘No. 72 for Release Friday, August 28,1959,’’ in [Press Releases] The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York, volume for 1959 (hereafter cited as MoMA Library).Arthur Drexler, ‘‘Introductory Label: Structures by Buckminster Fuller,’’ n.d. [1959], 2, in [Press Releases] MoMA Library, volume for 1959.Arthur Drexler, Three Structures by Buckminster Fuller in the Garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1960), n.p.Arthur Drexler, ‘‘Text of Wall Label: Structures by Buckminster Fuller,’’ n.d. [1959], in [Press Releases] MoMA Library, volume for 1959.Ibid.; Anon., ‘‘R. Buckminster Fuller,’’ n.d. [1959], in [Press Releases] MoMA Library, volume for 1959.Yunn Chii Wong, ‘‘The Geodesic Works of Richard Buckminster Fuller, 1948–68 (The Universe as Home of Man),’’ 2 vols. (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999), 1:334. Wong states that 550 geodesic rigid radomes were constructed between 1954 and 1961 and estimates Fuller’s royalties at 5 percent of fabrication costs, giving a ballpark average of $2,000 in royalties per radome.Drexler, ‘‘Text of Wall Label.’’Anon., ‘‘Art Carnival on for Young,’’ New York Times, Sep. 23, 1959, 34. ‘‘New Moods in Manhattan,’’ Town and Country, March 1960, in Department of Public Information Records, 82 [21, 807], Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York (hereafter cited as MoMA Archives).Anon., ‘‘R. Buckminster Fuller,’’ in [Press Releases] MoMA Library, volume for 1959; and Drexler, ‘‘Text of Wall Label.’’See installation photograph labeled on verso ‘‘Buckminster Fuller Exhibition: Far West Gallery. Oct. 27-Nov. 23, 1959. Photo: Kenneth Snelson, #10,’’ in Department of Architecture and Design Exhibition Files, Exh. #652, MoMA Archives.Drexler, Three Structures.Ada Louise Huxtable, ‘‘Future Previewed? Innovations of Buckminster Fuller Could Transform Architecture,’’ New York Times, Sep. 27,1959,21.See Mark Wigley, ‘‘Planetary Homeboy,’’ ANYmagazine.no. 17 (Jan. 1997): 16.Visionary Architecture opened on Sep. 29,1960, thus running concurrently with the tail end of Three Structures.Arthur Drexler, New York, to James W. Fitzgibbon, Raleigh, Feb. 15, 1960, in Fuller MSS, Ml 090:2:107.Ibid, (emphasis added).Buckminster Fuller to Elizabeth Shaw, New York, Oct. 21,1959, in Fuller MSS, M1090:2:105.Department of Architecture and Design Exhibition Files, Exh. #652, MoMA Archives.See note 14.Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, ‘‘Dome Days: Buckminster Fuller in the Cold War,’’ in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, ed. Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 169.Arthur Drexler, New York, to J. A. Vitale, Lexington, Mass., June 8, 1959, in Fuller MSS, M1090:2:103. Vitale was division head at MIT’s Lincoln Labs.For details on Fuller’s franchises and companies see Wong, ‘‘The Geodesic Works,’’ 1:284–301. For a major such dispute see Jeffrey Lindsay, Montreal, to Buckminster Fuller, New York, March 7,1955, in Fuller MSS, M1090:2:87.See, e.g., Fuller MSS, M1090:2:107.See Margaret Fitzgibbon, interview by Yunn Chii Wong, St. Louis, Missouri, Sep. 15,1994, cited in Wong, ‘‘The Geodesic Works,’’ l:328nl22.Shoji Sadao, New York, to Shell Oil Company, Martinez, CA, Dec. 29, 1959, in Fuller MSS, M 1090:2:105.Bernie Kirschenbaum, interview by Yunn Chii Wong, New York, Oct. 5, 1994, cited in Wong, ‘‘The Geodesic Works,’’ l:328nl22.Ibid., 327–29.See installation photograph labeled on verso ‘‘Buckminster Fuller Exhibition: Far West Gallery. Oct. 27-Nov. 23,1959. Photo: Kenneth Snelson, #3,’’ in Department of Architecture and Design Exhibition Files, Exh. #652, MoMA Archives.Drexler, ‘‘Text of Wall Label.’’ For Snelson’s account of his own role in Drexler’s eleventh-hour enlightenment about the origins of tensegrity see Kenneth Snelson, ‘‘Snelson on the Tensegrity Invention,’’ International Journal of Space Structures 11, nos. 1–2 (1996): 46–47. For his account of the process of experimentation in which Early X Piece came about see Kenneth Snelson, New York, to Ren6 Motro, Guildford, Surrey, ca. 1990, in Ren6 Motro, Tensegrity: Structural Systems for the Future (London: Kogan Page, 2003), 225. Beyond the scope of the present chapter is the question of Karl loganson’s invention of what might be called a prototensegrity principle in 1921; see Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 87–93. In a later forum I hope to reconsider this controversial question in the light of the argument presented here.I have drawn these appellations from a letter by the late Wilder Green describing all the models loaned for the supplementary show; the four Snelson models were borrowed from the artist himself (see Wilder Green, New York, to Dorothy Dudley, Oct. 27,1959, in Registrar Exhibition Files, Exhibition #649, MoMA Archives). While Snelson prefers not to use Fuller’s term tensegrity in relation to his own work, this is nevertheless how his models were described in the preparation of the show. The photograph that appears at the rear of the vitrine was captioned ‘‘Tensegrity Dome (1954), Fuller Student Project, University of Minnesota,’’ a project in which Snelson was not involved.‘‘No. 97 for release Wednesday, October 28,1959,’’ in [Press Releases] MoMA Library, volume for 1959.Anon., ‘‘Why Not Build It?’’ New York Sunday News, Nov. 1,1959; Anon., ‘‘Exhibition Design for Future Living,’’ New York Post, Nov. 11,1959; George McCue, ‘‘Buckminster Fuller’s One-Man Show,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 1, 1959; in Department of Public Information Records, 82 (21,807), MoMA Archives.John Canaday, ‘‘Art: New Directions in Architecture,’’ New York Times, Sep. 22, 1959,78; Huxtable, ‘‘Future Previewed?’’ 21.See ‘‘Geodesic Dome,’’ Architectural Forum 95, no. 2 (Aug. 1951): 149.Kenneth Snelson, New York, to Ren£ Motro, Guildford, Surrey, ca. 1990, in Motro, Tensegrity, 225.Ibid., 223–24.John Canaday, ‘‘Art: Constructions on the ‘Tensegrity’ Principle,’’ New York Times, April 16,1966,24.Kenneth Snelson, ‘‘Whose Baby?’’ Letter to the Editor, Johns Hopkins Magazine, April 1980,2.Kenneth Snelson, New York, to Buckminster Fuller, Jan. 23,1972, in Fuller MSS, M1090:2:234.Buckminster Fuller, Philadelphia, to Kenneth Snelson, New York, March 1, 1980,24, in Fuller MSS, M1090:2:411. Fuller’s account of the MoMA episode differs in certain details from that of Snelson.Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Tensegrity,’’ Portfolio and Art News Annual, no. 4 (1961): 112–27,144–48.Wong, ‘‘The Geodesic Works,’’ 1:168–69 and n. 72, where he cites Duncan Stuart, ‘‘Interview with Yunn Chii Wong,’’ Raleigh, North Carolina, April 26,1995. See also Michael John Gorman, Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility (Milan: Skira, 2005).Fuller, ‘‘Tensegrity,’’ 121.Buckminster Fuller to Brian Higgins, Chicago, Aug. 12, 1982, in Fuller MSS, M 1090:2:465.Pang, ‘‘Dome Days,’’ 171.Buckminster Fuller, Philadelphia, to Kenneth Snelson, New York, March 1, 1980,4,6, in Fuller MSS, M1090:2:411.Chapter 9

18 Quoted in Kenneth Keniston, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968), 48.Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 133.Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 13–16.C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 3; quoted in Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 42.C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 168.Ibid., 169.Ibid., 171.Quoted in May, Homeward Bound, 145.See, e.g., Keniston, Young Radicals, 229–47.Quoted in Keniston, Young Radicals, 39.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘The Comprehensive Designer,’’ manuscript of 7 pages, June 1, 1949, Buckminster Fuller Archive, Manuscript File 49.06.01; repr. in R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, Discourse (Baden: Lars Muller, 2001), 243–46; hereafter Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, Discourse is referenced as vol. 2 of YPS. Fuller published an expanded version of this essay under the title ‘‘Comprehensive Designing,’’ in Trans/Formation 1, no. 4 (1950): 18–23. This expanded version was reprinted in R. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure, ed. Robert Marks (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 173–82.Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, 43.Ibid., 35–43.Ibid., 173.Ibid., 176.Ibid.Ibid., 63.Ibid., 249.‘‘When I heard that Aunt Margaret said,‘I must start with the universe and work down to the parts, I must have an understanding of it,’ that became a great drive for me,’’ he would later recall (R. Buckminster Fuller and Robert Snyder, R. Buckminster Fuller: An Autobiographical Monologue Scenario Documented and Edited by Robert Snyder [New York: St. Martin’s, 1980], 12). On the effects of his time in the Navy, Fuller later explained: ‘‘You see how by this comprehensive anticipatory way of looking at things and thinking about the total needs of total man, I came a few years later to invent the words, ‘Spaceship Earth.’ Because I began to think about the total planet as being as beautifully designed and equipped as a ship. How do you run it in such a way as to take care of everybody?’’ (ibid., 29).Fuller’s work is full of computational metaphors. He often argued that the computer was an imitation of the human mind. See, e.g., R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 112. In that same volume Fuller points to cybernetics and systems theory as key tools with which to solve the world’s problems (87).For a comprehensive and fascinating study of the role computers played in cold war psychology, and popular psychological discourse thereafter, see Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).Fuller, quoted in Fuller and Snyder, R. Buckminster Fuller, 38.Hugh Kenner, Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller (New York: Morrow, 1973), 290.Geof Bowker, ‘‘How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–1970,’’ Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 107–27; for a study of how these universal rhetorical strategies shaped the American counterculture see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).For a historiography of the, relationship between the New Left and other movements of the time see Douglas Rossinow, ‘‘The New Left in the Counterculture: Hypotheses and Evidence,’’ Radical History Review 67 (winter 1997): 79–120. See also Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968: The Great Refusal (New York: Praeger, 1982); and Douglas C. Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). For a broad overview of the era see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Toronto: Bantam, 1987).By New Communalists I mean all of those who saw the transformation of individual consciousness rather than agonistic politics as the key to forming new communities. At the time, many who held such beliefs, including the back-to-the-landers, saw themselves as members of a ‘‘counter culture.’’ Yet, in recent years, these beliefs have become entangled with drug use, sexual freedom, and hippie fashion under the same term. New Leftists, hippies, and communards have slowly begun to blur in our collective memory. By identifying the New Communalists as a separate subgroup within the social movements of the time, I hope to sharpen that historical picture.Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Cidture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 208.Ibid., 50.Ibid., 240.Hugh Gardner, The Children of Prosperity: Thirteen Modem American Communes (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978), 3. See also Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680–1880,2nd [rev.] ed. (New York: Dover, 1966).Gardner, The Children of Prosperity, 9. Gardner also cites a New York Times survey that identified approximately two thousand ‘‘permanent communal living arrangements of significant size’’ across thirty-four states in 1970. Gardner argues that this figure should be seen as very conservative, since it does not include ‘‘small, urban cooperatives and collectives’’ (8). See also Richard Fairfield, Communes U.SA. (San Francisco: Alternatives Foundation, 1971); William Hedgepeth, The Alternative: Communal Life in New America (New York: Macmillan, 1970); Robert Houriet, Getting Back Together (New York: Coward McCann and Geoghegan, 1971); Rosabeth Kanter, Commitment and Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Rosabeth Kanter, ed., Communes: Creating and Managing the Collective Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Peter Rabbit, Drop City (New York: Olympia Press, 1971).For a concise history of Drop City see Gardner, The Children of Prosperity, 35–48.Quoted in ibid., 42. In a strange countercultural echo of the American government’s cold war policy of dispersion, this gathering of domes was to be a prototype of an emerging world: ‘‘Soon domed cities will spread across the world, anywhere land is cheap—on the deserts, in the swamps, on mountains, tundras, ice caps. The tribes are moving, building completely free and open way stations, each a warm and beautiful conscious environment. We are winning’’ (Rabbit, quoted in ibid., 37).

19 Rabbit, Drop City, 31; quoted in Hedgepeth, The Alternative, 36.Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, ‘‘Dome Days: Buckminster Fuller in the Cold War,’’ in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, ed. Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), 167–92.Peggy [no surname], quoted in Hedgepeth, The Alternative, 153. For an incisive architectural analysis of the domes at Drop City see Simon Sadler, ‘‘Drop City Revisited,’’ Journal of Architectural Education 59, no. 3 (2006): 5–14.Stewart Brand, ‘‘Buckminster Fuller,’’ in The Last Whole Earth Catalog, ed. Stewart Brand (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1971), 3.Gardner, The Children of Prosperity, 46–47. Chapter 10

20 Research for this chapter was supported by a Research and Travel Grant, and a Humanities Center Grant, from the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. I would also like to thank Hsiao-Yun Chu and the staff of Special Collections at Stanford University’s Green Library for their kind assistance with the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection.

21 Gene Youngblood, ‘‘Earth Nova,’’ Los Angeles Free Press, April 3, 1970, 34. Binelli was described here as a ‘‘young Israeli architect who had worked with Bucky in Ghana, teaching natives to build geodesic domes. He’s now conducting a similar project with a group of street gangs in New York City.’’See R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Prevailing Conditions in the Arts,’’ in Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York: Bantam, 1969), 83–84.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘How It Came About (World Game)’’ (1969), repr. in R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, the Art of Design Science, ed. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (Baden: Lars Muller, 2001), 472; hereafter Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, the Art of Design Science is referenced as vol. 1 of YPS. ‘‘The world’s increasing confidence in electronic instrumentation,’’ he noted in another context, was ‘‘due to the demonstrated reliability of its gyrocompasses, and its ‘blind’ instrument landings of airplanes at night and in thick fog’’ (R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘The World Game: How to Make the World Work,’’ in Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity [New York: Bantam, 1969], 160).In a remarkable essay, Mark Wigley has traced Fuller’s World Game project to military sources. He notes, for instance, that in 1941 ‘‘Fuller was part of [a] secret team of artists, filmmakers, designers and architects (including John Ford, Raymond Loewy, Walter Teague, Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes, Louis Kahn, Bertrand Goldberg, Lewis Mumford, and Walt Disney) working for the Visual Presentation Branch of the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the predecessor of the CIA) to design a Presidential Situation Room that coordinates and efficiently presents ‘a panorama of concentrated information’ during war’’ (Mark Wigley, ‘‘Planetary Homeboy,’’ ANY magazine, no. 17 [Jan. 1997]: 16–23).Fuller, ‘‘How It Came About,’’ 473.Ibid.Fuller, ‘‘The World Game,’’ 161.Fuller also attributed his popularization in the 1960s to Marshall McLuhan. See Thomas Albright, ‘‘Genius Who Kept His Optimism,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 23, 1967,50, in R. Buckminster Fuller Collection, M1090:3:14, Stanford University Libraries (hereafter cited as Fuller MSS).For an extended discussion of this topic see Felicity D. Scott, Architecttire or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘What Quality of Environment Do We Want?’’ Archives of Environmental Health 16 (May 1968): 699.Fuller’s presence can also be traced throughout the pages of underground papers such as the San Francisco Oracle and East Village Other.‘‘Evidently, Buckminster Fuller thinks design and planning would resolve the problems that politics has left unsolved for centuries,’’ Maldonado noted, clarifying: ‘‘In other words, design and planning would be called in to substitute for politics, to abolish it and cancel it from history. ‘Politics,’ he says, ‘will become obsolete.’ It is not surprising, then, that he considers the ‘Revolution by Design’ to be exclusively an act of technical imagination: a position typical of technocratic utopianism’’ (Tomis Maldonado, Design, Nature and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology, trans. Mario Domandi [New York: Harper and Row, 1972], 29).Gene Youngblood, ‘‘World Game: Escape Velocity,’’ Los Angeles Free Press, May 15,1970,24.The videosphere, he posited, ‘‘makes visible all the thoughts of all humanity simultaneously all around the planet. Not that TV is doing this now, but I think all of us can see that it could’’ (Gene Youngblood, ‘‘World Game: Scenario for World Revolution,’’ Los Angeles Free Press, May 1,1970,42).Youngblood, ‘‘World Game: Escape Velocity,’’ 24.Youngblood, ‘‘Earth Nova,’’ 34. Fuller had been embraced in Britain earlier in the 1960s by architects like Archigram and the critic Reyner Banham. That this was Fuller’s first encounter with ‘‘anti-FulIer propaganda’’ seems, however, rather unlikely.Reproduced in The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in '68, ed. Marc Dessauce (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).Posters depicting Fuller with a geodesic brain were at once an allegory of the militaristic ideology informing his geodesic domes and a parody of his anthropomorphizing claims. ‘‘It is no aesthetic accident that Nature enclosed our brains and regenerative organics in compoundly curvilinear structures,’’ he earlier noted; ‘‘there are no cubical heads, eggs, nuts, or planets’’ (R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘The Age of the Dome,’’ Build International 2, no. 6 [July-Aug. 1968]: 14).Fuller, cited in Gene Youngblood, ‘‘World Game Part Two: The Ecological Revolution,’’ Los Angeles Free Press, April 10,1970,55.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Geosocial Revolution,’’ in Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York: Bantam, 1969), 177.See Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970).Youngblood, ‘‘World Game Part Two,’’ 55.Ibid.Ibid.Ibid.Ibid., 58.Ibid.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘How to Maintain Man as a Success in the Universe,’’ in Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York: Bantam, 1969), 248.Youngblood, ‘‘World Game,’’ 35.Youngblood, ‘‘World Game: Escape Velocity,’’ 24.Fuller, ‘‘How It Came About,’’ 473.Fuller, ‘‘The World Game: How to Make the World Work,’’ 157.See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).Ibid., 158.Carl Von Clausewitz, On War (1832), trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).See, e.g., Albright, ‘‘Genius Who Kept His Optimism,’’ 50.Fuller, ‘‘How It Came About,’’ 479.Fuller, ‘‘The World Game: How to Make the World Work,’’ 159.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Spaceship Earth—Fuller’s World View,’’ Daily Californian, Feb. 25,1969,9, Fuller MSS, M1090:3:15.See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).‘‘Clausewitz Updated,’’ repr. in The Movement Toward a New America, ed. Mitchell Goodman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 578.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘Invisible Future,’’ San Francisco Oracle, vol. 11,1967,21, Fuller MSS, M1090:2.Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion, 269.I am thinking here of the thesis of Jacques Rancidre:The essence of politics resides in the modes of dissensual subjectification that reveal the difference of a society to itself. The essence of consensus is not peaceful discussion and reasonable agreement as opposed to conflict or violence. Its essence is the annulment of dissensus as the separation of the sensible from itself, the annulment of surplus subjects, the reduction of the people to the sum of the parts of the social body, and of the political community to the relationship of interests and aspirations of these different parts. Consensus is the reduction of politics to the police. In other words, it is the ‘‘end of politics’’ and not the accomplishment of its ends but, simply, the return of the ‘‘normal’’ state of things which is that of politics’ non-existence. (Jacques Ranciire, ‘‘Ten Theses on Politics,’’ Theory and Event 5, no. 3 [2001]: http://muse.jhu.edU/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html [accessed Dec. 20,2008])

22 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 55.Ibid., 54.See Branden W. Joseph, ‘‘Hitchhiker in an Omni-Directional Transport: The Spatial Politics of John Cage and Buckminster Fuller,’’ ANY magazine, no. 17 (Jan. 1997): 40—44.See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964).See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 3.Gene Youngblood, ‘‘World Game,’’ Los Angeles Free Press, May 29,1970,34.Peter L. Douthit, ‘‘Drop City: A Report from the Energy Center,’’ Arts Magazine 41 (1967): 233.Letter from Drop City to R. Buckminster Fuller, Jan. 12,1967, in Fuller MSS, M1090:2:141. The letter was signed Peter L. Douthit, Burt Wachman, Gene Bernofcky, John Fudge, Joe Clower, John Ceul, Judy Douthit, Charles DiJulio, Carol DiJulio, JoAnn Bernofsky, Clark Richert, Richard Xallweit, and Jill Speed.John McHale to Peter L. Douthit, Nov. 9,1966, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:145.Douthit, ‘‘Drop City,’’ 49.Albin Wagner, ‘‘Drop City,’’ Avatar, Aug. 4–18,1967,7.Douthit, ‘‘Drop City,’’ 50.Wagner, ‘‘Drop City,’’ 7.Peter Rabbit, Drop City (New York: Olympia Press, 1971), 28–29.Baer’s Dome Cookbook was published by the Lama Foundation, a not-for-profit dome-building community in New Mexico, which would also later reprint Fuller’s 4D Time Lock of 1927. Baer’s manual was dedicated to the use of convex figures, in particular the family of polyhedrons known as zonahedra, cast as a contribution to architecture’s future outside the extant ‘‘military-industrial-educational complex.’’ Along with a main text addressing the geometric qualities of various polyhedra and their ability to interlock and close-pack, Dome Cookbook included handwritten notes offering feedback and secondary observations. A number were in critical, and somewhat paranoid, dialogue with Fuller. ‘‘Today you hear people who are said to be ahead of their time say ‘the world is a huge space ship,’ ’’ he wrote. The problem was that spaceships ‘‘are built by men but this planet was not.’’ To Baer such rhetoric simply represented an urge ‘‘to take over and completely control every variable of our environment—to in fact reform our planet into a giant space ship—living machine’’ (Steve Baer, Dome Cookbook [Coralles, NM: Lama Foundation/Cookbook Fund, 1968], 8).Lloyd Kahn Family to R. Buckminster Fuller, April 9, 1969, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:184. Fuller was in the Bay Area in November 1967 for a conference titled ‘‘Designing Environments for Expanding Awareness,’’ sponsored by the Esalen Institute at Big Sur. See Albright, ‘‘Genius Who Kept His Optimism,’’ 50.Domebook 1 (Los Gatos, CA: Pacific Domes, 1970), 3.All citations in this paragraph are from Kahn’s letter of April 9,1969.Dale Klaus to Lloyd Kahn, June 8,1970, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:203.Dale Klaus to Jay and Kathleen Baldwin, June 8, 1970, Fuller MSS, M1090:2:203.Lloyd Kahn, ed., Domebook 2 (Bolinas, CA: Pacific Domes, 1971), 65.Ibid., 64–65.Ibid.‘‘The Wonder of Jena,’’ in Shelter, ed. Lloyd Kahn (Bolinas, CA: Shelter Publications, 1973), 111.Lloyd Kahn, ‘‘Smart but Not Wise,’’ in Shelter, ed. Lloyd Kahn (Bolinas, CA: Shelter Publications, 1973), 113.Youngblood, ‘‘World Game: Escape Velocity,’’ 24.Youngblood, ‘‘World Game Part Two,’’ 55.Gene Youngblood, ‘‘Bucky in the Universe,’’ Los Angeles Free Press, June 5,1970,In this short article Youngblood stressed the importance of the collected essays published as Utopia or Oblivion. He also recounted a conversation with Fuller, noting that ‘‘I had never in my life felt so apocalyptic.’’ If Utopia or Oblivion served as a motivating force for this embrace of evolution through technology, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, also published in 1969, would serve as the movement’s manifesto. See R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969).Fuller, ‘‘Age of the Dome,’’ 7.Chapter 11

23 Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’ (1939), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–64. Although he attempted to position himself outside what he took to be the ideological impasse of the cold war, Fuller worked on a number of projects for the U.S. military during the 1950s and 1960s. Among these were the ‘‘radomes’’—geodesic domes designed by Fuller to house radar installations along the Defense Early Warning (DEW) Line near the Arctic Circle, which were part of the Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) continental air defense system.See Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free press, 1960); and Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973).Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1977), 9.Charles Jencks, Late-Modern Architecture and Other Essays (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 65.Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 305.Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 165–73.Jameson, Postmodernism, 51–52,415–17.Fredric Jameson, ‘‘The Politics of Utopia,’’ New Left Review 25 (Jan.-Feb. 2004): 50–51.Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 9–10.Ibid., 59.See Reinhold Martin, ‘‘Crystal Balls,’’ ANY magazine, no. 17 (Jan. 1997): 35–39.Ibid., 66.R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘‘World Game: How It Came About,’’ in 50 Years of the Design Science Revolution and the World Game (Carbondale: World Resources Inventory Southern Illinois University, 1969), 112.Ibid., 114.Ibid., 111.Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992), 21.Ibid., 34.R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 58–59.Just Gaming was the title given to a series of interviews between Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud on the subject of language games and justice. See Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich, afterword by Samuel Weber (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). In Lyotard’s terms to the degree that Fuller’s World Game would qualify as a language game, it would be an ‘‘impure’’ one in that it mixes descriptive/denotative and prescriptive statements, or technical statements made by ‘‘experts’’ and statements that prescribe a ‘‘just’’ (or in Fuller’s terms, a utopian) outcome based on these technical descriptions.Jameson, Postmodernism, 40.Ibid., 44.

24 This volume takes a fresh look at the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, the famed architect, designer, inventor, and futurist. Leading scholars from a variety of fields reconsider Fuller, on the basis of the 1,300-plus linear feet of material newly accessible in the Fuller Archive at Stanford, and offer an extensive account of his contributions. Instead of lauding Fuller as a prophet whose work foretold sustainable architecture and nanotechnology, or dismissing him as a ‘‘delirious technician’’ with a talent for linguistic obfuscation, New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller presents a more balanced picture of the man and his work than has previously been available.

25 By taking a broader historical view and discussing this self-made polymath in the context of larger social and cultural patterns, New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller provides a critical cultural history that shows Fuller to be both a participant in and a product of his times. This new contextual study is an important step toward filling the void of serious scholarship on one of the twentieth-century’s greatest minds.

26 Hsiao-Yun Chu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Industry at San Francisco State University. Prior to this position, she was Assistant Curator of the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection at Stanford University.

27 Roberto G. Trujillo is Head of Special Collections at the Stanford Library.

28

29 762793

30 o-aoMT-bavi-i ^c17fl-0-a0M7-bE7‘1–3 I 90000

31 ISBN-10:

32 ISBN-13:

33 780804

34 I

35 Fuller’s ideas about energy had great resonance during the oil shortages of the 1970s, when it seemed possible that the world had entered a long-term crisis and energy was a central topic in public debate.¹ With the price of gasoline

36