1 Introductory Note
2In 1968 Buckminster Fuller was awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, yet he is not an architect nor, contrary to a widely held view, a geodesic dome salesman. In the last forty years he has been making news as an aviator, inventor, engineer, cartographer, scientist, mathematician, poet and philosopher. When asked to define his activity Fuller replies: ‘I’ve been engaged in what I call comprehensive anticipatory design science.’ His friend, author Christopher Morley, described him as ‘a scientific idealist, whose innovations proceed not just from technical dexterity but from an organic vision of life’.
3 This volume of his writings begins with a chronological inventory and a number of autobiographical items and is followed by a chronological sequence selected from his writing between 1942 and 1963. This case history of a man on ‘Spaceship Earth’ in the twentieth century concentrates on the development of the concepts and strategies that are ‘reduced to practice’ in his structures and inventions.
4 The items in this volume drawn from a twenty-year period vary both in vocabulary and style; in many cases, ideas in the early essays are developed further in those which were written later. The items were chosen both to explore this development and to exploit the concept of ‘useful redundancy’.
5 In his writings on education, strongly influenced by A. N. Whitehead, Fuller has constantly drawn attention to the dangers of over-specialization: the situation in which specialists are unable to communicate with each other and the task of integrating their work is left largely to their intellectual inferiors. In the present crisis in education Fuller’s own strategy of constantly monitoring the relationship between the particular and the whole deserves close examination.
6 The reader, hampered by his own experiences in an over-specialized system of education, may find the wide-ranging inter-disciplinary explorations disconcerting. However, he is urged to persist, for Fuller’s world-around lecture tours, the source of much of the material in this volume, are extraordinary demonstrations of his ability to overcome, in a few hours, the barriers between cultures, between generations and between specialists.
7 July 1969
8 JAMES MELLER