10 Success at Sixty

10  Success at Sixty

2The sudden recognition that came to Bucky as he approached his sixtieth birthday might have proved overwhelming for an ordinary man. Becoming wealthy almost overnight often makes it difficult for a man to keep his head.

3 But strangely enough, as the money rolled in faster and faster, it seemed to have less and less importance for Bucky. True, it was a relief to be able to settle all his old debts and to repay family and friends for help in the past. And it was nice to be able to say to Anne and Alle- gra, ‘‘Go into any store in the world and buy anything you want!’’ And he could see to it that the houses on Bear Island were fixed up and maintained regularly, so that the family could enjoy comfortable summers there.

4 But the most important thing now was that he could afford to travel anywhere in the world and talk to people about his ideas for providing man with all the benefits that could be derived from creative designing. In fact, he began to receive requests from universities, professional groups, and governments all over the world to come and speak and teach.

5 By 1959, more than a hundred companies had been licensed to manufacture geodesic domes. Some of these were ‘‘plydomes,’’ made of bent pieces of plywood and used as playhouses in parks and playgrounds. Others were huge affairs, costing as much as two hundred thousand dollars each. The Union Tank Car Company built and installed such a dome, three hundred and eighty-four feet across, at Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This dome, which could accommodate an entire football field and stadium, was large enough for whole trainlengths of railroad cars that needed rebuilding. A similar dome was built at Woods River, Illinois. There was a geodesic dome over the Anheuser-Busch Park aviary in Tampa, Florida, and another over that dolphin playground, the Seaquarium, at Miami. In a Cape Cod restaurant, delicious seafood was served up under one of Bucky’s domes. And in St. Louis, Missouri, a paradise of tropical foliage and flowers began to flourish in a temperature and humidity controlled atmosphere under a great aluminum and plastic dome called the Climatron. In addition to designing and consulting fees, Bucky’s corporations received five per cent of the sales price of every dome made by a licensed manufacturer.

6 Airline stewardesses all over the world began to recognize the chunky man with the thick glasses who seemed to be going from one country to another throughout the year. No matter how long the flight, his temper was always even and his smile pleasant. He traveled several thousand miles in a jet as calmly as other men might drive down to the corner drugstore.

7 The message that Bucky brought to the universities he visited and to the students whom he addressed was always about the part they would play in the future of man’s existence on earth. He warned against overspecialization —that was the path to doom for mankind. Look at the different biological species that had disappeared from the face of the earth. Look at the human tribes that had become extinct. They had grown overspecialized, each in its own way —and could not adapt to sudden change.

8 This was precisely what Bucky’s business was —being ready for change before it came. His name for this activity was comprehensive anticipatory design science. But politicians and industrialists had no interest in this kind of science. They cared little about the ecology of man, that is, about the balance between man and his natural surroundings. Look at the atmospheric pollution in the cities. Witness the wholesale destruction of forests and the indiscriminate use of insecticides. These were the results of specialization. Corporations were interested in specialization, because specialization provided them with a means of making money. Over and over, Bucky told his audiences:

9 ‘‘No scientist has ever been retained, or hired professionally, to consider the scientific design of the home of man, to consider objectively the ecological pattern of man, to design ways of employing the highest scientific potential towards helping man to be a success on earth, to implement total man to enjoy total earth. No scientist has ever been retained to do such a task. And we speak of our age as the age of science!’’

10 It had taken the world almost thirty years to catch up to Buckminster Fuller. Now, it seemed as though the world could not get its fill of him. He spoke at Capetown University in South Africa and at the Collegio degli Architect! (College of Architecture) in Milan, Italy. He visited England and Australia, Israel and Japan. Some of his domes were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. His honorary degrees, awarded at university and college graduations, began to pile up: Doctor of Design from North Carolina University, Doctor of Arts from the University of Michigan, Doctor of Science from Washington University. And all these for a man who had never completed his freshman year in college.

11 In 1959 he accepted an invitation from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, to become Research Professor of Design Science. His life’s work had finally been recognized as a valid field of academic research.

12 He designed and built a beautiful blue and white geodesic dome house for himself and Anne. Allegra, already grown up and graduated from college, had married and lived in California. The University made few demands on Bucky’s time; the president felt it was an honor just to have Bucky associated with them. He was able to adjust his life to a kind of steady pattern —two months or so in Carbondale, and the rest of the year traveling and working. He and Anne managed to be with Allegra at Christmas time; they usually saw the rest of the family during the summer. August became the ‘‘Bear Island month.’’ There, with no telephone, Bucky could cut himself off from the world and relax completely.

13 The Carbondale house was always open to his many good friends. Whenever company came, he was still the gay Bucky of the old Greenwich Village days. He could always be prevailed upon to sing one or more of the funny parodies he wrote about domes and architects. To the tune of ‘‘Home on the Range,’’ he would sing:

14 Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring

15 Rich clients in hordes to their knees;

16 Just give me a home in a great circle dome

17 Where the stresses and strains are at ease . . .

18 His energy amazed everyone who met him. A two- hour lecture, once begun, could easily go on for four or more hours. After-dinner conversation might finally end at three o’clock in the morning. This did not mean that he was simply a man who loved to hear the sound of his own voice. Bucky’s marathon talking was really his way of thinking out loud. Once he began to speak, he never really knew when he would come up with some new idea during any lecture or conversation. It was difficult for older listeners without his superb stamina to keep up with him; young students seemed to be able to listen forever.

19 In 1960, the American Institute of Architects finally gave in. They conceded that R. Buckminster Fuller was worthy of recognition and made him an honorary life member. Of course, this was not the same as being a professional architect. In order to be able to submit legal contracts to dome licensees, Bucky had to take on a partner who was a registered architect. Only such a person could sign the contracts. He chose a brilliant young architect named Shoji Sadao and installed him in an office near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

20 Most older architects still found it difficult to accept Bucky. When asked, they would often reply that it was true Bucky was a man of genius, a great inventor, a fine engineer, ‘‘but he’s not an architect, you know!’’

21 On the other hand, Bucky was not afraid to tell young students of architecture what he thought was wrong with the profession. The architect, he pointed out, had sold himself down the river to the people who were making fortunes developing real estate. These operators hired architects, told them what kinds of houses to design, what materials were to be used, and where the materials would be purchased. The architect really designed nothing and originated nothing. He was just a slave to the real estate business.

22 What a young architect needed to know, Bucky said to his audience, was more than drawing, more than architecture. He had to go into airplane factories and learn about production engineering and tools and metal alloys. An architect without an understanding of the most advanced technology was a useless architect. For example, Bucky felt that chemistry was far more important to the architect than advanced mathematics; yet at most schools of architecture students often had little or no chemistry and three or four years of the calculus. But in chemistry was where you learned the rules by which nature structured materials, the materials that architects would be using in their work.

23 Architects, argued Bucky, had to become the opposite of specialists. The specialist took things apart; the architect put things together. He was a comprehensive person. It was up to the architect to help keep the world from falling apart. But before he could do that, the teaching of architecture in the schools would have to change. Architecture would have to be taught as an important part of comprehensive anticipatory design science.

24 Bucky had a favorite way of describing the state of the civilized world. There were two major divisions of man’s activity: weaponry and livingry. Major scientific advances had always been made in the name of weaponry. Thus, the armies of the world were equipped with costly electronic equipment for warning, destroying, and killing. But in the cities of the world, millions of people were still living in horrible slums. The peaceful arts that were concerned with improving man’s shelter and wellbeing were low-priority arts, compared with the high priority of weaponry. So livingry was an underdeveloped area. Progress in livingry was made only in a kind of accidental way, as a by-product of the rapid technical advances made by weaponry. Perhaps this was one reason that engineers and scientists had lost communication with the people in literature and the fine arts.

25 ‘‘If you gain the lead in the world’s design science,’’ Bucky would tell his young audience, ‘‘and apply it to livingry, then there is hope. But you don’t have much time. The weaponry industry is ready to invade the livingry field. If that happens, a dreadful fate awaits humanity. Man will become totally godless, and his life will be governed by decisions turned out by a computer. You the teachers, and you the students, are man’s hope.’’

26 In 1963, when he was sixty-eight years old, Bucky received what many Americans considered a great recognition. His picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

27 Each year brought Bucky success piled on success. By 1966, more than five thousand domes had been installed in fifty countries. He now had acquired one hundred and forty-five patents, not only in America, but in fifty-five other countries. He had lectured and taught at two hundred universities and colleges in thirty countries.

28 His weekly program during the year was packed with detail. A typical section of the schedule looked something like this:

54

55Third Delos Symposium, Athens, Greece.

56 Sunday, July 11:

57 Saturday, July 17:

58 August, all month:

59

60Return to New York and Carbondale.

61Bear Island. No communication, except by mail.

62 Though Bucky’s physical energy seemed endless, time did begin to take its toll. His hearing began to fail. But since he was Bucky Fuller, it did not fail in th.e ordinary way; that is, he did not just become more and more deaf. He simply began to hear some sounds less well than others. He tried hearing aids, but they only served to amplify all sound equally, and that was annoying. He found it most difficult to hear general conversation at a dinner party, where many people would be talking in different directions at once. All the sounds seemed to blend into a kind of ball of noise that made his head ache.

63 Eventually, he discovered an electronic device that helped. It was a large bullhorn that was a kind of directional antenna receiver and a loudspeaker combined. He could use it to make himself heard, or to catch specific sounds by pointing the horn in the proper direction. The bullhorn came in handy at conferences; before he got it, Bucky used to have to ask everyone to repeat what was being said. His eyes, of course, remained as bad as always. Because of them, he could never drive a car.

64 One of the interesting aspects of the geodesic dome was that as you made the dome larger and larger, the distances between vertices became smaller and smaller until the tetrahedral triangles virtually disappeared. You might say that in a dome of infinite size, the dome became virtually invisible.

65 This gave Bucky the idea of using a dome to cover an entire city. It was not a dream, but a possible actuality. He visualized a dome, two miles in diameter, covering part of the island of Manhattan in New York. A mile high, this dome would arch far above the Empire State Building. Bucky calculated the weight of this city covering at eighty thousand tons, to be assembled by helicopters in five-ton sections. The estimated cost was two hundred million dollars, not much money compared to what was being spent in the United States on weaponry.

66 Natural laws would provide a movement of air within the dome. The shell itself would be so strong that people could live in it, as well as under it. And since the network of such a large dome would be made of very small triangles, virtually a fine wire mesh, dwellers under the dome would see the sun in the day and the stars at night. What advantages would there be to living under the dome? No air pollution, no individual air-conditioners, no snow removal, no umbrellas, no colds.

67 Another of his plans was a home dome called ‘‘The Garden of Eden.’’ This was a dome within a dome, with the inside dome covered by a transparent skin. Vines planted around the outside dome perimeter would climb up along the geodesic lines. A dweller in this house would see the sunlight streaming in through the green vine leaves. But the heat and bad weather would be kept out by the plastic skin. In fact, grooves could be made in the skin to capture the rain; this water could be diverted to water the vines, or even to fill a swimming pool.

68 The geodesic dome could give man the best chance to survive in his natural environment. But of course, Bucky saw that the major problem here was getting man to realize this. It was much easier to design a dome than to get men on earth to work together for their mutual happiness and prosperity.

69 One of the conferences Bucky was invited to attend was the Fourth Dartmouth Conference (so called, because the first was held at Dartmouth College) in the city of Leningrad in the Soviet Union. These conferences were actually a series of meetings between prominent American and Soviet citizens, and their purpose was to provide some kind of exchange of ideas and understandings between the two countries. Among those who attended were authors, scientists, businessmen, physicians, and other top men in different fields. They talked mostly about problems that were common to both countries, and how such problems could best be solved. The effect of belonging to two countries, each with a different system of government, showed up at once.

70 The Russians kept insisting that they had one advantage over the Americans in solving national problems. ‘‘We have a singleness of purpose in Russia. In America, everyone competes against everyone else; so the good effects cancel each other out.’’ The Russian delegates really believed this, and the Americans found it difficult to prove that it was not so. The atmosphere of the meetings tended to grow cool and overpolite.

71 Bucky was given a whole afternoon in which to answer the Russian argument. As usual, he did not prepare a speech, but got up and began to think out loud on his feet. His first words shocked the Russians, for he said, ‘‘I don’t know why I’m talking to you here, because you’re all so ignorant!’’

72 Then, before they could really feel insulted and walk out, he continued, ‘‘Many of you think of yourselves as scientists. But you go on a picnic with your families, and you see a lovely sunset, and you really see the sun setting! Now you have all had four hundred years to face up to the fact that the sun isn’t setting at all —we learned that from Copernicus and Galileo —but that the sun is standing still, and the earth is rotating. I can make a model of the earth and paste a standing man on it, and in a few minutes I can convince any child that as the earth rotates, the man’s shadow gets longer and longer, until the man is completely in the shadow. And that child will always think of what he sees in those terms.

73 ‘‘But you scientists still see the sun setting! What’s worse, you talk about things being ‘‘down’’ or ‘‘up,’’ when you really mean ‘‘in’’ or ‘‘out’’ in space. And you say that the wind is blowing from some direction —say, the northwest —when that isn’t so at all. The real thing that’s happening is that there is a low pressure area in the southeast, and the air is being sucked into that. So why don’t you say that the wind is sucking southeast, which is the truth?’’

74 By this time, the Russians had gotten the point, and they were shouting with laughter. Bucky had succeeded in breaking the ice. The rest of the meeting was carried on in an atmosphere of friendship. But he had not finished making his entire point.

75 ‘‘Young people are always asking me what it is like to be on a spaceship, and I always reply, ‘You know what it feels like, you tell me!’ Because we are living on a spaceship called the earth, a very small spaceship only eight thousand miles across. We’ve been living on it for a couple of million years. And the ecology of this spaceship is beautifully balanced, so that we can go on this way for a long, long time. The plants give up gases that are needed by mammals, and the mammals exhale gases that are needed by the plants.

76 ‘‘The bees are only interested in honey, and they go after it. And quite by accident they knock the pollen off with their little tails, and that fertilizes the flowers. Now, in the United States, we are all bees, and we are all really after our own honey, and quite by accident we knock off a lot of pollen, and so, quite by accident, we make a lot of contributions.’’

77 The Russians laughed again, and admitted that their argument about singleness of purpose might have been rather foolish. The solutions to man’s important problems would come about quite independent of a single nation’s politics.

78 Bucky went on to say what he really wanted to say to the Russians. Man had finally begun to know enough about his surroundings, his universe, so that he could actually begin to participate, instead of being an innocent victim of his own evolutionary changes. And this was no laughing matter.

79 ‘‘From now on, gentlemen,’’ Bucky said, ‘‘man has to be very responsible in all of his actions, or the show isn’t going to work.’’

80 He was not only speaking to the Russians. He was speaking to the world.