Buckminster Fuller

He demanded you ask yourself “how big can I think?” Meanwhile he was only 5 foot 1, cross-eyed, with one leg shorter than the other, was latterly deaf, and declared himself of “low-average” intelligence.

If we do more with less, our resources are adequate to take care of everybody. All political systems are founded on the premise the opposite is true.’ So began Bucky in his interview with Playboy in 1972. As usual it runs to many pages, but the kernel is right there. So, in telling us that we were running spaceship earth backwards, was he right? (...)

Bucky’s critique of specialisation was not intended to deny our talents as top darts players or pole dancers; blinkered mediocrity is better understood by avaricious bankers, politicians and ambitious academics; the first being a business we should have grown out of, the second a phoney diversion and the third a contradiction in terms. To avoid oblivion man would improve his thinking, abandoning stooge-like religion, treasure, art, culture and much else besides. Sunrise and sunset would be replaced by ‘sunsight’ and ‘suneclipse’ and even ‘up’ and ‘down’ were controversial.

Firmly believing a home was not a house (and perhaps not in homes at all) and with declarations such as: ‘If humans pass their cosmic exam as local Universe problem solvers and continue on the planet in to the twenty-first century, there will be no thoughts whatsoever of earning a living. There will be no thought of, or even such words as business competition, money or lies for such phenomena will be historically extinct’, Bucky became popular with the more adventurous hippies.

However, he was simultaneously wildly unpopular with the more politicised strain, those who saw him as a capitalist provider of military ordinance to Vietnam. Bucky said he had never designed the domes with military purpose in mind, but it certainly helped to pay the bills. (...)

Academics are shy of him. As Leonardo da Vinci crossed with Charles Lindbergh, Bucky attracts enthusiasts, romantic technocrats and children. But at least in a frontier-prone era of burgeoning futurians, Bucky was almost unique in saying that if we took to his synergetics seriously we would not end up mining rocks for food or seeing out our days on Aldebaran II. (...)

The Architectural Review