R. Buckminster Fuller is a name you don’t forget in a hurry. Born in 1895, the architect-inventor became the unlikeliest figure in the counterculture of the 1960s.
Expelled from Harvard – twice – he always carried a green plastic ear trumpet with the words WORLD SERIES 1965 printed on it and wore three watches, each set to a different time zone.
At school, I gave up Maths and Physics at the first opportunity but I still recall R. Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes made of tetrahedrons. Back then, Bucky seemed like an ancient relic to me. But there’s an idea of his that I just can’t get out of my head. He said, “The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: it came without an instruction manual.”
Today, our spaceship lurches dangerously out of control with record heatwaves across four continents, droughts throughout the South, even wildfires in the Arctic Circle. Bucky saw it coming but he was no gloomster. His advice was to operate on ‘the vast daily energy income’ provided to us by the sun, wind and tide, and to keep fossil fuels as our ‘savings account’. It was simply a case of doing more with less. We should stop wasting money on weaponry, and start using our technology for what he called ‘livingry’.
Declaring himself to be ‘A Verb’, Bucky began to document his entire life as a scientific experiment. He invented floating cities, flying cars and lightweight pre-fabricated skyscrapers that could be airlifted and dropped into bomb craters, like planting trees. His utopian architecture influenced The Gherkin and quite possibly the Teletubby House.
Maybe these ideas came 100 years too early? That’s the trouble with being a Futurist.
Back here on Spaceship Earth, we’re belatedly attempting a course correction. A report by the International Energy Agency says the reduction in carbon emissions we need to make by 2030 can be achieved by technologies already in production. If Buckminster had been alive today, he would certainly have been excited by these innovations: new wind turbines flown like kites half a mile in the sky; powerup pavements that capture kinetic energy whenever people walk over them; sharkskin for planes to reduce drag; and, straight out of the Bucky playbook, 3D printed houses made from corn starch bioplastics.
When I rediscovered R. Buckminster Fuller, the thing that struck me most was his tone of voice. Sounding like Uncle Willie in the movie High Society he improvised a kind of future speak which included made-up terms like ‘omniselfregenerative’. His Thinking Out Loud lectures, delivered breathlessly and at pace with bewildering detours, could last as long as six hours.
Yet, in the great soup of disorder, he saw elegant mathematical patterns. Do more with less, Bucky said, and make the world work better for everyone. He was convinced we have the potential for transformation: “There’s nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” At a time when we’re reassessing our planet’s trajectory, we could all use his optimism.
So, I commend to you: R. Buckminster Fuller. Tip: if I were you, I wouldn’t start with his 56-year memoir, The Dymaxion Chronicle, or his 42-hour archive entitled Everything I Know.
With thanks to The Future Today Institute, BBC Horizon, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guardian, C J Fearnley and of course R. Buckminster Fuller: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
