Happy 115th, Mr Fuller!

filthy light thief — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:17:43 -0800

When he was 32, his life seemed hopeless. He was bankrupt and without a job. He was grief stricken over the death of his first child and he had a wife and a newborn to support. Drinking heavily, he contemplated suicide. Instead, he decided decided that his life was not his to throw away: it belonged to the universe. Buckminster Fuller embarked on "an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity." If the architect, author, designer, inventor, and futurist Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller were still alive, he would be 115 years old today. Though he died in 1983, his legacy grows on through recordings of his ideas and the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Bucky did not arise from nothing on his 32nd birthday, but came from a long line of New England Nonconformists, including his great-aunt Margaret Fuller, an American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement, who is credited with writing the first major feminist work in the United States. In 1917 Fuller married Anne Hewlett, daughter of James Monroe Hewlett, an architect who had created a modular compressed fiber-block building material. Fuller himself supervised the erection of several hundred houses, but the construction company encountered financial difficulties in 1927 and Fuller was forced out. With the earlier death of his daughter in 1922, and now faced with caring for his wife and a newborn child, It was then that Buckminster Fuller set a goal of making a difference in the world at large. Though he had no official degree (he entered Harvard on a legacy, but was expelled twice - the first time for consorting with a dance troupe), Bucky started designing systems to address real-world needs and demands with the minimum amount of resources, often in very unconventional ways. One series of efforts started in 1927, with the design of the Dymaxion house. Dymaxion was a combination of three of Bucky's favorite words: DY (dynamic), MAX (maximum), and ION (tension). The first (and only) model was built until 1946, in Wichita, Kansas. It was supposed to cost about $6,500 in 1946, approximately the cost of a high-end automobile. Though it survived a near-miss with a tornado in 1964, the home was later abandoned. It was taken apart in 1992 and over the next eight years, Henry Ford Museum staff researched the house, and cleaned and restored its 3,000 components. On October 24, 2001, the restoration complete and the Dymaxion House was opened to the public. The Dymaxion line of creations also includes the Dymaxion map and the Dymaxion car (wobbly YT video, featuring Amelia Earhart amongst others). The Dymaxion map was called the Air-Ocean World by Fuller, based on an early effort to optimize air travel based on small connecting flights instead of long trips. The resulting map was a fairly accurate representation of the world, though the earlier Bernard J.S. Cahill butterfly map is considered more accurate. The Dymaxion car was another brainchild of 1927 that was refined for years. Three cars were produced, though only one is known to remain. One was ill-fated, surviving a fatal accident and being restored, only to be accidentally destroyed in a fire, and a second is lost and considered scrapped. Other items from Fuller with the Dymaxion name include his polyphasic sleep schedule, which he called Dymaxion sleep, as detailed in this 1943 Time magazine article, and the compendium of Fuller's lifetime of work, notes and associated recordings that is known as the Dymaxion Chronofile. In one of his last (lengthy, thought-provoking) public writings, Bucky noted that the "Chronofile" consisted of 750 12" x 10" x 5" volumes in 1981. Originally the Fuller Archives were curated by the Buckminster Fuller Institution, and in 1999 the Fuller archives were transferred to the Stanford University Libraries, where they are housed today. There is a lot of material online, including some fantastic audio, and though it is freely accessible, it requires you sign up for a password. If you're looking for more material, check the Buckminster Fuller Virtual Institute. Warning: heavy use of dated HTML, but the bibliography and itinerary is worth checking out. Bucky Fuller was not only a scientific mind, but also an artistic one. He is cited as a vague or possibly indirect influence on Warhol, through his painting of Romany Marie's restaurant with shiny aluminum paint. That act inspired Isamu Noguchi (seen here in a Dymanxion car, next to Dorothy Hale) to paint his own studio silver, before Warhol's Factory space turned silver.

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Happy 115th, Mr Fuller!