![]() ![]() It had a teardrop shape mounted on a triangular frame to cut wind resistance, featured three wheels (the rear one was used for steering), and a rear-mounted motor. For example, the Dymaxion car from the early 1930s was radical. The Almighty told him: “You think the truth.” He needn’t seek the assent of others.įor the next 60 years, Fuller followed his own star, and a persistent pattern emerges: a grand idea consumes him, which never quite translates into something lasting. What then happened he later described as a “blinding revelation.” God spoke to him: He didn’t have the right to eliminate himself, he belonged to the universe his significance would be fulfilled if he converted his talents to the advantage of others. Suicide crossed his mind as he wandered along the shore of Lake Michigan one late-November evening, contemplating God and his own existence. He took long walks around the city, thinking about his limited options. Essentially unemployed and with a family to support, he was hitting the bottle, heavily. By November, Fuller was no longer with Stockade. ![]() Soon after, his daughter Allegra was born. Newly settled, before the end of August Fuller was out as manager of Stockade Midwest, a fact he concealed from his wife. In August 1927, Fuller moved to Chicago with his wife, Anne, pregnant with their second daughter (an earlier child, Alexandra, died of pneumonia in 1922). Fuller seems to have had some kind of nervous breakdown when he was 32 during a period of job instability he had resigned as head of the Stockade Midwest Building Company, having previously stepped down as president of the parent company, Stockade Building Systems, a prefab building technology company he founded in 1923 with his father-in-law. The Bucky invention project starts in earnest in the late 1920s. Over the next half-dozen years, he works a variety of jobs, mostly in manufacturing. He gets married, attends and graduates from the Naval Academy, and sees action as an ensign. ![]() At this point he moved to New York, worked various odd jobs, had a weakness for cocktails and chorus girls, and ultimately joined a military camp in upstate New York, in anticipation of America’s entry into World War I. Readmitted, he bombed academically, and was asked to withdraw. A temporary stint working in a cotton mill propelled him to give Harvard another try. Insubordinate in school, he was admitted to Harvard as a legacy, partied hearty, and was kicked out by his second semester. Fuller didn’t clearly see his parents’ faces until fitted with glasses at age four. Born cross-eyed and farsighted, things within his grasp were essentially invisible. He was born in 1895 into a New England patrician family, the grand nephew of Margaret Fuller (an early feminist, women’s rights advocate, critic, writer, and Transcendentalist). But the Fuller that emerges from Nevala-Lee is also a control freak, given to exaggeration, who loathes sharing credit, exploits students as free labor, and is often petty, vindictive, and cruel. Bucky was inspirational (hippies followed his lead to create Drop City), inscrutable (an editor of one of his many books complained it wasn’t written in English), prodigious (lectures went on for three or more hours I sat through one), and prolific (he held nearly 30 patents and produced a comparable number of books). Books), tells a nuanced story of the man known for geodesic domes space frames “Spaceship Earth” the Dymaxion map, house, and car and concepts such as tensegrity, synergy, and “ephemeralization” (“doing everything with nothing at all,” as he described it).īut Fuller’s most substantial, complex invention was Bucky himself, a project that Nevala-Lee covers-in often unflattering ways-over the course of Fuller’s long life. Historian and writer Alec Nevala-Lee’s 2022 biography, aptly titled Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller (Dey St. But “inventor” is probably the most accurate description. He’s variously described as a “systems thinker,” perhaps the first “futurist,” a visionary, engineer, geometer, and architect (he won the AIA Gold Medal in 1970). Born in the last decade of the 19th century, Fuller lived long enough to hang out with Steve Jobs. Buckminster Fuller primarily through his oeuvre of iconic objects and ideas created over the arc of a nearly 90-year life. ![]()
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