Buckminster Fuller
Yesterday Bonnie DeVarco gave a talk on Buckminster Fuller at the monthly meeting of the EOE.
Bucky Fuller! His name brings back a flood of memories, among them: The domes, of course. And buckyballs. And dymaxion houses. The dymaxion car. The globe without Mercatur's distortions. Five-hour lectures that people might understand a few days later. Spaceship earth.
In the sixties, Bucky was sufficiently renegade, eccentric, visionary and out of the mainstream that you had to read him.
For six years, Bonnie administered the Buckminister Fuller Archive, so she certainly knows the material. See, for example, her Invisible Architecture, The Nanoworld of Buckminster Fuller. Bonnie treated us to a concentrated dose of Bucky. Here are some tidbits:
- Characterizations of the man
Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th Century
Poet of Industrialization
Engineer Saint
Anti-academician
“I Seem to be a Verb”
I am a random element.
I am a comprehensive anticipatory design scientist.
His thinking
Micro-incisive and macro-inclusive
Nothing is static; everything is dynamic
The importance of charting trends
Being comprehensive rather than general
The importance of thinking out loud
The importance of INTUITION
Dare to be naïve
Among his paradigms
Newtonian to Einsteinian universe
Wired to wireless
Ephemeralization of information
Accelerating acceleration
Bucky's 1932 conning tower concept described what we today know as the web, an amazing vision for the man who pointed out that "When I was born in 1895, reality was everything you could see, smell, touch and hear. The world was thought to be absolutely self-evident. When I was three years old, the electron was discovered. That was the first invisible. It didn't get in any of the newspapers; (nobody thought that would be important!) Today 99.99% of everything that affects our lives cannot be detected by the human senses. We live in a world of invisibles."
The Dymaxion Map
Buckminster Fuller Institute
The R. Buckminster Fuller FAQ
Synergetics (full text). Synergetics = The study of the coordinates of Universe -- the Geometry of Thought.
A Fuller Explanation. The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller
To play with a phrase from HP (remember them?), if Jay only knew what Jay once knew.
Until Bonnie's talk, I hadn't thought about Buckminster Fuller for twenty years. Now I've forgotten many of his lessons I didn't have a use for when I read them. Where's my lifeblog when I need it?
Posted by Jay Cross at January 9, 2003 07:44 PM | TrackBack
