Richard Buckminster Fuller

MOST GREAT inventors and innovators have left us with at least one signature creation in common usage. Yet one of the most fabled, Buckminster Fuller, left us with lots of creations and ideas but nothing that became ubiquitous, nothing that directly changed our lives. Between his exalted reputation and his rare successes lies the true measure of his legacy. Marshall McLuhan described him as “the Leonardo da Vinci of our time”, but perhaps the New Yorker was closer to the truth a few years ago when it asked, “Was [Fuller] an important cultural figure because he produced inventions of practical value or because he didn’t?”

Richard Buckminster Fuller is one of those enigmatic polymaths who defies easy categorisation. He was a designer, architect, entrepreneur, lecturer, philosopher and inventor. His work was not so much interdisciplinary as supra-disciplinary, floating at some point above the intersection of science and pure imagination. Above all, he was a fabulist, a great inventor of ideas, if not of things.

“Bucky” was born in 1895, the scion of a venerable New England family. His great aunt Margaret Fuller was a noted transcendentalist, friend of writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, and a pioneering journalist. He was expelled from Harvard twice for unbecoming conduct, and he took relatively menial jobs for a few years before joining the US navy in time to take part in the first World War.

His early attempts at business – manufacturing lightweight building materials out of wood shavings – floundered, despite it being “the roaring twenties”. By 1927, impoverished and with a wife and young child to support, he was depressed and contemplating suicide. It was at this point Fuller claims he experienced an epiphany, a moment of clarity in which he saw his role was to embark on a lifelong experiment, with the aim of determining what one person could do for “all of humanity”.

Making an impact on society would come about through imagining a better future and putting his ideas into practice. One reason for Fuller’s enduring appeal is the sci-fi leanings of his ideas and creations, and the fantastical nature of the language he used to describe them. The central premise of his theories was “ephemeralization”, which meant doing more and more with less and less. He coined the word synergetics to describe “a system of mensuration employing 60-degree vectorial coordination comprehensive to both physics and chemistry, and to both arithmetic and geometry, in rational whole numbers”.

Fittingly enough, given his unwieldy name, his idiosyncratic vocabulary was full of multisyllabic neologisms, his writing occasionally resembling an early Star Trek script. He described himself as a comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist or a comprehensivist. He consistently described this planet as Spaceship Earth, a vessel that carries us through space. His flair for futuristic nomenclature was best evidenced in his use of the word “Dymaxion”, which was coined by marketer Waldo Warren, a conflation of “Dynamic maximum ion”, itself a nonsensical phrase

It became a kind of personal branding that Fuller used on many projects such as his breakthrough success in 1929, the revolutionary Dymaxion house, a circular steel dwelling suspended from a central mast and full of the latest technological innovations.

The idea of lightweight, affordable and easily manufactured housing was to remain a priority of Fuller’s for many years, but after the end of the second World War, production had still not commenced, and eventually only one prototype was made, which now rests in the Henry Ford Museum in Illinois.

Another futuristic design was the Dymaxion car, an innovative three-wheeled vehicle that looked like something from The Jetsons, all tear-drop aerodynamics and shiny metal finish. It generated a lot of hype, but one of the prototypes was involved in a fatal collision outside the Chicago World Fair in 1933, and the design never went into production.

Fuller’s fantastical visions for the future had a lot in common with the Utopian ideals exhibited at the world fairs and expositions of the time; they were an antidote to the grim reality of conflict and strife. But Fuller was to find a refuge of sorts in a series of teaching positions, most notably his time at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he mixed with composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham and artists Willem and Elaine de Kooning.

It was there he began to develop his most celebrated creation, the geodesic dome, a lattice-shell structure derived from his geometric investigations. The aim was to develop the largest possible structure with the least possible use of materials and at the lowest cost. The most famous example of a “Buckydome” was the US pavilion at Expo ‘67 in Montreal, a bubble that was at once imposing and ephemeral.

The dome was Fuller’s most lucrative invention but, while thousands were built, their limitations became obvious. They leaked, were hard to heat, created loud echoes and left a lot of unused space higher up in the dome.

Fuller imagined a dome covering central Manhattan, with spheres housing communities floating in the clouds, and countless other feats of imagination that stretched reality past breaking point.

His most successful project was arguably the Dymaxion Chronofile, an exhaustive record of his own life that grew to more than 200,000 pages and weighed 45 tons. After studying the Chronofile, some Fuller scholars suggested his suicidal thoughts and subsequent epiphany had been yet another invention, a successful attempt at self-mythologising. Whether that is accurate or not, it bolsters the theory that Fuller’s greatest, most enduring creation was himself, and the very idea of Buckminster Fuller is his greatest legacy.