From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Everybody concerned about the planet should read this book. It fully illustrates that a great man walked among us." -- Larry King, talk show host & author
"Lloyd Sieden's interpretations of Fuller's creative genius should greatly enhance public acknowledgement of the intellectual wisdom of this diminutive giant." -- Dr. Buzz Aldrin, former astronaut & author
"Sieden probes beyond Fuller's famous inventions to offer a unique psychological perspective on the roots of his successes and failures." -- Amory B. Lovins, Director of Research, Rocky Mountain Institute
"Sieden's biography is a tribute to a great man." -- Marilyn Ferguson, author The Aquarian Conspiracy
"This is a very necessary and useful book. It is not written in Fuller's language. You will understand it." -- John Cage
...lays out the saga of one of the great minds of the 20th century... his complicated ideas come into focus. -- Timothy Willard, Former Editor, The Futurist
“A well-painted portrait of a genius who had as many angles as his Geodesic Dome.” -- Richard D. Lamm, Former Governor of Colorado
“Sieden has done a magnificent job of simplifying and restating Fuller’s comprehensive view.” -- Rev. Peggy Bassett, D.D., Former President United Church of Religious Science Worldwide
“Sieden has succeeded in bringing Fuller back as vibrant and thought provoking as ever, in a way we can understand.” -- Allan Ray Putnam, Former Director, American Society for Metals --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Book Description
From the Inside Flap
As one of the first to perceive that humanity’s very survival was dependent on global cooperation and making the necessities of life available to all, he devoted most of his life to that cause. He created modern technologies and revolutionary designs that would support humanity in working as one global community on what he referred to as “Spaceship Earth.” Fuller’s was a bold, global perspective - one based on a new way of merging Nature and technology. With great enthusiasm, he extrapolated from the intricate structure of Nature to design imaginative, ultramodern inventions for the common good, among which the Geodesic Dome, the Dymaxion Car, the Dymaxion House, and the Dymaxion Map figure most prominently.
Lloyd Steven Sieden, a respected educator and consultant on Buckminster Fuller, remains true to the vitality and imagination of Fuller’s ideas and wisdom. His book follows Fuller’s life in order to translate his complex ideas into clear, accessible language. Sieden brings new light to Fuller’s fascinating belief system and the rationale behind his futuristic designs; he also shows how these unprecedented designs model the framework of Fuller’s elaborate philosophy.
This eloquent and inspiring work fulfills the need for a book that ultimately recognizes and articulates Fuller’s monumental contributions to humanity. It conveys an appreciative portrayal of the man affectionately dubbed “the grandfather of the Universe.” It also vividly illustrates Fuller’s enormous impact upon and contribution to society as well as the ways in which his visionary ideas will continue to shape and expand our perception of Spaceship Earth for years to come. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
When he was not delivering lengthy thinking-out-loud lecture during his 1947 tenure at Black Mountain College, Bucky's primary concentration centered on furthering an entirely new form of architecture. In his examination of traditional construction, Fuller had discovered that most buildings focused on right-angle, squared configurations.
He understood that early human beings had developed that mode of construction without much thought by simply piling stone upon stone. Such a simplistic system was acceptable for small structures, but when architects continued mindlessly utilizing that same technique for large buildings, major problems arose. The primary issue created by simply stacking materials higher and higher is that taller walls require thicker and thicker base sections to support the upper walls. Some designers did attempt to circumvent that issue by using external buttressing to keep walls from simply crumbling under the weight of upper levels, but even buttressing limited the size.
Fuller found that the compression force (i.e., pushing down) which caused such failure in heavy walls was always balanced by an equal amount of tensional force (i.e., pulling, which in buildings is reflected in the natural tendency of wall to arch outward) in the structure. In fact, he discovered that if the tension and compression are not perfectly balanced in a structure, the building will collapse. He also found that builders were not making use of the tensional forces available. In conventional structures, the tension forces are not functionally employed. Those forces are, instead, relegated to the ground, where solidly built foundations hold the compressional members, be they stones or steel beams, from being thrust outward by tension. Always seeking maximum efficiency, Bucky attempted to employ tensional forces in construction. The result was geodesic structures.
Because Fuller could not afford even the crude mechanical multiplier machines available during the late 1940s and he was working with nothing but an adding machine, his first major dome required two years of calculations. With the help of a young assistant, Donald Richter, Bucky was, however, able to complete those calculations. Thus, he brought most of the material needed to construct the first geodesic dome to Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948.
His vision was of a fifty-foot-diameter framework fabricated from lightweight aluminum, and operating on an austere budget, he had purchased a load of aluminum-alloy venetian-blind strip which he packed into the car for the trip down to the College. Over the course of that summer, Bucky was also able to procure other materials locally, but he was not completely satisfied with the dome's constituent elements, which were neither custom-designed for the project nor of the newest materials. Still, with the help of his students, the revolutionary new dome was prepared for what was supposed to be a quick assembly in early September, just as the summer session was coming to an end.
The big day was dampened by a pouring rain. Nonetheless, Bucky and his team of assistants scurried around the field which had been chosen as the site of the event preparing the sections of their dome for final assembly while the faculty and students stood under umbrellas watching in anticipation from a nearby hillside. When the critical moment arrived, the final bolts were fastened and tension was applied to the structure, causing it to transform from a flat pile of components into the World's first large geodesic sphere. The spectators cheered, but their cheers lasted only an instant as the fragile dome almost immediately sagged in upon itself and collapsed, ending the project.
Although he must had been disappointed that day, Bucky's stoic New England character kept him from publicly acknowledging that emotion. Instead, he maintained that he had deliberately designed an extremely weak structure in order to determine the critical point at which it would collapse and that he had learned a great deal from the experiment. Certainly, the lessons learned from that episode were valuable, and his somewhat egocentric rationale was by no means a blatant lie. However, had he really been attempting to find the point of destruction, Bucky would have proceeded as he did in later years, to add weights to the completed framework until it broke down. What had actually happened was something he and Starling Burgess had years earlier agreed no designer should ever allow.
In his haste to test his calculations, Fuller had proceeded without the finances necessary to acquire the best materials. Because of the use of substandard components, the dome was doomed to failure, and a demonstration of the geodesic dome's practical strength was condemned to wait another year.
During that year, Fuller's reputation as an eccentric genius grew, as did his invitation to lecture and teach about his architectural and design ideas. He was even asked to speak to the Graduate school of Design at his former alma mater, Harvard - from which he had been expelled twice. Bucky's most significant engagement that year was at the Chicago Institute of Design, where he spent a great deal of time working with students to develop his ideas. It was with the assistance of those design students that Bucky built a number of more successful dome models, each of which was more structurally sound than the previous one.
Then, when he was invited to return to Black Mountain College the following summer as Dean of the Summer Institute, Fuller suggested that some his best Chicago Institute design student and their faculty accompany him, so that they could demonstrate the true potential of geodesic domes.
As he was now receiving an average fee of $1,000 per lecture, Black Mountain's salary of a mere $800 for six weeks presented something of a hardship for the Fullers. However, when he assured Anne that he needed to spend the summer at Black Mountain, the financial question was quickly tabled. Having earned some substantial fees during the previous year, Bucky was also able to provide the best of materials for his second Black Mountain dome. The project was a fourteen-foot-diameter hemisphere constructed of the finest aluminum aircraft tubing and covered with a vinyl-plastic skin. Completely erected within days after his arrival, that dome remained a stable fixture of the campus throughout the summer. To further prove the efficiency of his design to somewhat skeptical fellow instructors and students, Bucky and eight of his assistants daringly hung from the structure's framework like children on a playground immediately after its completion. (Fig. 14-5)
That summer also resulted in another breakthrough artifact for Fuller. For years, he had been searching for Nature's coordinate system, which he felt was embodied in the Energetic-Synergetic Geometry (i.e., geometry dealing with relationships rather than simply forms such as lines) he had begun to formulate during his study of spherical geometry. He had, however, not yet been able to overcome the obstacle of modeling all his mathematical theories.
Then, when a young sculpture student named Kenneth Snelson entered Bucky's office one day with a unique new form of sculpture, Fuller could only stop and stare. He immediately knew that he was seeing a physical representation of his idea of employing continually integrated tension in a structure. Snelson's sculpture was unique because it was built from solid struts connected by thin wires (similar to Fig. 5-2) in such a way that, as if by magic, no strut touched another. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
