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Buckminster Fuller
 Buckminster Fuller |
There are few men who can justly claim to have revolutionized their discipline. R. Buckminster Fuller revolutionized many. “Bucky,” as he was known to most, was a designer, architect, poet, educator, engineer, philosopher, environmentalist, and, above all, humanitarian. Drive by the belief that humanity’s major problems were hunger and homelessness, he dedicated his life to solving these problems through inexpensive and efficient design.
As World War II ended, Bucky accepted a position at a small college in North Carolina—Black Mountain College. There, with the support of an amazing group of professors and students, he began to work on the project that was to make him famous and revolutionize the field of engineering. Using lightweight plastics in the simple form of a tetrahedron (a triangular pyramid), he created a small dome. As his work continued it became clear that he had made the first building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. The U.S. government recognized the importance of the discovery and employed him to make small domes for he army. Within a few years, there were thousands of these domes around the world.
Having finally received recognition for his endeavors, Buckminster Fuller spent the final fifteen years of his life traveling around the world lecturing on ways to better use the world’s resources. A favorite of the radical youth of the late 60’s and 70’s, Fuller worked to expand social activism to an international scope. Among his most famous books were No More Secondhand God (1963), Operating Manual for the Spaceship Earth (1969), and Earth, Inc. (1973), in which he writes: “In reality, the sun, the Earth, and the Moon are nothing else than a most fantastically well-designed and space-programmed team of vehicles. All of us are, always have been, and so long as we exist, always will be—nothing else but—astronauts.”
—Courtesy of American Masters
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