New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller

by Hsiao-Yun Chu and Roberto G. Trujillo, Editors
Stanford University Press, Berkeley, CA, 2009
248 pp., illus. 48 b/w. Trade, $55; paper, $21.95
ISBN: 0804752095; ISBN: 0-8047-6279-1.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

The children’s book illustrator, Wendy Anderson, has told friends how, when Buckminster Fuller spoke at her design college, she felt compelled to give his bald dome a kiss upon meeting him afterwards. He was just so cute, unassuming, and Elmer Fudd-like. Perhaps in Fuller many students, in an era that suffered a “Generation Gap” in families’ interpersonal communication, saw an approachable, brilliant grandfather, not a critical parent.

This collection of “new views,” nicely illustrated with photographs, drawings and Fuller’s graphs and flow charts, are based on research within the mammoth archive that Fuller left that now resides (after a journey through several universities) at Stanford University. Much of the archive is mundane, his sales receipts and everyday business correspondence, and Hsiao-Yun Chu discusses the history of this “paper mausoleum” and the challenges its archivists face. Yet it obviously contains many interesting items, including those that inspired the investigative directions here.

Several of these essays use archival materials to expand on aspects a life that Fuller expended much energy, over 50-plus years, in making known. Barry M. Katz recounts the defining moment in Fuller’s life when, at age 32, he contemplated suicide so his impoverished family would receive his life insurance. At the last moment, standing beside icy Lake Michigan, Fuller received divine instruction to serve mankind with his design and conceptual skills. In this time of energy conservation concerns, Joachim Krausse, Claude Lichtenstein, and David E. Nye examine and explain Fuller’s “Dymaxion” (his coinage) architecture. Fuller’s late-life impact as “a technocrat for the counterculture” is noted by Fred Turner.

Two essays especially stand out as of interest to artists involved in technology. Jonathan Massey writes on the influence of Claude Bragdon, developer of a mathematically-based system of ornament, on Fuller’s own aesthetic. Bragdon’s books, from 1915 onward, presented a richly-decorated architecture of hyperspheres and tesselations. Now looking very Art Deco and a bit Star Wars, Bragdon admitted its 1920s environments are “Moorish,” and show the influence of decorative architectural patterning in Islamic nations. Bragdon even included figures of Sinbad and women in rather middle eastern robes in his illustrations.

In the second chapter of note, “America’s Last Genuine Utopian,” Howard P. Segal locates Fuller in a Yankee futurist tradition that includes Fuller’s own great aunt Margaret and Edward Bellamy in the nineteenth century, through space colonies advocate Gerard O’Neill, to John Naisbitt and Alvin and Heidi Toffler. As Segal considers prognosticators of liberatory computers like Michael Dertouzos and Nicholas Negroponte, he neglects to mention one figure whose influence could be compared to Fuller’s: Ted Nelson, the conceptualizer of hypermedia. One wonders if this scholar in Maine is unaware of Nelson’s impact on California’s Silicon Valley developers of the 1980s. Nelson’s ideas, promoted in books like Computer Lib, Dream Machines, and many presentations at computer-industry conferences, bore fruit in branching user-directed content, though his visionary Xanadu Publishing System is yet to be realized.

Like Fuller, Nelson has delivered spellbinding public lectures of several hours duration that combined intellectual and personal autobiography. Yet those expansive evenings were brief compared to Fuller’s sixteen-hour talkfests, which—we learn from this volume—demanded the presenter’s discreet in-trousers urination while standing at the podium.