The Life and Times of Buckminster Fuller

The New Yorker features a review of the life and work of R. Buckminster Fuller, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition in New York 25 years after his death. Fuller was a deeply strange man. He documented his life so thoroughly (in the "Dymaxion Chronofile," which had grown to over 200K pages by his death) that biographers have had trouble putting their fingers on what, exactly, Fuller's contribution to civilization had been. The review quotes Stewart Brand's resignation from the cult of the Fuller Dome (in 1994): "Domes leaked, always. The angles between the facets could never be sealed successfully. If you gave up and tried to shingle the whole damn thing — dangerous process, ugly result — the nearly horizontal shingles on top still took in water. The inside was basically one big room, impossible to subdivide, with too much space wasted up high. The shape made it a whispering gallery that broadcast private sounds to everyone." From the article: "Fuller's schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past... He was a material determinist who believed in radical autonomy, an individualist who extolled mass production, and an environmentalist who wanted to dome over the Arctic. In the end, Fuller's greatest accomplishment may consist not in any particular idea or artifact but in the whole unlikely experiment that was Guinea Pig B [which is how Fuller referred to himself]."

Who needs a single contribution...

[HitekHobo]

...when you can have the entire world referring to 'Bucky Balls'.

That should be enough for any man.

Cough cough

[Aussenseiter]

He documented his life so thoroughly (in the "Dymaxion Chronofile," which had grown to over 200K pages by his death) that biographers have had trouble putting their fingers on what, exactly, Fuller's contribution to civilization had been.

Future historians will note that this trend spiralled upwards, as more and more ceaseless bloggers continued to kick the bucket.

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, sorta sounds like the Segway

Re:Only idiots say "prolly".

[Fluffeh]

I write the way I speak, and I do include the word prolly in my vocabulary. I don't write comments to gratify your sense of proper English. Secondly, if you want to be identified with that much, why not post under who you are rather than old man anonymous. Guess you PROLLY don't have the minerals to do that.

What about Buckyballs?

[Jane Q. Public]

Maybe they leak, too.

Re:R. Buckminster Fullofhimself!

[Xyrus]

That is the response I usually expect from a self-zeigleblantamous spurion migitar-analphlaxis.

~X~

Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla

[fireboy1919]

Given that his first model of a geodesic dome collapsed under its own weight...

As did the second. The third one burned down, fell over, and then collapsed under its own weight.

But the fourth one stayed up, and that's what we have now: the strongest dome in all England.