Sam Green narrating his live documentary The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (Photo by Sam Allison)
“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.”
–R. Buckminster Fuller
In 1927 designer, architect, and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller was contemplating suicide on the shore of Lake Michigan, when he had an epiphany:
“The thought then came that my impulse to commit suicide was a consequence of my being expressly overconcerned with ‘me’ and ‘my pains,’ and that doing so would mean that I would be making the supremely selfish mistake of possibly losing forever some evolutionary information link essential to the ultimately realization of the as-yet-to-be-known human function in Universe.”
According to legend, Fuller decided to “throw away” his “personal ego” instead of committing suicide, and use himself “as a scientific `guinea pig’… on behalf of all humanity.” He resolved to “make the world work for one hundred percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
At least that is the story as Fuller told it.
Although he grew up in an elite New England family, he flunked out of Harvard (twice), worked as a meatpacker, and served in the Navy before reinventing himself as a philosopher, engineer, writer, inventor, and lecturer. Never content to work in only one field, Fuller, or “Bucky” as his friends called him, embraced an interdisciplinary approach to global problems like poverty, shelter, transportation, education, energy, and ecological destruction. By the time of his death in 1983, Fuller held 28 patents, had authored 28 books, and received 47 honorary degrees.
F. Buckminster Fuller has influenced everyone from Pritzker Prize–winning architect Thom Mayne to Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and The WELL, one of the oldest virtual communities. (Photo by Roger Stroller)
Part TED Talk, part travelogue, and part Japanese benshi, Sam Green’s “live documentary,” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, was like no other film screening I’ve been to. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)
But neither Fuller’s biography, nor his legacy are simple.
“If you really look for the details of his life at the time, it’s easy to see that the suicide story was a creation,” Stanford historian Barry Katz told the New York Times in 2008.
“There was nothing even remotely in the archives suggesting feelings on the scale he later described” in 1927, he said…
Mr. Katz said he found instead signs of depression and anxiety stretching from the time…[Fuller's] first daughter, Alexandra, died in 1922, through his financial failures and, finally, the collapse of a torrid extramarital romance in 1931. Still, he said, the suicide story seemed to serve a purpose.
“That’s why I now call it a myth,” [said Katz,] “but it was an effective myth. It gave a trajectory to his career. The story was constructed after the fact to show how he suddenly developed these new ideas. I think he came to believe the story himself…”
In recurrent dark periods Fuller was not trying only to persuade others his ideas were important, but to persuade himself that he mattered….
Supporting that view is [the late] Evelyn Schwartz Nef. “Those days were really quite exciting because he was so convincing that he was trying to save the world,” she said in an interview…“The question I had is whether he was as convinced as we were. He was trying to reassure himself that he was something.”
Buckminster Fuller in his Black Mountain College studio (Photo courtesy of SFMoMA)
Sam Green and Yo La Tengo performing the “live documentary” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the ICA in Boston (Photo by Sam Allison. Click to Enlarge)
As James Sterngold writes in the New York Times, “by conventional measures…[Fuller] accomplished little. The efforts to mass-produce his houses, though written about widely, failed. His project to develop his efficient three-wheeled autos collapsed after an accident killed the driver of one. His soaring geodesic domes, built with a distinctive pattern of triangles, have been used — memorably for the United States pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal — but never for the large-scale projects he envisioned.”
Mention Fuller’s name to a group of artists and architects and you’re likely to be bombarded with passionate responses from both supporters and detractors.
Philip Johnson once called Fuller a “lousy architect,” and Fuller’s vision for Manhattan provoked this response from one architect I know: “Fuller envisioned covering mid-town Manhattan by an enormous climate-controlled bubble. How in the world is that an environmental improvement? It would have consumed enormous amounts of energy, contributing immensely to air pollution and global warming. And the prospect of enclosing city dwellers in a bubble, cut off from wind and rain and sun and the play of the elements, is something that I find horrifying…I’m very suspicious of big universal theories, like those of Fuller, when it comes to architecture.”
But Fuller’s impact can’t be discounted. He has influenced everyone from Pritzker Prize–winning architect Thom Mayne to Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and The WELL, one of the oldest virtual communities.
“Bucky…looked at the world big-scale, in terms of the number of people who didn’t have enough to eat,” architect Nicholas Grimshaw says. “He talked about the really big issues, like food and water and shelter. And that’s really just coming home to roost. Everything he wrote then he could have written right now.”
The Dymaxion House as presented by Buckminster Fuller in Fortune magazine in July of 1932 (Click to Enlarge)
Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao Dome Over Manhattan, 1960. Black-and-white photograph mounted on board, 13 3/4 x 18 3/8″ Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries (Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)
As K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, explained to me via email, focusing too much attention on Fuller’s popularization of the geodesic dome or his idea to shroud the city of Manhattan in a bubble misses the point. According to Hayes, Fuller made other contributions that are still relevant today, if we can look past the outdated designs and cultural critique:
The current generation of artists and architects who rediscover Buckminster Fuller will not be inspired by his structural inventions or cultural critique but by his spatial modeling of a globalized system of pattern and contingency, organization and change, temporary stability and constant renewal. That is his legacy.
“Bucky…looked at the world big-scale, in terms of the number of people who didn’t have enough to eat,” architect Nicholas Grimshaw says. “He talked about the really big issues, like food and water and shelter. And that’s really just coming home to roost. Everything he wrote then he could have written right now.”
“Fuller was the original systems thinker, with regards to the ecology of a building and its relationship to the environment,” explains artist, designer, and engineer Chuck Hoberman:
When he asked, ‘How much does your building weigh?’ it immediately put it into the realm of material usage and embodied energy, all of which are now very hot topics of discussion—not driven by stylistic concern, but simply by the need to make buildings more sustainable. His work framed a lot of those issues very early on…
I think he’s been highly influential as an iconoclastic spirit, who never accepted that the boundaries between disciplines were anything other than something to be climbed over or circumvented in some way. To me that’s not so much a heroic stance as much as a very practical way to proceed in the world today.
Whether R. Buckminster Fuller was visionary or naive in his beliefs is one of the subjects that interests Sam Green, a genre-bending artist in his own right. (Photo by Sam Allison)
Fuller’s sketch of a Three-Frequency Geodesic Sphere. Felt-tip pen and graphite on paper, 8 1/2 x 10 1/4 in. Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries (Photograph by Ben Blackwell courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)
“At many other points in history…people had high hopes and a great imagintion for the future. You remember: we’d all be living in space, or flying around using jetpacks, or robots would be doing all the work for us. Today, it seems to me that most people don’t look at the future with fancy or hope or a great imagination.” (Photo by Sam Allison)
We live in a dystopian age—one more interested in zombies from The Walking Dead and Cormac McCarthy’s grim, apocalyptic vision than in slick, futuristic fantasies about jet-packs and cars that drive themselves. “There are too many of us who wonder whether civilization is going to make it or not,” former Vice-President Al Gore commented in a recent interview. “When people flirt with despair about the future, they are less likely to take the actions necessary to safeguard it.”
In marked contrast, R. Buckminster Fuller believed that cooperation, not competition, was the key to a better life, and he remained optimistic about humanity’s future. ”It no longer has to be you or me,” Fuller wrote in Critical Path. “Selfishness is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.”
Whether R. Buckminster Fuller was visionary or naive in his beliefs is one of the subjects that interests Sam Green, a genre-bending artist in his own right.
It’s fitting that a multi-media artist like Green should tackle an enigma like Fuller, while accompanied by the live music of a critically-acclaimed, three-piece band that also defies categorization. Part TED Talk, part travelogue, and part Japanese benshi, The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller was like no other film screening I’ve been to, with Green narrating a special cut of his film (created for his Boston audience), while the intoxicating sounds of Yo La Tengo pulsed through the glass-walled auditorium. As writer Rebecca Solnit described the experience, it’s like “a movie being born as you see it and hear it, as alive as music.”
“It’s really exciting to perform this way,” Yo La Tengo band member Georgia Hubley told me via email. “You feel like you are a piece of something bigger and doing your part. It is different than presenting yourself as a band with songs etc., which is more personal.” (Yo La Tengo photo by Ed Dittenhoefer courtesy Sam Green)
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