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Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility
Hailed as one of the greatest minds of our times, Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) is known as an American visionary. Designer, architect, engineer, inventor, and philosopher, he was undeniably one of the key innovators of the 20th century.This volume provides a visually rich and complete overview of Fuller's design and architectural production, situating Fuller's projects in their historical context. The book features never-before-published material from the Fuller archives that were recently donated to Stanford University.Michael John Gorman's essay offers an in-depth analysis of Fuller's work-focusing more attention on his innovative architectural projects than to other aspects of Fuller's "design science"-as well as an interesting perspective on post-war American society and architectural culture. Chapters include concepts of Fuller's philosophy, his manifesto for mass-produced housing, the role of mobile shelter in transforming behavior, geodesic domes, and Fuller's early experiments. Fuller's achievements, astonishing design, and production are fully documented using original and often unknown archival materials.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published September 13, 2005
About the author
Michael John Gorman
7 books2 followersMichael John Gorman is Founding Director of BIOTOPIA Naturkundemuseum Bayern and Professor of Life Sciences in Society at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. He was founder and CEO of Science Gallery International and Founding Director of Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 24, 2013
I'll be honest. I set out to read a book by Buckminster Fuller, not a book about him. But I just couldn't do it. Oh, I could've probably forced myself to drudge through the dense text, but I would've been a chore, and that's not why I read.
So I looked at the local library catalogs, not realizing that what I reserved was a coffee-table book (no pun intended). But I'm actually really glad that this was the one I picked up. The author (Gorman) did a respectable job giving me a feel for Fuller's work, his outlook, his ambitions. But I think it was the photos of his inventions, the artwork he commissioned as promos, and the diagrams of never-realized ideas that gave me a much better idea of what Fuller's vision really was. So yes, I'd recommend the book. :-)
I'm kinda fascinated by Fuller's bizarre yet ingenious ideas. His main obsession was transportable homes, which could be factory produced and then air-delivered to the customer. Quite different from the hippie-homes I used to think of when I heard of "dome houses". I'll definitely read more about him.
So I looked at the local library catalogs, not realizing that what I reserved was a coffee-table book (no pun intended). But I'm actually really glad that this was the one I picked up. The author (Gorman) did a respectable job giving me a feel for Fuller's work, his outlook, his ambitions. But I think it was the photos of his inventions, the artwork he commissioned as promos, and the diagrams of never-realized ideas that gave me a much better idea of what Fuller's vision really was. So yes, I'd recommend the book. :-)
I'm kinda fascinated by Fuller's bizarre yet ingenious ideas. His main obsession was transportable homes, which could be factory produced and then air-delivered to the customer. Quite different from the hippie-homes I used to think of when I heard of "dome houses". I'll definitely read more about him.
January 10, 2023
In 1946 the rooftop rudder on Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller’s rotating Dymaxion Dwelling Machine failed to make the house turn into the wind as intended, and made the interior overheat instead of keeping it cool. So he sold it for a dollar to a man in Wichita, whose children used it as a playhouse until they got tired of it. From playhouse to whorehouse, it was then painted pink and became popular with airmen from the local base, until it was abandoned and taken over by raccoons.
Another of Fuller’s brilliant, but pointless ideas was to roof the entire planet Earth under a single geodesic roof, and control its environment artificially. Another was to build cheap prefabricated housing by dropping bombs from airships. The semicircular craters would become the foundation holes for prefabricated houses lowered from the airship as, crater after crater, it sailed along punching out a new suburbia.
What makes Michael John Gorman’s new book so worthwhile is these impish new insights into Fuller’s methodical madness. Gorman knows more about Fuller than anyone else; he curated the Fuller Archive at Stanford. His excellent writing, and the hundreds of wonderful illustrations (never published before) enable us to make a completely new assessment of this great American nutcase (or if you prefer, genius).
The trouble with Fuller (1985-1983) was that he was a deeply conventional bourgeois who simply assumed the white American suburban lifestyle was the ideal model for everyone; but each mad idea contained a glimmer of something very wise, of universal validity. Just below the surface of Gorman’s account lurk deep questions as to how a man so banal, yet so brilliant, could have believed God chose him to save humanity; it seems to derive in some way from a naive belief in America’s dominance and military technology.
This is what comes through from Gorman’s account of Fuller’s early years, working on factory production lines (after being thrown out of Harvard for running after a woman) and then in the Navy. He spent the 1920s cheating on his wife, getting drunk at Romany Marie’s in Greenwich Village, sleeping on sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s floor, and “living on coffee and doughnuts”. In 1927 his father-in-law’s business failed, and Fuller found himself washed up. About to fling himself into Lake Michigan, he was “suddenly struck with the realisation that his life belonged not to himself, but to the universe. He felt himself lifted off the ground into a sort of sparkling kind of sphere”. Gorman suggests this was a premonition of Fuller’s weightless geodesic structures; others might suspect it was a convenient post-rationalisation, written years after the event. But if we take Fuller’s word for it, an otherworldly voice said “You think the truth”.
Combining this rather terrifying self-belief with his tecnological inventiveness, and his world-view of a Navy captain on the bridge of a 10,000-ton cruiser, Fuller became convinced he had been chosen to pilot Spaceship Earth to a better future. “The naval cruiser provided Fuller with a powerful paradigm” writes Gorman; but Fuller was not the only young man in 1920 to whom the new future world seemed full of promise for humanity. F. T. Marinetti published the first Manifesto of Futurism in 1909, and in Bolshevist Russia, the Constructivists were already far advanced in industrialised construction systems. Le Corbusier was using ocean liners as the paradigm for his new architecture of the Machine Age, and Lewis Mumford had already said that the future would be about electricity and mass communications. Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, and Raymond Hood collaborated on Fuller’s short-lived magazine “Shelter” but in the end he rejected modern architecture for designing houses that only looked like machines. He wanted them to be real machines, cheap and mass-produced.
Gorman takes us through all of Fuller’s brilliant, radical and crazy housing experiments of his “4D” period and the “Dymaxion” phase, into his mature “Geodesic” period, when he devised a new map of the world that showed all the land-masses at the correct size. From about 1950 onwards he became monomaniacally obsessed with ever-new techniques and materials for making one thing: geodesic domes. Nothing else interested him, and he ended up living in a geodesic dome himself; the interesting photographs of Fuller’s domestic arrangements reveal that even though he thought standardised built-in furniture was good enough for everyone else, he had his own collection of handmade antiques. In this period his self-publicity bore fruit as he received more and more commissions for bigger and bigger domes, and prestigious academic appointments that enabled him to create his cult; many photographs capture him surrounded by elated students, working on geodesic projects.
Whether Fuller was a genius or a clown, Gorman points out that “his central objective of air-delivering factory-produced multi-family homes, complete with all fixtures and fittings, has remained elusively out of reach”. His ideas remain “as elusive and tantalising as flying seed-pods’.
Another of Fuller’s brilliant, but pointless ideas was to roof the entire planet Earth under a single geodesic roof, and control its environment artificially. Another was to build cheap prefabricated housing by dropping bombs from airships. The semicircular craters would become the foundation holes for prefabricated houses lowered from the airship as, crater after crater, it sailed along punching out a new suburbia.
What makes Michael John Gorman’s new book so worthwhile is these impish new insights into Fuller’s methodical madness. Gorman knows more about Fuller than anyone else; he curated the Fuller Archive at Stanford. His excellent writing, and the hundreds of wonderful illustrations (never published before) enable us to make a completely new assessment of this great American nutcase (or if you prefer, genius).
The trouble with Fuller (1985-1983) was that he was a deeply conventional bourgeois who simply assumed the white American suburban lifestyle was the ideal model for everyone; but each mad idea contained a glimmer of something very wise, of universal validity. Just below the surface of Gorman’s account lurk deep questions as to how a man so banal, yet so brilliant, could have believed God chose him to save humanity; it seems to derive in some way from a naive belief in America’s dominance and military technology.
This is what comes through from Gorman’s account of Fuller’s early years, working on factory production lines (after being thrown out of Harvard for running after a woman) and then in the Navy. He spent the 1920s cheating on his wife, getting drunk at Romany Marie’s in Greenwich Village, sleeping on sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s floor, and “living on coffee and doughnuts”. In 1927 his father-in-law’s business failed, and Fuller found himself washed up. About to fling himself into Lake Michigan, he was “suddenly struck with the realisation that his life belonged not to himself, but to the universe. He felt himself lifted off the ground into a sort of sparkling kind of sphere”. Gorman suggests this was a premonition of Fuller’s weightless geodesic structures; others might suspect it was a convenient post-rationalisation, written years after the event. But if we take Fuller’s word for it, an otherworldly voice said “You think the truth”.
Combining this rather terrifying self-belief with his tecnological inventiveness, and his world-view of a Navy captain on the bridge of a 10,000-ton cruiser, Fuller became convinced he had been chosen to pilot Spaceship Earth to a better future. “The naval cruiser provided Fuller with a powerful paradigm” writes Gorman; but Fuller was not the only young man in 1920 to whom the new future world seemed full of promise for humanity. F. T. Marinetti published the first Manifesto of Futurism in 1909, and in Bolshevist Russia, the Constructivists were already far advanced in industrialised construction systems. Le Corbusier was using ocean liners as the paradigm for his new architecture of the Machine Age, and Lewis Mumford had already said that the future would be about electricity and mass communications. Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, and Raymond Hood collaborated on Fuller’s short-lived magazine “Shelter” but in the end he rejected modern architecture for designing houses that only looked like machines. He wanted them to be real machines, cheap and mass-produced.
Gorman takes us through all of Fuller’s brilliant, radical and crazy housing experiments of his “4D” period and the “Dymaxion” phase, into his mature “Geodesic” period, when he devised a new map of the world that showed all the land-masses at the correct size. From about 1950 onwards he became monomaniacally obsessed with ever-new techniques and materials for making one thing: geodesic domes. Nothing else interested him, and he ended up living in a geodesic dome himself; the interesting photographs of Fuller’s domestic arrangements reveal that even though he thought standardised built-in furniture was good enough for everyone else, he had his own collection of handmade antiques. In this period his self-publicity bore fruit as he received more and more commissions for bigger and bigger domes, and prestigious academic appointments that enabled him to create his cult; many photographs capture him surrounded by elated students, working on geodesic projects.
Whether Fuller was a genius or a clown, Gorman points out that “his central objective of air-delivering factory-produced multi-family homes, complete with all fixtures and fittings, has remained elusively out of reach”. His ideas remain “as elusive and tantalising as flying seed-pods’.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews