Buckminster Fuller Starting with the Universe

History has a way of generating figures to help us move our collective narrative forward. We needed a Buckminster Fuller during the last century to help us see the perils and possibilities of that era and to point the way toward the twenty-first century. Fuller taught us to think in totalities just when the world seemed to be breaking apart into specialized disciplines and practices — insisting on the significant interconnectedness of things otherwise thought disparate, from the only possible arrangement of four equidistant points to the Universe itself.

Core structure

• Fuller's Geological Engagements with Architecture
• Thought Patterns: Buckminster Fuller the Scientist-Artist
• A View from the Present
• Buckminster Fuller and Contemporary Artists
• In the Outlaw Area
• Plates

Main ideas

• History has a way of generating figures to help us move our collective narrative forward.
• In a 1996 film interview, Philip Johnson denied that Buckminster Fuller should ever have been described as an architect.
• Intuition and aesthetics automatically trigger consciousness of opportunities to consider and selectively initiate alternative acts or position-taking regarding oncoming events and potential realizations.
• There are many Buckminster Fullers.
• The wide range of ideas and achievements associated with Fuller — utopian, visionary thinking about systems and their interconnectedness, the structural and aesthetic manifestations of integrity, the relationship between pragmatism and vision.

Why it matters

Fuller taught us to think in totalities just when the world seemed to be breaking apart into specialized disciplines, insisting on the significant interconnectedness of things otherwise thought disparate, detached, or irrelevant. The catalog situates his work as a bridge between science and art and a pointer toward twenty-first-century thinking.

See Also

• Antoine Picon — catalogue essay contributor
• Elizabeth A. T. Smith — catalogue essay contributor
• Dana Miller (Dana Miller) — related figure
• K. Michael Hays (K. Michael Hays) — related figure

Sources

• buckminster_fuller_starting_with_the_universe/ — book project directory (repo-local source tree)
• index.md — project index
• buckminster_fuller_starting_with_the_universe.md — full catalog text