Buckminster Fuller Inc.

Every object, including ourselves, seems to have a radio attached to it. Our environment is busy transmitting and receiving. Each space is flooded by signals. We constantly swim in electromagnetic radiation, whether from unthinkably distant galaxies or tiny pulses within our own bodies. We ultimately live in the invisible world of radiation rather than the visible forms of buildings and cities. Or, more precisely, it is electromagnetic waves that form our buildings and cities. Space itself is defined and redefined by countless hidden vibrations. We tune in to spaces rather than simply occupy them, and usually tune in to many different overlapping spaces at the same time.

Core structure

• Chapter 1: Broadcasting Shelter
• 1.1 Radio Man
• 1.1.1 Coming of Age Through Wireless
• 1.1.2 Radio Turns Buildings into Ships and Ships into Buildings
• 1.2 The Wireless Avant-garde
• 1.2.1 Planet-Shrinking Masts

Main ideas

• Fuller, who treated any discussion of the universe as autobiographical, noted that he was born in the same year as the discovery of radio.
• He marked another key radio event when "the human voice was transmitted transoceanically for the first time in history."
• It is not by chance that the house with which Fuller publicly entered architectural discourse in 1928 featured a built-in radio transceiver in its library, through which occupants would maintain connection with everyone else on the planet.
• The clearest precedent for this deep embrace of radio was Vladimir Tatlin's remarkable 1920 design for a monument to the Third International.

Why it matters

It documents a Fuller-related source project in a form that can be compared against the rest of the corpus, reframing his architecture as a project about radio, media, and the invisible electromagnetic shaping of space.

• People in the information-design lineage: Knud Lonberg-Holm, Ted Nelson

See Also

• Knud Lonberg-Holm — the "father of information design" whose terrain this book's media reading occupies
• Ted Nelson — hypertext pioneer extending the information-as-design lineage
• Mark Wigley (Mark Wigley) — related figure

Sources

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