Buckminster Fuller Pawley
More than half a century ago, on January 18th 1933, Punch published a menacing cartoon. It showed a figure described as an employer seated at a desk. Standing in front of him was a monstrous mechanical man. In the caption the robot is saying: "Master, I can do the work of fifty men." The employer replies: "Yes, I know that. But who is to support the fifty men?"
Core structure
- Heroes of the Design Century
- Brief Encounters
- The Year of Silence
- Dymaxion Cars
- House of the Century
- Triumph of the Domes
Main ideas
- "Making the world's available resources serve one hundred per cent of an exploding population can only be accomplished by a boldly accelerated design revolution to increase the present performance per unit of invested resources." — R. Buckminster Fuller, 1970
- Fuller asked himself whether he could trust himself never to turn the insights entrusted to him to his own exclusive advantage, rather than to the benefit of all humanity and the Universe itself.
- "Picture on the shores a city of 4-D design, in place of the hit-and-miss, American Institute of Bow & Arrow Boys pile-em-up, paste-em-together architecture."
- Intent on developing a high-technology dwelling machine that could be air-delivered to any remote site with no roadways or landing fields, he set out to develop an omni-medium transport and shelter.
Why it matters
"Making the world's available resources serve one hundred per cent of an exploding population can only be accomplished by a boldly accelerated design revolution... This is a task for radical technical innovators, not political voodoo-men." The biography presents Fuller as such an innovator across his Dymaxion and geodesic work.
See Also
- Martin Pawley — author of this biography
Sources
- buckminster_fuller_pawley/index.md — book project directory (repo-local source tree)
- buckminster_fuller_pawley/ — source project root