Tetrascroll

One day in 1930, when our daughter Allegra was three years old, she said, "Daddy, tell me about Goldilocks and the Three Bears." … As I started telling it, I began to think of new and heretofore unknown details of the famous story. Allegra was delighted with the innovations. — Prologue

Subtitled Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale, Tetrascroll is Fuller's most playful exposition of his geometry. While studying Einstein and Eddington around 1930, Fuller began recasting the bedtime story as a "scientific seminar conducted by Goldy with the Three Bears as students," explaining relativity, light-years, and topology in terms a child could grasp — "the beginning of my spontaneous thinking-out-loud discourses."

Structure

The book frames the fable with a Prologue and an Introduction (by Amei Wallach), then alternates the narrative "Tetrascroll" text with twenty-one lithograph captions Fuller calls "tricaps," closing with an "Epilever" and bibliography:

Prologue (Fuller) — the 1930 origin with Allegra.
Introduction (Amei Wallach) — the making of the book with Tatyana Grosman.
Tetrascroll — the core cosmic narrative.
Tricap (chapters 4-22) — the lithograph captions / expanded text.
Epilever — a closing prose-poem on seeing the world afresh "through the eyes and mind of a man who has never seen the world before."

The artist's book

The Introduction recounts the collaboration that produced the physical object. In February 1975 Fuller's young friend Edwin Schlossberg (a collaborator on the World Game) brought Fuller to ULAE — Universal Limited Art Editions, the West Islip, Long Island workshop of master printer Tatyana Grosman ("Tanya") — as an eightieth-birthday gift of "something new to do." The meeting came weeks before Synergetics (Fuller's "Principia," with E. J. Applewhite) was published, when Fuller felt disoriented at having finally unwound his life's mathematical work.

The original Tetrascroll was a lithographic book-object of twenty-six pages, each a 36-inch equilateral triangle — one face of the tetrahedron Fuller held to be nature's basic unit — hinged in Dacron sailcloth so it could unfold into a circle, a 40-foot strip, or a scroll. It was first shown publicly on January 29, 1977, at the Museum of Modern Art and at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, in a deluxe edition of thirty-four. The 1992 trade edition (ULAE / St. Martin's Press) interleaves the larger source text with the twenty-one lithographs and their tricaps, making it ULAE's first co-publication with a trade publisher.

Core ideas

Through Goldy's "sky party" with the Polar Bear family (Daddy = Ursa Major, Mommy = Ursa Minor with her pole star, plus Wee Bear), Fuller dramatizes synergetics:

Four events make a system. Goldy plus three bears = four star-events; it takes four to produce a system, which divides all universe into six parts (macrocosm outside, microcosm inside, and the four dividing events). Three thousand years ago the Greeks named this minimum system the tetrahedron.
Topology of the minimum system. Four star-events yield six interrelationship lines and four triangular facets, totaling — with vertex angles, insideness/outsideness, convexity/concavity, and axis of rotation — thirty-two describable characteristics; "only the minimum limit is demonstrably absolute."
Universe as scenario. Because the four star-corners need not be simultaneous (the bears' stars are 210, 680, and 43 light-years "away-and-ago"), Goldy grasps Einstein's idea that "Universe is a scenario and not a single simultaneous structure" — like needing many cinema frames to see a caterpillar become a flying butterfly.
Synergy defined. Per Wallach's Introduction, "the behavior of whole systems cannot be predicted by the behavior of individual systems acting alone"; Tetrascroll itself is what emerged from the interaction of "two formidable systems named Buckminster Fuller and Tatyana Grosman."

Significance

Tetrascroll is unique in Fuller's corpus as both a serious art object and a pedagogical fable: it compresses synergetics into a children's story while standing among ULAE's celebrated editions (alongside work by Johns, Rauschenberg, Motherwell, and Newman). It embodies Fuller's conviction that the 99 percent who "do not understand science" can grasp it if it is explained, as he says, "like a child."

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