R. Buckminster Fuller

Architect

  • Born: July 12, 1895
  • Birthplace: Milton, Massachusetts
  • Died: July 1, 1983
  • Place of death: Los Angeles, California

American architect and engineer

Fuller heightened the American public’s awareness of how to employ natural resources to full advantage in building a principle exemplified in his design of the geodesic dome.

Areas of achievement Architecture, engineering

Early Life

R. Buckminster Fuller was born in Milton, Massachusetts. His parents were Richard Buckminster and Caroline Wolcott Andrews Fuller, both of prominent New England families. Fuller’s mother’s ancestors included Roger Wolcott, a royal governor of Connecticut, and his father’s family had arrived from England in the 1630’s; his aunt was Transcendentalist and feminist Margaret Fuller.

Fuller’s father was a successful merchant of leather and tea. Young Fuller, or “Bucky” as the family called him, was one of four children. They enjoyed a comfortable childhood in Newton, Massachusetts, in a large house with servants. Fuller, however, had very poor eyesight; he was fitted with powerful glasses at age four and for the first time in his life saw clearly. He claimed to have been delighted at his wonderful new sense (he maintained that sense of delight throughout his life).

One of the boy’s early triumphs occurred when he was six and a kindergarten student. Given dried peas and toothpicks with which to sculpt, he constructed three squares that combined into eight triangles to complete his first tetrahedronal octet truss. He entered Milton Academy as a day student and did well in his studies, but not outstandingly so. His tenure at the academy was from 1904 to 1913.

Next, the young scholar entered Harvard, where he did not fare well. The snobbery of the all-important university clubs upset Fuller, more so because they had not accepted him. One of the reasons that the Harvard club men did not embrace Fuller was his unusual physical appearance. He was five feet two inches tall with a head too large for his body. In addition, he wore extremely thick glasses, and because one leg was shorter than the other, he walked with a pronounced limp. He rebelled against his peers at Harvard by withdrawing his tuition money from his account while still in his first year; he spent it all in one night in New York City. His exploits that night included a lavish dinner for the cast of the Ziegfeld Follies. Fuller may have impressed his fellow students with this caper, but the Harvard administration was not amused, and he was expelled.

The Fuller family decided in 1914 to send him for several months to work in a relative’s textile mill in Sherbrooke, Canada. There, the young man served as an apprentice mechanic, gained the respect of his fellow workers, and was happy. His mother (his father was by then deceased) decided, however, that her son should have a formal university education, and so, he was sent back to Harvard. His second stay there was also a failure, and he was expelled for good in 1915.

Not all of Fuller’s early years were full of disappointments. His extended family summered each year at Bear Island, Maine, where he fell in love with boats and sailing. One of his first inventions was a push-pole to help propel his rowboat more efficiently than oars did. In 1917, when American involvement in World War I seemed imminent, Fuller entered the United States Naval Academy; there, he successfully completed an accelerated, three-month training period and was commissioned an ensign. This was an era during which the navy first began to fly airplanes into combat. In working with these new machines, Fuller was again inspired to invention. Seeing pilots drown in their cockpits when the airplanes flipped over in the water, Fuller devised a grappling hook, which hoisted downed airplanes quickly above the water while the pilot was pulled free.

Fuller was married to Anne Hewlett, the daughter of a prominent architect, on Rock Hall, Long Island, on July 12, 1917. Fuller then worked for a time for the Armour Meat Company and then the Kelly-Springfield Truck Company, but when his job was eliminated during the firm’s reorganization, Fuller was offered a position by his father-in-law, J. Monroe Hewlett. Hewlett had invented a new building material filled with fibrous centers and put it to commercial use, creating the Stockade Building System Company. To accept his job of managing his father-in-law’s company, Fuller, with his wife, moved to Chicago. Fuller did well in this firm from 1922 to 1927, until he ran into difficulty with the stockholders. Never interested in achieving high profits, Fuller had earned the distrust of the company hierarchy. His interest during these years had been in refining the product, but his superiors did not agree with his inclinations. Fuller’s lack of interest in accumulating wealth continued throughout his life; he usually requested that people hiring his architectural and engineering services pay him only the cost of erecting the structure.

Fuller and Anne suffered a tragedy during their early life together. After a series of grave illnesses, their firstborn child, Alexandra, died at age four. Grief-stricken by the girl’s death and by his business failure, Fuller fell into a period of heavy drinking and depression. He so despaired over the course of his life that he contemplated suicide. Instead, he began a two-year period of silence, seclusion, and meditation, during which he read widely and slept little.

Life’s Work

From this period of intense contemplation, Fuller later claimed, he began to see the universe in new ways. He decided that he had to reeducate himself completely, that he would reject that which he could not prove to himself was true. He rejected traditional geometry, which concentrated on rectangles and planes, and substituted his own, which concentrated on triangles. From this new geometry, Fuller developed his geodesic dome his best-known and most widely used invention.

The geodesic dome has as its base numerous adjoining tetrahedrons. The alloy metals used to build the domes have high tensile strength by which force is dispersed away from the dome’s surface; the result is a maximum-strength structure made from a minimum of light-weight materials. The first uses of a prototype Fuller dome were for advertising exhibits in such places as the Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago in 1929. It was then that an agent of that store coined the term “dymaxion” to describe an early dome; the word is an amalgam of “dynamic” and “maximum.”

On the basis of the public’s interest in his designs and inventions, Fuller began to appear as a lecturer before architectural and engineering societies. He also founded his Dymaxion Corporation and received some modest financial support to back his projects. Prior to this time, Fuller, his wife, and a second infant daughter, Allegra, had been living in poverty; they had received some family inheritances that had paid for their shabby apartment, but food had not always been easy to obtain, and they had often eaten only one meal a day.

Unfortunately, Fuller’s domelike house did not prove to be a success in the 1930’s. A number of factors caused its early demise. First, Fuller had developed the dymaxion house in the early period of the Great Depression, which held Americans in a tight grip for almost a decade; bounteous funds to develop and promote new products (which had been available in the 1920’s) were almost nonexistent in the 1930’s. Also, the Fuller dome was accepted with curiosity and interest by architects, but rejected by the construction industry. While Fuller saw this dymaxion house as an inexpensive home for young and poor families, the construction unions viewed it as a way of undercutting their various trade jobs. With these factors against it, the Fuller house did not find further employment until the early 1950’s.

A second Fuller invention of the 1930’s that enjoyed only a brief life was the dymaxion car. To produce prototypes of this vehicle, Fuller moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where a large factory building and good mechanics were available. Fuller’s financial backer in this project was Philip Pearson, a wealthy Philadelphian, and the consulting engineer was W. Starling Burgess. Together, Fuller and Burgess manufactured a car that had a streamlined body similar to that of an airplane. The car, with a rear engine, was energy-efficient, getting some thirty or forty miles to one gallon of gasoline. It had a three-wheel design with front-wheel drive, so it could maneuver much more easily than a four-wheel vehicle. In tests, the dymaxion car achieved a speed of 120 miles per hour; it also held eleven passengers. Fuller himself drove the car in the New York and Connecticut area, creating a stir among spectators. Again, however, this invention was to fail. In 1933, the car was involved in a crash in which its driver was killed. Although another, “regular” car had caused the accident, publicity focused on the odd dymaxion car and pronounced it a failure. Fuller closed his factory in Bridgeport and began to concentrate on other inventions.

His next major innovative product was not a failure, but again it was an unusual item. In the early 1940’s, Fuller developed a new map of the world: a flat map that avoided the exaggeration of land masses that round globes had always contained. Fuller termed his map the “dymaxion airocean” world map; the public first saw it printed in Life magazine in 1943.

In 1953, when the Ford Motor Company commissioned Fuller to build a ninety-three-foot dome to cover the rotunda at their Dearborn, Michigan, plant, he had his first overwhelming success with one of his inventions. In 1954, Fuller constructed a series of “radomes” for the Arctic Circle, where the U.S. Air Force had established its Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line of radar stations. The radomes were flown to their destinations and quickly assembled between Arctic storms. The results were small but unusually strong domes that withstood wind gusts of up to two hundred miles per hour.

Throughout the 1950’s and the early 1960’s, Fuller’s domes were in demand: Corporations ordered them for their plants, cities for their theaters, and the United States government for its overseas exhibitions of new technology. One of the most famous Fuller domes was constructed in 1959 in Moscow, where it was used to house the United States Pavilion at the American Exchange Exhibition. It was two hundred feet in diameter and was built by the Kaiser Aluminum Company. This dome caused Fuller’s reputation to soar and led, in part, to his appointment as a professor of generalized design at Southern Illinois University in 1959. In the years following his teaching career, Fuller lectured as a goodwill ambassador overseas and at most major American universities; he won numerous academic awards, including more than forty honorary degrees. In 1972, a nonprofit organization, The Design Science Institute, was formed in Washington, D.C., to perpetuate Fuller’s designs and ideas. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on July 1, 1983.

Significance

Fuller accomplished much in his lifetime as a world-famous lecturer, inventor, engineer, mathematician, and architect, but his greatest influence on Americans may have come from his philosophy. Fuller advocated using the world’s resources wisely and fairly so that all humankind could live in comfort. To promote this ideal, he invented the World Game in 1969, which employed computers to show how the natural environment could serve all persons equally well. This game, in addition to his boisterous, enthusiastic lecturing style, endeared Fuller to established world leaders and rebellious college students alike.

Fuller’s buoyant energy and fervent, optimistic conviction that humans could solve their environmental problems came at a time when widespread pollution and the deep pessimism that it inspired were first developing on American soil and shore. Fuller served as a catalyst to spur younger inventors and scientists to careful, productive study of human uses and misuses of their resources. Fuller also left a legacy of many engineering and architectural designs that will probably be developed in the future. Always ahead of his time, Fuller saw the need for entire cities covered by domes to ensure stable climatic conditions for their inhabitants. Similarly, he designed domes to be used as permanent housing on the ocean floor and on moon colonies. It is for Fuller’s belief in the positive role of design and engineering for the future of America and humankind and his vital contributions to that future that he will be remembered best.

Bibliography

Banham, Reyner. Age of the Masters: A Personal View of Modern Architecture. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Banham places Fuller in perspective as a modern architect, seeing him as influenced by vaultworks, an ancient architectural design. The author also includes an interesting piece on how it feels to enter a Fuller dome with its open and airy spaciousness, and laments the fact that the geodesic dome is not widely used.

Cort, David. Is There an American in the House? New York: Macmillan, 1960. A book of topical essays by a noted journalist. He discusses Fuller’s popularity as it emerged from overseas dome exhibits for the United States government. “Darkness Under the Dome” includes an amusing look at the enthusiastic response to the dome around the globe, particularly in Afghanistan.

Gordan, Alastair. “The Dome Gains Weight and Settles Down.” The New York Times, January 11, 2007, pp. F1-F6. Report about the popularity of geodesic domes, including information about Fuller’s introduction of the structures and their subsequent evolution.

Gorman, Michael John. Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility. New York: Rizzoli International, 2005. An overview of Fuller’s design theories and the structures he produced, including information about his philosophy, manifesto for mass-produced housing, and creation of the geodesic dome.

Hatch, Alden. Buckminster Fuller: At Home in the Universe. New York: Crown, 1974. A warm and personal biography written by a longtime friend of Fuller. In interviews with Fuller and other friends and associates, Hatch provides fascinating highlights of his subject’s life. A good balance between the personal life of Fuller and his scientific achievements.

Kenner, Hugh. Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kenner provides his own drawings of some of Fuller’s inventions. He likes Fuller personally and presents him in a good light, but he does not hesitate to refute Fuller’s philosophy when it seems disjointed or obscure. Includes a helpful annotated bibliography.

McHale, John. R. Buckminster Fuller. New York: George Braziller, 1962. This book is one of a series on contemporary architects. The text itself is only about forty pages long, but it is followed by generous notes and a bibliography. Fuller’s buildings (or structures) are shown in photographs. Perhaps too much emphasis on the functional aspect of the domes and not enough on their aesthetics.

Marks, Robert W. The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960. This book is devoted more to Fuller’s professional life and achievements than to his personal life. Detailed, multiple pictures of all the major designs are given. Also, the author reproduces the patent pictures for several of the most famous inventions by Fuller. Photos display domes being built in sequence.

Snyder, Robert. R. Buckminster Fuller: An Autobiographical Monologue/Scenario. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. A unique and fascinating look at Fuller. Snyder, the inventor’s son-in-law, includes in his book numerous pictures as well as Fuller’s monologues from the several motion pictures in which he was featured (and which were directed by Snyder). In these films, Fuller described his designs and explained the World Game in his own special style.

1941-1970: April, 1953: Fuller Builds First Industrial Geodesic Dome; April 28-October 27, 1967: Expo 67 Features Innovative Architecture; November, 1968, and January, 1970: The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News Appear; 1970: Design for the Real World Calls for Industrial Design Reform; July, 1970: Future Shock Explores the Impact of Change.