BUCKY WORKS: Buckminster Fuller's Ideas for Today

by J. Baldwin  / 1996 / 243 pages / $29.95 / John Wiley & Sons / ISBN 0-47l-l2953-4

Book Review by Bill Bazik

     Inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller, "Bucky," died in l983 at age 88. He is known the world over for his invention of the geodesic dome. The author of this book knew him for 31 years.
    Bucky, as he was known to everyone, (except his wife of 66 years) was not a college graduate, yet he received 47 honorary degrees during his lifetime. His influence on architectural and product designing was--and still is--tremendous.
     This book is of interest not only as a tribute to his inventiveness, but for detailing why many of his concepts, to this day, have not been accepted. The full-page cartoon on page 20 is a classic example of his frustration. It depicts an automobile being made on the driveway of a home. Bucky argued for years how ridiculous it is that we build houses 'from scratch' on a house lot. If we built cars that way, as the cartoon shows, they would cost $300,000! It should be noted that the American Institute of Architects (AIA), in 1928, passed a resolution "...on record as inherently opposed to any peas-in-a-pod-line reproducible designs." Others, sewer system builders, carpenters, electricians, etc., indicated they too would oppose home-building innovations.
   One reason the geodesic dome concept succeeded was that the military did not need to consult zoning and codes when it needed a transportable light weight and super strong structure for a mountain top or an Arctic location.
    You will be amazed at how much his 1934 car designs resemble todays vans. Equally amazing is his "traveling cartridge," a small car transportable by air or rail. No need to rent a car. It could even be used as a sleeping unit.
  His "Triton City" was designed as a floating city (100,000 people) for Tokyo Bay. You see variations of this idea almost every year and it is invariably presented as a new idea. His "Fly's Eye" dome is now under commercial development and you may be seeing into the future when scanning this section of the book.
    An example of the tremendous respect for Fuller's concepts can be seen in the naming of the 60-atom carbon molecule discovered in the early 1970s. It is called "buckminsterfullerene" and is often referred to as "Buckyball." Its soccer-ball-pentagon-hexagon pattern very much relates to Fuller's icosahedron-based constructions.
    Fuller maintained that the entire universe, from atoms to galaxies, "is make made up of islands of compression in a continuous sea of tension." This "tensegrity" concept may even apply to biological cells according to a recent (1993) paper by Dr. Ingber.
     As the author often notes, Fuller--as a person and as a designer--had his faults. However his accomplishments and his influence on others far outshine his failures. Many inventors can relate to the problems due to being "before your time" and to the difficulty of displacing the "established way" of doing something.
     This book is crammed with photos, many never before published. Buy it, enjoy it. Donate it to your local school library. There is a whole new generation out there that can be inspired by it.

Bill Bazik can be contacted at: (216) 734-3297

Taken with permission from the April, 1997, issue of INVENTION IN GREATER CLEVELAND, the monthly newsletter of the Inventors Connection of Greater Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio.