R. Buckminster Fuller 1895–1983

Leonardo, Vol. 17, No.1, p. 3, 1984. Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in Great Britain. R. Buckminster Fuller 1895-1983 I live on earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing-a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process-an integral function of the universe. On I July 1983 the verb changed its tense from present to past, when R. Buckminster Fuller died at 87 in Los Angeles. Ah, but I have already fallen into one ofthose obsolescent thought patterns that Bucky Fuller was so fond ofidentifying and correcting. Past and present tenses seem to be illusory: "Time is not linear but probably consists of wave propagations in all directions simultaneously. Allatonceness." This thought was neither new nor original with Fuller. An Irish priest proposed something similar in a religion class I attended in the Bronx, when he attributed the ability to see all time in one instant to God. Fuller's concerns were often religious, although he took pains to couch them in the language ofeither the material universe or the processes of human thought. But the best way to convey his concerns, as well as his distinctive way of communication, is by quoting a statement he called "What I am trying to do": As a conscious means of hopefully competent participation by humanity in its own evolutionary trending while employing only the unique advantages inhering exclusively to the individual who takes and maintains the economic initiative in the face of the formidable physical capital and credit advantages of the massive corporations and political states I seek through comprehensively anticipatory design science and its reduction to physical practice to reform the environment instead of trying to reform man also intend thereby to accomplish prototyped capabilities of doing more with less whereby in turn the wealth-regenerating prospects of such design-science augmentations will induce their spontaneous and economically successful production by world-around industrialization's managers all of which chain-provoking events will both permit and induce all humanity to realize full lasting economic and physical success plus enjoyment of all the Earth without one individual interfering with or being advantaged at the expense of another. There, in a single-sentence, unpunctuated, 153-word nutshell is Bucky Fuller: optimistic, skeptical of established institutions, convolutedly precise, concerned with human consequences as well as physical results. He wrote those words in the 1920s,after considering suicide but resolving instead to pursue the complicated challenge described above. The task was more than enough for a million people, let along a single human verb, but he retained his immense optimism throughout the six added decades of life that he decided to give himself and us. Buckminster Fuller was inarguably one of a kind, yet he was also one of the most characteristic embodiments of the 20th century, whether verb or noun, and past, present, future or allatonce. John Pastier Senior Editor, Arts & Architecture, The Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Road, Los Angeles, CA 90069, U.S.A. Originally published in Arts and Architecture Magazine, 2 (2), 8 (1983). 3 ...