You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future

Architect and designer Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) may no longer hold the kind of counterculture cachet he had in the 1960s, but writer and artist Keats (Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age) emphasizes his ideas without ignoring his often controversial accomplishments in a biography that manages to be enthusiastic without descending into hagiography. Fuller—a Harvard dropout, autodidact, and relentless self-promoter—believed that technology would liberate man from work and make politics unnecessary. He thrilled audiences “at least until the buzz wore off the following morning,” though Keats points out that Fuller’s designs did sometimes match his hype. The geodesic dome remains a breakthrough, far lighter and stronger than traditional dome designs. Fuller’s Dymaxion world map portrays continents with much less distortion than the popular Mercator or Gall-Peters projections and helped him promote his technocratic “world game” solution to the world’s problems. His three-wheeled Dymaxion car had no particular advantages, but his Dymaxion house design—circular, domed, and sheathed in aluminum—was strong, lightweight, cheap to manufacture, and easy to assemble, though only one prototype was ever built and lived in. Keats’s insightful account of this impressive American innovator reveals a man who managed to be “both corporate and antiestablishment,” more pragmatic than concerned with resolving contradictions. [em](Apr.) [/em]