In the later years of his life, the American designer and inventor Buckminster Fuller often told a story about a painful period in his early 30s. It was 1927, and he was out of work; he was depressed and drinking heavily, and sick with worry about his ability to provide for his family. Financial and existential despair had led him to the edge of Lake Michigan, into whose darkness he had decided to throw himself, convinced that his life insurance policy would be of more benefit to his family than his actual life. And then he heard a voice that seemed at once to come from everywhere and nowhere. “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself,” said the voice. “You do not belong to you. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”
To ask whether this ever actually happened seems somehow beside the point. Like so many interesting artists and thinkers, Fuller – or Bucky, as he was known to his friends and many devotees – was an inveterate self-mythologiser. The story contains in any case a poetic truth. He saw his life’s work as putting his almost dementedly generative imagination to work in service of a utopian vision of the human future. Fuller, who died in 1983, is probably best remembered now as the inventor of the geodesic dome, that hemispherical structure composed of interlocking triangles that remains a haunting symbol of a kind of mid-20th century utopian futurism that has been mostly lost, buried under a rising landfill of Silicon Valley detritus.
Over the last week or so, I’ve been reading a 1973 book called Bucky: a Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller, by the Canadian scholar Hugh Kenner. One of the things that’s strange and delightful about the book is that Kenner seems, at least at first, such an unlikely person to have written about Fuller at all. A major figure of 20th-century literary criticism, he was known for his books on Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and TS Eliot. But in Bucky – which is not so much a biography as a long, stylish riff on the wayward notions and inspired inventions of its subject – Fuller emerges as a figure wholly attuned to the spirit of modernism, driven almost mad by the technological possibilities of the 20th century. Like Pound, whose imperative to “make it new!” became the keynote exhortation of the movement, he was impelled by a desire to break with formal conventions and to exploit every aspect of modernity. (Unlike Pound, he was not a fascist or an anti-Semite.)
There is a kind of mad scientist appeal to Fuller; it’s often hard to make a call on whether his inventions are inspired or merely harebrained. Among his great weirdo innovations was something he called the Dymaxion car, which he worked on in the years of the Great Depression, and which featured prominently in the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. (Dymaxion was a portmanteau of the words “dynamic”, “maximum” and “tension”.) The car went around on three wheels, seated nine people and looked like a cross between a yacht and a cartoon drawing of a shark. The thing was fast and exceptionally fuel-efficient for its time, but it had a tendency to get destabilised by strong winds; although Walter Chrysler and Henry Ford were both enamoured of the prototype, it never made it into mass production, and it remains, like many of Fuller’s inventions, an artefact of a future that never came to be.
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He was obsessed with the idea of using the minimum amount of energy and material to produce the maximum pay-off
Fuller’s innovations – the buildings, the cars, the various concepts of urban design – were animated by an idea he called “ephemeralisation”, which meant doing more with less. He was obsessed with the idea of using the minimum amount of energy and material to produce the maximum pay-off. This had little to do with profit, and everything to do with what would eventually become known as “sustainability”, an idea he was considering many decades before the world at large. As early as the 1920s, he was predicting our contemporary carbon crisis, and diagnosing the economic and social costs of our reliance on fossil fuel.
But he was far from anti-progress, or anti-technology. What he believed in, above all, was using technological innovation to improve living standards. Although he was not a Marxist – he fondly considered himself above and beyond politics – he was devoted to the improvement of the material conditions of humans everywhere, regardless of national borders. “It is now highly feasible,” as he once put it, “to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.” (A minor aspect of Fuller’s restless renovation of the world was his creation of countless new words; one reason Kenner found him so seductive, I suspect, was this almost Joycean rage for neologism.)
Among the many projects he was involved in was a collaboration with the Black feminist writer June Jordan, in the wake of a 1964 riot in Harlem over police brutality, which they called Skyrise for Harlem. The design featured 15 conical towers, with large living spaces and communal areas intended to ferment creativity and imagination, to give up to half a million residents space to think and imagine. “It is architecture,” wrote Jordan, “conceived of in its fullest meaning as the creation of environment, which may actually determine the pace, pattern and quality of living experience.” “Like so many of the things Fuller imagined and helped to imagine, Skyrise for Harlem never came to be.
And so as inspiring and compelling a figure as he was, there is an insistent sadness in reading about him today. In his time, he was among the pre-eminent imaginers of the future. But it’s a future that’s been lost, or forgotten. The future now has become almost entirely privatised, the near-exclusive preserve of Silicon Valley billionaires and their acolytes, who seem strangely incapable of imagining anything other than more of the same – and to increasingly diminishing returns for anyone but themselves and their shareholders. “Humanity,” as Fuller once put it, “is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.” It seems to me we are also prioritising all the wrong kinds of weirdos. The world, if it is to have a future, needs more of Buckminster Fuller and less of Elon Musk.