Buckminster Fuller

The most farsighted man of our century.

Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), inventor, engineer, scientist, philosopher and poet, bequeathed more guidance to posterity than any of the great pioneers of Modern architecture, whose influence and thinking has already waned under changing circumstances.

Unlike them he made no attempt to bond the new technologies of the 20th century to architectural history. He was first and foremost a pragmatist, schooled by service in the United States Navy, chastened by failure in the construction industry, made famous by a design for a house that was never built and a car that never worked,

and finally made globally successful by a patent for a lightweight dome that generated more than 300,000 structures in thirty years.

Buckminster Fuller died shortly after delivering the address at the Royal Gold Medal ceremony for Sir Norman Foster, consulting editor of this magazine. He died loaded with honours from the world of architecture, a profession that had earlier rejected him, only later recognising the limitless possibilities that his concept of 'design science' offered for the future. Today the reality of this bequest is larger than life and to be seen everywhere. It is evident in the ever-increasing use of finished assemblies in construction, in the bankruptcy of the traditional craft-based housebuilding industry, and in the final triumph of the factory-produced home, now accounting for nearly half the market in Japan.

On an intercontinental scale we can see that Fuller's macro-approach to planning for humanity in a densely populated, ever developing world, is overtaking all resistance. Everywhere larger and larger energy-efficient architectural enclosures of all kinds are being built, from super-high rise office towers in Malaysia, to monster indoor shopping malls in China, huge aircraft factories and urban sports stadiums in the United States, and mighty distribution centres and leisure complexes all over Europe. All of them are, on one way or another, derived from Buckminster Fuller's seminal 1960 project for the enclosure of 50 blocks of Manhattan under an enormous, lightweight, climate-controlled envelope.

As we can now see, it is this vision of the megastructure as a vast, translucent bubbleg -- not a concrete ziggurat -- that has opened up the prospect of great cities within which the design of individual buildings will assume the freedom of interior design. By degrees all our world cities are moving slowly towards this kind of integrated climatic envelope. They must do, if they are to achieve energy efficiency and digest their own toxic emissions in the high-energy years ahead.

But if Fuller was the first to see that houses must become machine products, and cities must become megastructures of a new and more liberating kind, he was also the first to see the futility of global environmental strategies that try to put such developments into reverse -- turning away from the wider and wider distribution of comfort and personal mobility, back into a voluntary hardship brought on by the suppression of development in the mistaken belief that this will 'save the planet'. In his lifetime he was fond of saying; 'There is no such thing as pollution, all we do when we pollute is make recovery and recycling difficult instead of easy.' For architectural sentimentalists this message - that more world development is best answer to more world development - is his most valuable lesson of all.

Richard Buckminster Fuller Institute

Pictures by Build Amerika