BUCKMINSTER FULLER (1895-1983)
Thinking Outside the Box with Bucky
by Petr Jandácek

Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, designer, author and futurist. He published more than 30 books and loved to invent words (neologisms). Some of the "Buckyisms" are Spaceship Earth, ephemeralization (doing more with less), synergetics (currently used as Synergy), outstairs & instairs rather than upstairs & downstairs, reflecting towards and away from the gravitational center of the spherical Earth, world-around rather than worldwide, and sunsight & sunclipse rather than sunrise & sunset, reflecting a more Copernican understanding. At first "Bucky" drove his friends and audiences nuts with these terms, but upon more reflection they started to use these words too.

Like Leonardo Da Vinci, Bucky had many more failures than successes. Truly an iconoclast, as a boy at Milton Academy, Buckminster Fuller had problems with geometry, but was fascinated by Fibonacci Numbers. He enjoyed making inventions and his own tools from found objects. As a child on Bear Island, off the coast of Maine, he experimented with human propulsion of small boats. He was expelled from Harvard two times and described himself as a "misfit." He worked in Canadian textile mills and in meatpacking plants. In World War I he was in the Navy as a radio operator. In 1917 he married Anne Hewlett and with his father-in-law established a company of unique building materials. The enterprise soon failed. In 1922 the Fullers' baby daughter, Alexandra, died of complications from polio and meningitis. By age 32 Buckminster Fuller was bankrupt, jobless, drunk and contemplating suicide. He blamed the inferior slum housing in Chicago for his daughter's death. 

Bucky was saved from this depression by dedicating the rest of his life to a single-minded experiment: What can a single individual do to contribute to the changing world and benefit all humanity that large corporations, governmental agencies and entire national states are incapable of doing? With friends, Isamu Noguchi and Constantin Brancusi, Fuller began to experiment with shapes held together not by gravity and compression but rather by tension towards the center of the geometric structure. His geodesic spheres and domes are independent of "up and down" orientation and are just as functional in zero gravity. Building upon ideas fabricated about 30 years earlier by Dr. Walther Bauerfeld, Bucky obtained several U.S. patents. The United States military began to use several thousand geodesic domes for radar stations and other shelters. Buckminster Fuller assumed positions at several universities in Illinois and at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.   

While other architects were thinking "inside the box" houses, Buckminster Fuller's geodesic spheres and domes and other hemispherical and cylindrical buildings became a novel, much stronger attraction. Fuller's car designs were less successful. Bucky became a "guru" of architecture, design, philosophy, futurism and to some, a theologian.  

RECOMMENDED READING

The writings of the hyperactive mind of R. Buckminster Fuller are difficult to digest by most readers.  It is often better for audiences to experience a presentation (such as a Chautauqua) that provides a spoken word and/or visual and tactile information.

Baldwin, J. Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller's Ideas for Today. Canada: John Wiley & Sons

Publishing, 1997. (For more pedestrian readers)

Fuller, R. Buckminster. Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking. New York:

Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1975, 1979. (For readers with profound understanding of science and technology)

Fuller, R. B. and Snyder, Jamie. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Lars Muller Publishers, 2008. (For general public)

PETR JANDÁCEK

Petr Jandácek was born in 1941 in the dismantled part of Czechoslovakia, the Bohemia/Moravia Protectorate of the Third Reich. Later, that part of Europe was a satellite of the Soviet Union. As a pro-American journalist, Petr's father received the death sentence from the Communist regime. With early experiences under both Hitler and Stalin the Jandácek family and Petr learned survival skills in a hostile economic and political environment. The family escaped and lived in refugee camps from September 1948 to December 1950. They immigrated to the United States, and Jandácek continued his elementary and high school education in Cicero, Illinois. He received a BS degree in Art and Art Education at Illinois State University. He married Louise Evanich, a fellow art teacher, in 1966. In 1969 Petr Jandácek received a Master of Science Degree from the Institute of Design, also known as American Bauhaus. Following Peace Corps service in Jamaica in 1970-71, Jandácek was in a PhD program in Anthropology at Southern Illinois. He became acquainted and exchanged ideas with Buckminster Fuller, who was a Professor Emeritus at Southern Illinois University in the 1970s, and a frequent lecturer at Illinois State University and American Bauhaus.  Since 1981 the Jandáceks have been living in their own Geodesic Dome in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Petr Jandácek has taught art and art history for 45 years, the last 37 years in Los Alamos Schools.  

Scientist friends in Los Alamos keep honing Petr's understanding of structures in nature and man-made materials. Jandácek also portrays Otzi, the Neolithic Iceman, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Jandácek also does presentations about Pierre Teihard de Chardin and the Australopithecus-like Hominids of Flores Island, Indonesia.

BUCKMINSTER FULLER

QUOTES

"Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking."

"Design-science revolution is the only legitimate revolution."

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