The New Yorker visage a review of the life and work of R. Buckminster Fuller, on the convenience of a llc.view results from: wordbook | thesaurus | encyclopedia | all character | the web
share this: exhibition in New York 25 years after his death. Fuller was a deeply strange man. He documented his life so thoroughly (in the "Dymaxion Chronofile," which had grown to over 200K pages by his death) that biographers have had trouble putting their fingers on what, exactly, Fuller's contribution to civilization had been. The review quotes Stewart Brand's resignation from the cult of the Fuller Dome (in 1994): "Domes leaked, always. The angles between the facets could never be sealed successfully. If you gave up and tried to shingle the whole damn thing — dangerous process, ugly result — the nearly horizontal shingles on top still took in water. The inside was basically one big room, impossible to subdivide, with too much space wasted up high. The shape made it a whispering gallery that telecast private sounds to everyone." From the article: "Fuller's schemes often had the hallucinatory quality customer's broker with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past... He was a stuff determinist who believed in radical autonomy, an individualist who extolled mass production, and an environmentalist who wanted to dome over the Arctic. In the end, Fuller's greatest accomplishment may consist not in any particular idea or artifact but in the whole unlikely try-on that was Guinea Pig B ."

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