Bucky: Inspiring, Confusing, Design Pioneer

I think part of my attraction to Buckminster Fuller's thinking is his uncanny ability to defy accepted logics and invent his own. His method for forging his own path was a grand experiment of the self that reflected upon—and morphed forever—our thinking about human-planetary interactions. While the results were confusing, profound and prolific, even his most abstract work was always inspiring. Elizabeth Kolbert's recent profile in The New Yorker expresses the tension this created for Fuller as well as those whose lives he touched. The article features some interesting statements from Fuller about the capacity for behavioral change:

Fuller was also deeply pessimistic about people's capacity for change, which was why, he said, he had become an inventor in the first place. "I made up my mind . . . that I would never try to reform man -- that's much too difficult," he told an interviewer for this magazine in 1966. "What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions."

Yet, in many ways Fuller's pessimism is perhaps more an issue of scale than human capacity for change. He seems, in many ways, both a designer and anthropologist at heart:

If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.

Kolbert's article was written to accompany a retrospective of Fuller's work at the Whitney.