Word: fullers
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Romantic Pioneer. Bucky Fuller, as he calls himself and urges everyone else to call him, is a charismatic man who attracted a cultic following even in the days when he seemed to the unclouded eye little more than some kind of a nut. Today, at 68, he is more charismatic than ever and evokes an impressive chorus of enthusiasm from many of those best qualified to judge his work...
...Fuller visualizes his Garden of Eden as a dome within a dome. "I might use a 114-ft.-diameter dome, inside a 128-footer. I'd plant vines around the base of the outside dome. Because the lines of the dome are geodesic, the vines will follow those lines. You now have the outer dome covered with vines. You then go up between the two domes, winding a translucent plastic around the surface of the inner dome. This will keep the rain out, letting the sun come through your forest of vines. The plastic can be wound in such...
...erroneously accepted by the bootstrap-anchored custodians of civilization's processes, to a new role for mankind, that of an inherent success." He is sure the whole world can be fed, housed and happy, if designers can just put to work all the world's skills with Fuller-like efficiency. He is endlessly excited by the massive strides mankind has made in just the last 50 years, of which one of the most dramatic has been the increase in range of the average man's "toing and froing." For thousands of years primitive man traveled on foot...
Such superdomes are in fact already feasible; several New York designers are still smoldering at World's Fair President Robert Moses for vetoing a proposal to cover the 646 acres of the fair with a Fuller dome a mile or so in diameter. "What an opportunity missed!" says Arthur Drexler, director of architecture and design at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. "It would have had the same impact on the world of design as the Crystal Palace at London's great exhibition in 1851-probably more so, because the Crystal Palace prefab pieces had classical roots...
Architect Nathaniel Owings of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill pronounces Fuller "the most creative man in our field; he's the only one that's dealing with something that's totally dissimilar to what everybody else is doing. He's tried to find out how nature really works." Architect Minoru Yamasaki calls him "an intense, devoted genius, whose mind, which is better than an IBM machine, has influenced all of us." Italy's famed Architect Gio Ponti feels that Fuller is "not only a romantic pioneer who sees 50 years ahead, but a genius who has already...