Technology and Culture

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 697 Inventions: The Patented Works ofR. Buckminster Puller. By R. Buckmin­ ster Fuller. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Pp. xxxii-l-316; illustrations, appendix. $18.95 (paper). The Artifacts ofBuckminster Puller: A Comprehensive Collection of His De­ signs and Drawings. Edited by James Ward. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Illustrations, bibliography, appendix. Vol. 1: The Dymaxion Experiment, 1926—1943, pp. xliv+184; vol. 2: Dymaxion Deployment, 1927—1946, pp. 276; vol. 3: The Geodesic Revolution, Part 1, 1947—1959, pp. vi + 416; vol. 4: The Geodesic Revolution, Part 2, 1960-1983, pp. vi + 394. $625 the set. Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895—1983) was a genuine techno­ logical utopian, a true believer in the ability of technology to bring about the alleged “good”—ifnot literally “perfect”—society in the very near future. After overcoming several personal and business setbacks culminating in a failed suicide attempt in 1927, he eventually became an internationally known and widely acclaimed professional visionary. Thousands of disciples bought his books and attended his lectures, and the Harvard sophomore-vear dropout ultimately garnered forty-three honorary doctorates—all ofthem reproduced, with complete citations, at the end of Inventions. No less important, hundreds of thousands of his famous geodesic domes have in fact been built and used through­ out the world, while other of his inventions—such as his Dymaxion cars, houses, and bathrooms—have also been patented, if less often commercially developed. These two handsomely printed, posthumous publications allow nonspecialists to scrutinize Fuller’s actual and proposed inventions. Although published independent of each other, they provide com­ plementary views of his works and ideas. Inventions includes illustra­ tions ofall twenty-eight ofhis patented inventions and the descriptions he used in applying for their legal protection, while the Artifacts con­ tains over 2,000 of his drawings and photographs with the words of others describing them. Neither volume claims to be complete—Fuller left thousands more drawings and photographs scattered outside these largely personal collections—but taken together they go far beyond all previous publications by or about him. They cover every design project in which he was actively involved. Not surprisingly, the inventions overlap in many cases, such as the geodesic domes and Dymaxion structures; but the amount of detail given about each differs in the two books. Happily, both volumes proceed in approximate chronological order and thereby indicate further the evolution of Fuller’s ideas and their manifestation on paper, if not necessarily in three- (or, as he sometimes claimed, four-) dimensional objects. In addition, Inventions has an illuminating introduction by Fuller himself, written shortly before he died and entitled “Guinea Pig B” 698 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE (“B” for “Bucky”). Here the normally bombastic, inscrutable, and self-centered utopian is surprisingly restrained, lucid, and modest, characterizing himself more as God’s humble servant than as God’s anointed prophet. Even his familiar utopian rhetoric is tempered by the recognition that the world is still far from almost anyone’s ideal. The Artifacts contains an equally useful introduction by its editor, James Ward, an architectural historian. Ward emphasizes Fuller’s no­ table contributions to modern architectural theory and practice, espe­ cially his philosophy of economic design—that less is more: “(1) the reduction of space in domestic designs, (2) transportation of portable structures to underutilized or hitherto undesirable regions, and (3) the invention of structures that require no land at all” (p. xiii). These, in turn, require minimal construction costs along with maximum strength and durability. Those objectives Fuller admirably achieved. Following Ward’s essay is a laudatory profile by Galvin Tomkins from a 1966 New Yorker that, like so much else written about Fuller, suffers from uncritical hero worship. At the same time, however, the patents, drawings, and photographs remind us of Fuller’s weaknesses: above all, his shallow optimism seemingly untempered by the familiar nightmares of his own day, and his accompanying naive belief that comfortable living and working conditions alone constitute utopia. Indeed, it hardly occurs to Fuller that many people would not wish to live in his various proposed communities: his land-based cities covered by gigantic geodesic domes, his tetrahedronal cities floating on the...