11987. We come late upon the scene. A tremendous shape mushrooms up before us, as indifferent
to our gaze as it is to its frozen surroundings. It’s as if something once happened here,
some cosmic drama played upon this stage, and we are left only the quiet shell of that
event. The forces once in play here seem to have played themselves out. We bundle our
overcoats to us and huddle before yet another bitter blast of the Montréal winter
wind.
2 This thing, this bare Expo Dome, seems an alien form here. It stands out and it stands totally
alone, somewhere—or when—it shouldn’t be. It is an American thing, out of place; unmoved by the
deep Québec cold, by the iced-up St. Lawrence River, by the sharp-edged skyline of
Montréal above and beyond the ice. The dome seems to hold its own like an architectural
island on its own island, Ile St. Hélène, a shape that has kept its shape despite all
the elements—fire, rain, snow, ice and wind—that time and disuse have hurled against
it.
3 We move closer to the strange thing, into its black lace shadow. We circle round, then duck
under the protecting fence through a low furrow made by many ‘illegal’ visitors over the
years. The tourists and architecture buffs, the Bucky Fuller freaks, the curious, the
daring or the merely foolhardy, the teen-aged beer drinkers and furtive lovers and
graffiti artists; many have made this pilgrimage before us, too many leaving their
rubbish. We enter the dome compound cautiously, keeping an eye on the broken chunks
of concrete, the twisted lengths of metal beams and jagged protusions everywhere
underfoot.
4 My guide, Robert Duchesnay, knows every nook and cranny of this ruin. To muse over ruins is
customarily considered a Romantic pursuit, but for that sensibility Nature itself was the idyll.
You made a word-picture, or painted a landscape, and to it you added an artificial ruin to
heighten the sense of Nature’s dominance over Man’s puny handiwork. But the Expo Dome plays
on this sensibility in an unusual way. It is not the past, or Nature in the raw, that is lost or
to be found in this place. Rather it is the romance of the future that draws people
here, the glimpse of a future that once looked bright and hopeful, and now has grown
dim and darkly clouded. It evokes nostalgia, yes, but not for the past or the pastoral
scene. What we feel instead is something like nostalgia for a lost future: Once upon a
might-have-been…
5 Anyway, this particular ‘ruin’ stoutly defies decrepitude. It has been called ‘the most beautiful
building-completely-destroyed-by-fire in the world.’ Some, including its architect, Buckminster
Fuller, have even declared that they prefer the ruin to the once-functional building. And it’s easy
to see why.
6 The structure itself is so elegant; the vast, mathematically precise sphere so overwhelming; the
feel of the thing at once so massive and so lightsome, that it defies being taken in at a single
glance. Literary critic Hugh Kenner once noted that it looks much smaller from the outside, since
on a sphere (or two-thirds sphere, in this case) the external dimensions retreat from the eye.
We’re not used to looking at buildings like this; it is outside our usual ‘frameworks.’ Inside, it is
clearly huge—very clearly, since almost nothing stands between you and the enormous 20-storey
vault overhead.
7 For only this much of his achievement was Fuller grudgingly honored by the American Institute
of Architects, that he enclosed more space with less stuff than anybody else in human history.
Although he eventually built even larger structures, the Expo Dome still dwarfs the Pantheon,
St. Peter’s, the Taj Mahal, the Hagia Sofia, and all history’s other famous domes. Today it
simply stands there—vast, purposeless, and yet somehow its own justification. Filmmakers have
repeatedly been drawn to it: Robert Altman shot his frigidly futurist Quintet under it in 1978;
it appears in passing in Stuart Cooper’s moody, mechanically symmetrical thriller,
The Disappearance. The films glance toward the image, but say not a word about
it.
82005. Montréal, which inherited the Dome after Expo ‘67, has never quite figured out what to
do with it. Slow-growing pressure at last prompted some clean-up and refurbishing in the early
1990s. In 1995, the Centennial of Fuller’s birth, the Dome was grandly rechristened ‘Biosphere’
and turned into an environmental education center. It contains a facility for monitoring
water-quality in the St. Lawrence River, standing lonely sentinel-duty for science while commerce
and industry continue to poison the Seaway. Despite Montréal’s lack of interest, the Dome has,
over the years, become something of a symbol for the city. For many of us, I suspect, it also
serves as a kind of symbol for the 1960s, a lost era of hope which seemed to peak
in 1967 when the Mohawk high-steel workers were erecting the Expo Dome—without
scaffolding, believe it or not—and the Summer of Love was about to get off the ground in
San Francisco. The romance of the future still had power then. People were actually
getting ready to walk on the moon. Optimism and energy coupled with science and
engineering seemed as if they might very well guarantee a limitless horizon for human
‘progress.’
9 All that is gone now, of course.1
But if we are to understand this strange webwork, this time capsule to futures past, we must take
account of the way in which it came to be: first, spun in Fuller’s own mind; then built as the
United States Pavilion for the 1967 Expo; later destroyed through negligence and misadventure;
and finally, left standing ever since as a kind of open enigma, a challenge to the imaginations of
all who happen upon it.
Yankee Ingenuity
10R.
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) has been characterized as a mathematician, architect, inventor,
philosopher, and even a prophet. He has also been caricatured as a wide-eyed technocrat with big
plans for the industrialization of practically everything. Toward the end of his life, a listing of his
various honorary degrees made his the longest entry in Who’s Who. All of these classifications
notwithstanding, Fuller tended to refer to himself as a ‘‘comprehensive anticipatory
designer,’’2
which was his own way of summing up five decades of unparalleled Yankee
ingenuity.3
11 It is also
fair to understand ‘Bucky’ Fuller, as he liked to be called, as a poet or an artist—that is, a maker
of images.4
And he was a poet not mainly for the volleys of verse he took to publishing in his
later years, each line a ‘‘mental mouthful’’ as he put it, but rather because the
great part of his life’s work was to propose what may well be the grandest pattern
metaphor of our time: Nature’s coordinate system, a triangulated matrix which has
turned out to be an astonishingly accurate model for natural structures—like the
posthumously-named ‘Buckminsterfullerene’ (C60), Science magazine’s 1991 ‘‘Molecule of the
Year.’’5
12
Fuller called his geometry ‘‘synergetics,’’ or the ‘‘geometry of thinking.’’ Its basic approach is
‘‘the exploratory strategy of starting with the whole …’’ From such thinking about housing in an
integral way, for example, he came up with the startling innovations for which he is justly
famous—geodesic domes and the ‘Dymaxion Dwelling Machine’ most notable among them.
Fuller’s geometry is founded upon triangles and tetrahedra—as is all the carbon chemistry of
organic life—and leaves behind the square, cubical and gridiron forms which still saddle most
conventional architecture. Indeed, Fuller’s synergetics goes well beyond architecture altogether,
into the very structure of matter and the shape-shiftings of the cosmos at large. So
it helps to consider his ‘‘geometry of thinking’’ not as some abstract mathematical
formalism, but as an artistic exploration, an adventure of the creative imagination. No one
ever took Einstein’s relativity more to heart than Fuller; everything is constitutively
related to everything else. Bucky Fuller’s achievement was to articulate these very basic
relationships of matter and energy in meticulous detail, and to find practical applications
everywhere, most of which are still well ahead of their time. His innovations span
so many fields of science and engineering so adroitly that Marshall McLuhan may
not have been too far off the mark in dubbing Fuller ‘‘the Leonardo da Vinci of our
time.’’6
13 Over
the course of 1995, those who knew him or were touched by him in life celebrated the Centennial
of Bucky’s birth. Since then, the nostalgic Goodman/Simon American Masters PBS
production Thinking Out Loud has offered rare and touching glimpses of both the
public and private man from half a century of documentary footage, and J. Baldwin
has commenced in his Bucky Works a long overdue reexamination of the continuing
utility of Fuller’s many technical innovations for coming to grips with present-day
ecological and economic dilemmas. But lacking the magic of Bucky’s personality, his
legend has otherwise quickly faded from the media spotlight. Architecture critic Allan
Temko is probably right to call the Expo Dome the apogee of Fuller’s career; in 1967,
Bucky was incontestably the most famous structural designer in the world. An entire
generation has since come of age who have never felt for themselves the magnetic
influence of Buckminster Fuller, or tested the strength his ideas against their own
experience.
14 The best chance for newcomers to ‘meet’ Bucky has probably been provided by D. W. Jacob’s
remarkably comprehensive one-man play, ‘‘R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of
the Universe,’’ performed memorably by Ron Campbell first at the San Diego Repertory Theater
in the Spring of 2000, and then to multiple return engagements in San Francisco and
elsewhere ever since. Next best would have to be the very extensive traveling museum
exhibit, Your Private Sky, mounted by the Zürich Museum für Gestaltung which toured
Europe in 2000 and Asia in 2001. The vast photographic tome compiled from this
exhibition by Joachim Krause and Claude Lichtenstein delves deeply back into the Fuller
archives to bring to light many previously unremarked aspects of Fuller’s early formative
years.7
15 Of
course the past decade has divulged a rich harvest of fresh and sometimes astonishing discoveries
associated with Carbon 60 and its molecular family, the ‘fullerenes.’ In April 1996, for instance,
marine geo-chemists Luann Becker and Jeffrey Bada detailed in Science their findings that
naturally occurring ‘Buckyballs’—hollow soccer-balls of soot, each made of 60 or 70 carbon
atoms—were created by a meteor the size of Mt. Everest crashing into the Ontario region nearly
two billion years ago, and appear to contain gases from a distant star that expired long before
our own sun even ignited—making these the oldest complex molecules so far found on
Earth.8
Fuller would have been delighted by such findings. There are no native sources of carbon on
planet Earth, yet all organic lifeforms are carbon-based. Where did it (and eventually all of us)
come from? We are all made of star-stuff, Bucky used to say; in light of today’s evidence, he
might have added that the death of such stars (particularly in their red giant phase, when main
sequence stars like our Sun become prolific producers of carbon) may well have helped kick-start
the carbon chemistry of life on this planet. But such new findings reflect only the most indirect
credit on their namesake.
16 What
is the measure of a man? His ideas and accomplishments? Of course. His friends, followers,
influence? Yes, all of these. But above all, and in a sense beneath all these there is something
else—a character, a style of thinking, a certain spirit, a way of being. In this respect, Buckminster
Fuller was a man distinguished by the depth of his determination to think for himself, to
resolutely go his own way in both words and works. In 1927, at about age 33, Fuller decided to
stop speaking until he could rid himself of received opinions, untested assumptions and speech
patterns not his own. When he resumed speaking a year later, the results were altogether
unusual. Thinking, he had decided, meant weeding out irrelevancies. Henceforward, he
would speak only of matters he had found to be true in his own experience, or of
things which could be tested by experiment. Not surprisingly, both his new way of
speaking and the style of thought behind it were unique and, to many people, quite
incomprehensible.
17 For Fuller, the sun does not rise or set, there is no up and no down (on our spheroidal Earth),
and there are no solids or straight lines in all Universe. If you had just heard or read about
such assertions, which aim to carry Einstein’s postulates to their logical term, you
might well come away scratching your head. But when Fuller began to show people
what he was talking and thinking about by building elegant models—Try it! Hands
on! See for yourself!—his approach became strikingly clear. Buckminster Fuller had
hit upon an entirely novel way not only of expressing himself, but of relating to the
Universe at large. Indeed, he devoted his life to finding ways for people to work with
Nature’s principles, rather than building, dwelling and thinking against or in spite of the
patterned dynamisms of the natural world. On his deathbed Albert Einstein said he
found himself facing Ernest Haeckel’s famous question, which may yet turn out to
be crucial for our own ecologically-stricken era: ‘‘Is the universe friendly?’’ In 1971,
Ezra Pound called Bucky Fuller ‘‘friend of the universe,’’ an epithet which suggests
that here at least is a man whose life and work offers a resounding ‘‘Yes!’’ to that
query.9
18
Fuller saw in technology the human mind at work finding ways to do ‘‘more and more with less
and less,’’ using Nature’s bounty without abusing her limits. Early on, he made a
distinction between ‘Brain,’ which he saw mainly as a mechanism for storing particular,
special-case experiences and ‘Mind,’ which he saw as the capacity to learn, to discover the
generalized principles which connect such experiences and make them meaningful. ‘Brain’ is
physical and local; ‘Mind’ metaphysical and, he would insist, universal. Just so, he
came to consider all of his inventions and buildings as no more than models, graphic
demonstrations of what could be done by a mind in tune with Nature. And for those of us who
come after Fuller, his works offer the possibility of an alternative science, a way of
exploring natural and human possibilities for ‘livingry,’ as he called it, rather than
weaponry.
19 With Fuller’s models in their hands, Einstein’s universe is intuitively and spontaneously
comprehensible by children. All children are born geniuses, he used to say, until parents and
schools teach them to distrust their own innate sense of the truth. And it is in those children that
Fuller’s hope for the future resided, perhaps because he managed to preserve in his own way of
looking at things so many of those richly creative characteristics we associate with children:
unflagging curiosity coupled with delight in the unknown and unexpected. The motto for his
magnum opus, Synergetics; explorations in the geometry of thinking, was ‘‘Dare to be naive.’’
Not the whole picture, to be sure, but an important aspect of a man who claimed that he
was not a genius, but rather only an average human being with ‘‘a terrific bundle of
experiences.’’10
1.1American Dreamers
20There
are many ways of assessing Bucky Fuller’s legacy. But picking about in the charred ruins of the
once-glittering American Pavilion for Expo ‘67, it doesn’t take long to realize one is also picking
one’s way through some other remnants as well, torn cast-offs from the very fabric of the
American dream itself. To see how deeply the texture of Fuller’s own vision is woven into the
many-layered historical tapestry of the American dream, we must first try to sort the living
strands from tangled skein of lost hopes and shredded dreams it has become, and then try to
stitch those strands together in some semblance of the original pattern. Betsy Ross had it
easy…
21 Once there really was an American dream. No, not the materialistic one with two of
everything: two kids in the big house, two cars in the garage, two pets in the yard, two bank
accounts, and maybe two marriages before you get it all right. The original American dream was
part of the spirit of this place, this land, this Turtle Island as the Iroquois call North America. Its
homeplace was not the Great Plains or the desert Southwest or the Rocky Mountains or the
California goldfields. It belonged to New England, or to be precise, to the Northeast
woodlands more or less centered on today’s New England. It was alive there when the
white settlers first arrived from England, it was kept alive for a couple of hundred
years by remarkable individuals and even more remarkable communities and Utopian
experiments. Its spirit was that of a bold, pragmatic, reflective, self-reliant people who found
themselves in a rich land and attuned themselves to its possibilities for new sorts of human
dwelling. It has perhaps never been quite so clearly articulated as by Ralph Waldo
Emerson:
23We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the
American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame…What
is the remedy?…If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts,
and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience,—patience;
with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace the
perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and communication
of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world
…We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will
speak our own minds. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because
each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all
men.11
24 ‘‘Life
alone avails, not the having lived,’’ declared Emerson, casting off the shell of European
conventions as he sought a new birth of the soul appropriate to a new land. As a thinker, it is
entirely appropriate to situate Fuller within the tradition of American transcendentalism best
exemplified by Emerson, who happens to have been a close friend of Fuller’s famous great-aunt,
Margaret Fuller. He himself referred to her glittering nineteenth-century circle of New England
literati as ‘‘the small coterie of thinkers who formed the original nucleus of an American
culture.’’12
With all the optimism of his transcendentalist predecessors, Bucky would steadfastly maintain
that humans were meant to be a success on this planet—and all the apparent evidence in the
world to the contrary would never dissuade him from this conviction; our immediate prospects, in
his phrase, were ‘‘utopia, or oblivion.’’ Work against Nature’s principles, he would say, and you
will find yourself thwarted at every turn. Work with Nature’s principles, and the Universe itself
pitches in to help. There is at work in every human endeavor a larger mind, something like the
very soul of Nature. Harking back to this ancient tradition of the living Universe or anima
mundi, Emerson spoke of the ‘Over-Soul,’ and Fuller of the intellectual integrity of
Universe. The following passage is vintage Emerson, but presages Fuller in both spirit and
substance:
26Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy.
The cell of the bee is built at that angle which gives the most strength with the
least wax; the bone or quill of the bird gives the most alar strength. ‘It is the
purgation of superfluities,’ said Michel Angelo. There is not a particle to spare in
natural structures.13
27 Like
Emerson, Fuller chose to rely primarily on his own experiences in order to discover the intimate
secrets and principles by which the Universe cohered. He once wrote:
29I did not set out to design a house that hung from a pole or to manufacture a new
type of automobile, invent a new system of map projection, develop geodesic
domes or Energetic Geometry. I started with the Universe—as an organization
of regenerative principles frequently manifest as energy systems of which all
our experiences, and possible experiences, are only local instances. I could have
ended up with a pair of flying slippers.
30 Here the analogy with Leonardo da Vinci is just about
irresistible.14
Lacking (and professing to scorn) the classical book-learning that ruled the academy of his time,
the West’s first supremely inventive ‘‘disciple of experience’’ also resolved to put himself directly
under the tutelage of Nature, for reasons similar to Bucky’s:
32Although human ingenuity makes various inventions, corresponding by various
machines to the same end, it will never discover any inventions more beautiful,
more appropriate or more direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing
is lacking and nothing superfluous.15
33
As for Bucky, there seems to be something in the New England air that fosters
a non-conformist individuality; it’s practically an indigenous tradition. Fuller was
raised in this atmosphere, in Massachusetts, and spent much time in later life on his
family estate on Bear Island, Maine. However radical his ideas, he always dressed
like a straitlaced New England Protestant minister making his rounds—of ‘Spaceship
Earth.’16
He imbibed his independent spirit early, even managing the dubious distinction of being the only
person ever to be expelled from Harvard University twice. (In his last years, he held the
Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard, perhaps a unique experience for a
Harvard maverick.) But the complex of notions that guided his work—that nature
is the best teacher, that technology moves toward a refined simplicity of life, that
industry should meet basic human needs like housing, and that such pragmatic concerns
are not in the least divorced from spirituality—seems to be basic to the New England
temperament.
34 From
the early seventeenth century onward, villages in New England and environs exhibited what has
sometimes been called ‘Yankee communism,’ a spirit of corporate co-partnership carried over to
this day in communal barn-raising amongst the Pennsylvania Dutch, for example. It did
not escape the eye of the ever-perspicacious Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed in
1831:
36The Americans…show with complacency how an enlightened regard for
themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them
willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the
state.17…The
free institutions which the inhabitants of the United States possess, and the
political rights of which they make so much use, remind every citizen…that he
lives in society. They every instant impress upon his mind the notion that it is
the duty as well as the interest of men to make themselves useful to their fellow
creatures.18
37
Citing such passages, Hector Garcia writes in the present day of the urgent need for
America to rediscover this sense of ‘cultural complementarity’: ‘‘It seems that
the origin of American excellence might have been more about cooperation than
competition.’’19
Six decades earlier, Dartmouth historian and jurist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy had seen just this:
‘‘ ‘Co-operate’ is the most striking phrase of the American vocabulary. For concrete co-operation, not
for abstract philosophy, reason was given to men…[the] co-operative reasoning of the men of good
will.’’20
Unfortunately, for America as for human nature generally, this communitarian spirit seems more
likely to emerge in times of disaster—in the aftermath of the 1992 Loma Prieta earthquake in San
Francisco, for instance, or in the extraordinary self-sacrifice of so many New Yorkers during the
9/11 terrorist attack—than in times of ease, when squabbling and petty competition seem to be
the rule. Lately, historian Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University has reinforced
not only the outlines of the original American Dream—he sees it as a focus on the
transcendent (God, Nation) which manifests itself in practical, community-based cooperative
action—but also just how far indeed twentieth-century America had strayed from those early
ideals.21
38 Many
of the cooperative traits of such self-sufficient villages were carried to their logical term by the
famed Shaker communities: ‘Hands to Work, Hearts to God.’ The Shakers continued and in some
aspects intensified the communal early American pattern, itself really a vestigial form of the
medieval European village, although elsewhere such communalism was already giving way—either
to the rough-and-ready pioneer mentality, or to the cities as commercial centers. Right through
the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, each Shaker village was more or less self-sufficient
in normal times; yet all participated in a larger pattern of shared faith, institutions, and
techniques.
39 After he and Nathaniel Hawthorne visited a Shaker Village in the Nashua River Valley during
a walking tour in the Autumn of 1842, Emerson was moved to compare the ‘socialist’ Shaker
community to a single great ‘capitalist.’ (Before Marx, one might make such comparisons.) He
wrote:
41They have fifteen hundred acres here, a tract of woodland in Ashburnham,
and a sheep pasture somewhere else, enough to supply the wants of the two
hundred souls in this family. They are in many ways an interesting society, but
at present have an additional importance as an experiment of socialism…What
improvement is made is made forever; this capitalist is old and never dies,
his subsistence was long ago secured, and he has gone on now for long scores
of years in adding easily compound interests to his stock. Moreover, this
settlement is of great value in the heart of the country as a model-farm, in
the absence of rural nobility…Here are improvements invented, or adopted
from other Shaker communities, which the neighboring farmers see and
copy…22
42
Indeed, the Shakers never shared the bias against technology of the Amish or many another early
American Utopian experiment. For the Shakers, the Kingdom had already come. They considered
their foundress, the redoubtable Ann Lee, to have been the Second Coming. If they were to live
up to their vision, they had to set about creating the conditions of Paradise right here on Earth,
in their own communities. Each settlement was to be an example to the rest of the world: ‘‘No
one will find a spiritual heaven,’’ they used to say, ‘‘until they first create an earthly
heaven.’’23
43 What
would a redeemed human life look like here and now? Coming from all walks of life, they knew
the unsettling effects of unbridled sexuality, and voluntarily adopted a celibate lifestyle. Yet there
were always children aplenty in the Shaker villages, and fine schools for them, since the Shakers
started some of the first American orphanages. Knowing from experience the evils of greed, they
agreed upon communal ownership of lands and goods. Having once felt the sting of persecution,
they advocated religious toleration a full century before the word ‘pluralism’ became
fashionable. And by undertaking collectively the day-to-day chores of maintaining
their communities, they hit upon some remarkably practical improvements. They were
among the first to package and market seeds, herbs and spices. And they invented,
among other utilities, the flat broom, the circular saw, the washing machine and the
clothespin: all labor-saving devices designed to free people from onerous, repetitive
tasks.
44 Their simple, hand-tooled furniture is now by far the most valued body of American antiques.
The Shaker way of life made tangible many of the ideals—thrift, efficiency, industry,
inventiveness—that helped build the young American nation. The works they left behind share a
certain aesthetic not only with Danish modern furniture, but, indeed, with many of Fuller’s own
artifacts: absolutely no frills, a functionalist minimalism which results in a spare and simple
elegance of form. There is one very big difference. Shaker artifacts were all hand-made, and
therefore each unique. Indeed, some scholars say that the Shaker way of life succumbed to
industrialization and mass production, which eventually cut into the market for their products.
And Fuller, more than Hart Crane or any other American, not only built with industrial tools
but saw himself as the epic poet of industrialization. It’s a refraction we shall examine a little
later.
45 Although ‘artificially’ re-opened for newcomers in 1999, the original Shaker Covenant was
intentionally closed in the late 1980s by the last few elderly Shaker Sisters, who have since passed
away. The end for this living focus of the American dream came, says scholar Leonard
Mendelssohn, neither from their celibacy nor from industrialization. It came, says he,
because America is no longer capable of facing up to its own ideals, let alone sustaining
them.24
46 Yet
even in their passing, the Shakers passed on something of that dream and those ideals. It’s still
there; you feel it whenever you visit the quiet, simple buildings and manicured park-like grounds
of one of their model settlements. Here there are no ruins, only the well-preserved shell of a
former life, a tidy utopian vision frozen in time and in place, perhaps awaiting a new realization.
Here you see the remnants of a vision that was more or less fully realized, and that lived out its
natural life-span.
47 The neglected, burned-out, rubble-strewn shell of Bucky Fuller’s Expo Dome, on the other
hand, would strike the latter-day visitor in exactly the opposite way. Here, too, was a utopian
vision, but of what? Where did such a powerful idea come from, and why has it all been left to
fall apart? What was intended to happen here? And what would Fuller’s vision look like, had it
too been lived out and fully realized? Before even trying to answer, we need to excavate the
American Dream just a bit further, in order to discern the peculiar way it informs and intersects
Fuller’s own vision.
1.2The Original Vision
48The American dream has always been to some extent an immigrant’s vision—of economic
opportunity, of political liberation, of back-to-the-Earth rusticity, or religious millenarianism. But
through this lens, we see only what the newcomers sought; the other face of privations
suffered in their homelands. Yet the American dream was also what the new arrivals
found when they arrived on these American shores. Indeed, if we permit ourselves
to dig down a little deeper in our speculative archaeology, there seems to be a very
special ingredient rooted in the native soil, a unique spirituality to this bio-region, a
mindscape that also belongs to this landscape, part and parcel of the distinct seasons and
mountains and changing winds, and part also of the human character these all tend to
mold.
49 In this sense, Emerson and Thoreau in their self-reliance, as well as the Shakers in their
Kingdom-already-come, were themselves only inheritors of the original American dream. The
early Americans were English or European men and women who found themselves in a rich and
abundant land, which they took to be a gift from God. In this attitude, they were not alone. And
from this angle, it may well be a very old dream indeed, from an ancient people who never
acted without taking into account the effects of their every action down to the seventh
generation.
50 Partly because Bucky rarely took note of cultural context, it falls to us to wrestle with the
implications of the fact that he built his Expo Dome on Indian land. The Northeastern
Woodlands sheltered native inhabitants of two distinct language families: the Algonquian
speakers were mainly nomadic hunters; their less numerous Iroquoian neighbors were both
hunters and agriculturalists, living in settled communities, and visiting the St. Lawrence and
Montréal areas only as distant hunting grounds.
51 The Shakers, as it happened, first settled in the Mohawk River valley, near present-day Albany,
NY. Only a few months before the Shakers arrived, this area had been at the heart of the
Mohawk Nation, Elder Brothers of the Iroquois Confederacy. The first Shaker meeting houses
even echoed the Mohawk longhouse architecturally, with its open dancing floor and separate
entrances for men and for women. And when the Shakers danced there the ecstatic,
shuffling ‘Bruin’ dances that became their namesake, they recorded that ‘old Indian
Spirits’ sometimes spoke to them. What did the early Shakers hear in those old Indian
voices?
53 We may only speculate, but surely they knew they were setting up their community on
Mohawk lands. The Iroquois Confederacy embodied not only the first disarmament treaty
(‘burying the hatchet’ under the white roots of the great Tree of Peace) but the first genuinely
United Nations in human history (which in turn became the prototype for the division of powers
in the eventual US Government). The Iroquois League would have been the immigrants’ first
encounter with a fully functional democratic society, coming as they all did from the old and
despotic monarchies of Europe. If these ‘savages’ can do it, Benjamin Franklin once wrote, why
can’t we? He, Madison and Jefferson made sure that the Iroquois Chiefs were consulted in
drafting the original US Articles of Confederation, modeled on their Confederacy, and the
Iroquois were the first to recognize the new American nation even after it took a more
centralized, federal turn.
54 The Shakers would have seen what was left of the fertile farmlands and orchards the native
peoples had left behind when the newly federalized Americans turned upon them. This may
indeed be the saddest part of our archaeology of the American dream buried in Bucky Fuller’s
work. In 1779, George Washington ordered General Sullivan and his 3,000 soldiers to
totally destroy the villages of the Iroquois Confederacy. It was one of the most shameful
episodes in American history—from our angle, no less than an attempted murder of the
native American dream—and deserves a moment of our reflection. Historian Page Smith
writes:
56Sullivan’s campaign was the most ruthless application of a scorched-earth
policy in American history. It bears comparison with Sherman’s march to the
sea or the search-and-destroy missions of American soldiers in the Vietnam
war. The Iroquois Confederacy was the most advanced Indian federation in
the New World. It had made a territory that embraced the central quarter of
New York State into an area of flourishing farms with well-cultivated fields
and orchards and sturdy houses. Indeed, I believe it could be argued that
the Iroquois had carried cooperative agriculture far beyond anything that
the white settlers had achieved. In little more than a month all of this had
been wiped out, the work of several generations of loving attention to the
soil…25
57 But
the dream did not die. It metamorphosed, as we have seen. So what did it mean to begin
with?
58 The interpreter of dreams may be allowed a certain latitude not permitted the historian…What
we glimpse from the very beginning is a dream or, if you like, an ideal of cooperation.
Even the most ‘rugged’ individualist cannot stand alone for long through the harsh
winters of the Northeast Atlantic region. The European model had always been one
of dependence upon a central authority: mon-archy, one leader, one principle. The
rhetoric of the emerging American republic was a cry for independence from all that,
autonomy. But the reality of their lives puts the rhetoric in perspective. The picture we see
is one of bold individualists indeed capable of standing alone in their thinking, but
inevitably drawn into natural alliances with one another: the Shakers trading with the
new American polity, giving and taking selectively; Emerson standing by the younger
Thoreau in the latter’s civil disobedience and rejection of society’s constraints and
conventions. Solzhenitsyn’s hermit posture was not a native New England stance;
and indeed, he could hardly have maintained his absolute privacy without the aid of
his neighbors. Even at the very start, when John Winthrop and the Puritans came
over the Atlantic in 1630 to found the Massachusetts Bay colony, their biblical ‘city
upon a hill,’ they saw that the pilgrims from the Mayflower voyage nearly a decade
earlier had already made common cause with the indigenous inhabitants. The only
native American religious holiday, still celebrated by Americans and Canadians alike,
purportedly commemorates the harvest they celebrated together so long ago. The Pequods of
Massachusetts were eventually exterminated by the colonists in the War of 1637. The
neighboring Mohawks, though literally decimated to one-tenth of their original numbers,
did however survive with most of their customs, tribal structures, language, and lore
intact.
60Our creator made all of life with nothing lacking. All we humans are required
to do is waste no life and be grateful daily to all life. And so we gather all our
minds into one and send our greetings and our thanksgiving to our maker, our
creator.
61 So ends one version of the famous Thanksgiving Address of the Iroquois League, the proper
ceremonial opening for any important occasion, which often takes the better part of an hour to
perform.26
The pilgrims didn’t really ‘originate’ Thanksgiving at their Plymouth colony in December, 1621.
They merely ‘observed’ in their own way the harvest festival and thanksgiving ceremony of the
native inhabitants, along with the appropriate native foods—wild turkeys, pumpkins,
cranberries—which enabled them to survive that first long, cold winter.
62 Mark
the main themes: Life—not just as a given, but as gift. The clear mind is the thankful mind, say
the Mohawk elders. And Nature—not just as raw material for ‘development,’ but as the
way things are. Waste not, want not. Finally, interdependence—the rule of Life for
people, indeed, but in reciprocity with the entire natural world. When Christians say
grace, they thank God for the food. But the Indians always thanked the food, too. The
traditional Thanksgiving Address scales the entire Creation—Earth, water, animals,
trees, edible plants, birds, the sun, moon and stars—before addressing its final thanks
to the Creator. When the Europeans departed for the ‘New’ World, some came by
reason of faith alone, others put their faith in reason alone, but all had voluntarily cut
themselves off from their roots in their own native soil. Yet once they arrived, they
found a living network of vital relationships already awaiting them on ‘New England’
soil.
63 Long before this first meeting of Europeans and Native Americans, the peoples of this
continent had known, and recognized, a great genius—a figure quite as remarkable in his own
context as a Jesus of Nazareth, or a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King in theirs. His own
name was Deganawidah, but it is sacrilegious to call him by name. He is remembered
only as the Peacemaker. He was a Huron, who came unarmed to Mohawk territory
(mainly encompassed by the central quarter of today’s New York State). Together with
his disciple Aionwahtha (Hiawatha), he began a process which eventually brought
peace to five, and later six, tribes long at war with one another: Seneca, Onondaga,
Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida and, later, Tuscarora. Out of his vision, steadfast courage and
remarkable political innovations, the Iroquois Confederacy was born. Scholars and native
peoples disagree as to whether this all happened in the century or two before the white
settlers arrived, or several centuries earlier. But in any case, and contrary to the many
Western preconceptions which Robert Vachon’s extensive and intensive intercultural
work convincingly debunks, the Confederacy was neither an empire nor a nation of
warriors.27
The Peacemaker outlined a set of kinship relations, a great extended family of peoples—Clan
Mothers, Elder and Younger Brothers, etc.,—each with different languages and customs, who
nonetheless agreed to meet in peaceful council at a Central Fire, rather than imposing a single
‘kingship’ regime of the sort familiar to Europeans.
64 What
the Peacemaker taught instead was KAYANEREKOWA, the Great Law of Peace, and the
people who lived according to his teachings came to call themselves the People of the
Great Peace. They still do. Even today, in the face of all sorts of political, military,
religious, and social pressures from the modern American and Canadian nation-states, the
Confederacy lives on. And here, I submit, we finally touch ground. Here may well be
the oldest stratum, the foundation level of the American dream we’ve been trying to
excavate.
65 During the final decade of the twentieth century, the Mohawk communities straddling the
borderlands between the United States and Canada were torn apart by bitter conflicts, both
internal and external. So-called Warriors supported by gambling money and cigarette smuggling
were vying for power with the Band Council, supported by fat paychecks from the Canadian
government. An armed stand-off with the Canadian army in 1991 went on for weeks. The
traditional people, still the majority, were caught in the middle. Weary of all the fighting, and
frustrated that the Iroquois Great Law of Peace has been so blatantly flouted, some of them
determined to return to their ancient homeland, the ‘Land of Flint’ on the Mohawk River near
Albany, NY. It is called the ‘Clean Pot’ movement, implying a fresh start. Some kind
soul has deeded a parcel of their original land back to them, so that such a move
at last looks feasible, although the politics and logistics may yet turn out to be a
nightmare.28
Iroquois people have always been a dream culture, following their dreams even if they sometimes
seem to defy the logic of the daytime world. Once upon a time, you recall, they built a dome in
Montréal for Bucky Fuller. And today some of the elders are dreaming of a return to their
homeland and traditional ways, a visionary feat which would have to span the highest idealism
with the most down-to-earth practicality. Once again, they are building without scaffolding.
Maybe there will always be American dreamers, even if America at the turn of a new millennium
remains oblivious to them.
1.3The Way Things Are
66By now
you may well be wondering what all this ancient history has to do with Bucky Fuller and his
domes. Patience; we are nearly done digging. There is more at stake here than collective amnesia
about the original American dream, or the bald fact that it was the Mohawks who actually
built Bucky Fuller’s Expo Dome in 1967 on Ile St. Hélène, itself once Mohawk land.
At the deepest level, what is at stake is a matter of principle. Indeed, the Iroquois
Great Law calls into question the very way we conceive of ‘laws’ or ‘principles’ of
Nature.
67 Westerners tend to think of ‘law’ as something man-made, a principle or set of principles
discovered by the human mind and imposed upon the things of the natural world or, indeed,
upon human nature itself. The Iroquois Great Law, by contrast, is a recognition of the Law
already there in Nature herself, an attunement to the ‘Way’ things are—the original plan of the
Creator. Westerners, moreover, tend to see the natural world as fundamentally flawed, or
incomplete, or even sinful; it is merely raw material to be developed to human ends. The
Iroquois, in concert with many traditional societies the world over, have always seen Nature
as pretty good and complete just as it stands: an order, a peace and harmony to be
preserved.
68 This, then, is the first Law, to which human life, customs and institutions ought to be attuned.
It is a way of Life already ‘written’ into the patterned energies and dynamisms of the natural
world: all things ‘are’ always and only in intimate and constitutive relation with one another, i.e.,
interdependence. All that is needful for a fully human life has already been given. The way to
realize this law in human affairs, it follows, is neither by compulsion nor competition, but by
cooperation—with one another, with Nature herself, and with the spiritual power, manitou,
surging through her every fiber.
1.3.1A Tale of Two Museums
69The American dream of ‘cooperation’ between different peoples leading to a new polity, always
in tune with the reciprocating ‘way of Nature,’ has been articulated in many ways.
Largely, the holistic vision we have discerned at its root has been displaced by monistic
and dualistic models—the ideal of cooperative ‘confederacy’ displaced in America by
compulsory federalism with its ‘melting pot’ ideal, and in Canada by competitive
‘provincialism’ with its own ideal of a cultural ‘mosaic.’ (Which may be why each polity is so
susceptible to its contrary: bland conformity in Canada, cut-throat competition in
America.) And just where might we expect to find these two visions, the mosaic and the
melting pot, enshrined and architecturally embodied? In the ‘national’ museums, of
course…
70 The Smithsonian in Washington, DC: a hodge-podge of buildings designed in different epochs
for different purposes. A place for everything, everything in its place. ‘Civilization’ resides in the
artifacts from mainstream Western sources, duly preserved in the arts museums, as well
as in the aerospace museum where even the ‘future’ is enshrined. All other cultures,
even native American until very recently, have been lumped together in the ‘Natural’
History museum next to the stuffed animals and dinosaur skeletons. One big melting
pot.
71 Canada’s Museum of Civilization in Ottawa: one design concept, by a single architect—flowing
tiers of stone set into the curving river, the flow of time as organizing principle. ‘Civilization’
here is the upsweep of evolution from the Grand Hall of native artifacts through the many waves
of immigrants—Basque whalers, French settlers, English soldiers—all the way up to a
nineteenth century Main Street. You follow the pattern by climbing the stairs, but
nobody’s allowed to peek into the attic where the future must be hidden. Unfinished
mosaic.
72 Surprisingly, something else has recently surfaced, within yet beyond both images: Bill Reid’s
huge Black Canoe jam-packed with shape-shifting spirits from Haida Gwaii today faces the
Smithsonian from the Canadian Chancery, while its white plaster cast now adorns the Museum
of Civilization. The feat of bi-location is telling. Each mythic form—Bear, Wolf, Eagle, Beaver,
etc.—strains to pull the boat in its own direction, yet each is pulled inescapably into the medley of
other forms. Raven is at the helm and his way, ‘so I have heard,’ is to go through endless
transformations.
73 Maybe it’s time we North Americans found a new metaphor for ourselves: whether
figured as a mosaic or a melting pot, it’s beginning to look like we’re all in the same
boat.
74 The Shakers no doubt felt and lived it too, in their millennial Christian way. For them, as for
most medieval and renaissance thinkers, the Book of God’s Word (the Bible) and the
Book of God’s Works (Nature), were ultimately the same Book. ‘‘I never feel closer to
God,’’ said Eldress Gertrude Soule about a month before she died in 1988, ‘‘than
when I am walking in these forests and fields and pastures.’’ Emerson and Thoreau,
too, borrowed a leaf from that Book when they spoke of communion with the very
‘Soul’ of Nature. In ‘Worship,’ a late essay from his Conduct of Life, Emerson took
to task any soft-headed moralists who ignored this connection between Spirit and
Nature:
76The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which
works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing. I
find the omnipresence and the almightiness in the reaction of every atom in
Nature. I can best indicate by examples those reactions by which every part of
Nature replies to the purpose of the actor,—beneficently to the good, penally
to the bad. Let us replace sentimentalism by realism, and dare to uncover
those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and
govern.29
77 And
for Buckminster Fuller, the single word which sums much of this up is synergy. It is a Greek
word, which basically means ‘working together.’ Now that every other business in the Western
world seems to have adopted ‘synergy’ as its middle name—a tendency which hit a
new low when Mobil Oil trade-marked its latest multi-additive gasoline concoction
Synergy®— it may be worthwhile to glance back at the word’s venerable origins. It is a
theological word which retained currency in Fuller’s time solely in chemistry, for the
unique behaviors of compounds. Yet St. Paul had used it in his Epistles (Rom. 8:28; I
Cor. 3:9) to illustrate not a static but a dynamic conception of human, divine and cosmic
cooperation:
79I did the planting, Apollos the watering, but God made things grow…We are
fellow workers (synergoi)30
with God; you are God’s farm, God’s building.
80
In his modern and scientific context, Fuller uses the word ‘synergy’ to describe ‘‘the
behavior of whole systems unpredictable from the behavior of their parts taken
separately.’’31
He liked to claim it is the only word in English which describes this unique behavior of whole
systems, always something greater than the sum of their component parts. By his time—after the
mechanized slaughter of the First World War and the killer flu that followed in its wake—religion
and politics no longer seemed to be viable arenas for Utopian visionaries. They had pretty much
yielded the field to science and technology. Fuller, very much a man of his historical moment in
this respect, considered all political and religious systems parochial and atavistic. Yet he was
their inheritor. He inherited above all the belief in open-ended progress—itself part of
the age-old Western quest to transcend this world—in its streamlined, evolutionary
twentieth-century form. Like Francis Bacon, he put his faith in the empirical methods of science.
Following the utilitarians, he sought the greatest good for the greatest number of his fellow
humans…though he did not find this ‘good’ in terms of the greatest pleasure (Bentham, Mill),
nor the greatest financial gain (Adam Smith, Ricardo, Keynes), like so many of his
contemporaries.
81 And
he made a great discovery. He was not the first to see it, to be sure, but I would say he was the
first to see clearly these metaphysical patterns which govern physical changes through the hi-tech
lenses provided by modern science. How did he find it? The novelty of his approach was the very
personal way he took Einstein’s relativity as a license to re-envision the entire universe of human
experience. Instead of a static Newtonian world of separate ‘things’ whose normal state was to
stay pretty much the way they always were, Fuller saw the universe as a dynamic
complex of interconnected energy events: a fluxus quo. Can we discern the form the flux
takes?
82 In mapping the structures of this dynamic universe, Bucky deliberately chose, moreover, not to
follow the piecemeal, hyper-specialized approach of most science in his day. Fuller’s
understanding of himself as a scientist took its inspiration from Sir Arthur Eddington’s definition
of science as the systematic attempt to set in order the facts of experience. In this sense, despite
his very up-to-date scientific information, he was more like a natural philosopher in the
nineteenth-century English (Lyell, Darwin) or American (Emerson, William James)
mold, still seeking to embrace the Whole. Indeed, one is reminded of Galileo’s early
formulation of the scientist’s quest to ‘read’ the Book of Nature in a comprehensive
way:
84Philosophy is written in that very large book that is continually opened before
our eyes (I mean the universe), but which is not understood unless one first
studies the language and knows the characters in which it is written. The
language of that book is mathematical and the characters are triangles, circles,
and other geometric figures.32
85 In a
sense, Buckminster Fuller claimed nothing less than to have read that Book, in its original
language of images. Synergetics is his exegesis of it, a grammar of this language of
images. What Bucky did uncover—or ‘discover,’ if you suppose as he did that he was
the first to do so—was a matrix of interconnections which also turned out to be the
matrix for all these transformations: ‘‘Nature’s Coordinate System,’’ he boldly called
it. Here is Fuller recounting his own quest in Utopia or oblivion: the prospects for
humanity:
87In 1917, I found myself asserting that I didn’t think nature had a department
of chemistry, a department of mathematics, a department of physics, and
a department of biology and had to have meetings of department heads
in order to decide what to do when you drop your stone in the water.
Universe, i.e. nature, obviously knows just what to do, and everything seemed
beautifully coordinate. The lily pads did just what they should do, and the
fish did just what they should do. Everything went sublimely, smoothly. So
I thought that nature probably had one coordinate system and probably
one most economical arithmetical and geometric system with which to
interaccount all transactions and transformations. And I thought also that
it was preposterous when I was told that real models are not employed
in advanced science, because science was able to deal with nature by use
of completely unmodelable mathematical abstractions. I could not credit
that universe suddenly went abstract at some micro-level of investigation,
wherefore you had to deal entirely with abstract-formula, unmodelable
mathematics…I thought then that if we could find nature’s own coordinate
system we would understand the models and would be able to develop
much higher exploratory and application capability. I felt that if we ever
found nature’s coordinate system, it would be very simple and always
rational.33
Figure 1.2.:
The Coordinate System of Nature, alias Octet Truss. Thickest lines are
elements nearest you and (despite effect of perspective) all members are
the same length. Start at bottom left. 1. First-level triangular grid. 2.
Tetrahedra, pointing away from you, with octahedra (3) appearing between
them. 4. Second-level grid joins tips of tetrahedra. 5. Next array of tetrahedra.
6. Dotted lines show third-level grid. This can be continued indefinitely.
Twelve-way vertices (7) in second level are centers of vector equilibrium. (From
Hugh Kenner, Bucky: a guided tour of Buckminster Fuller, NY (Morrow)
1973. By permission of the William Hugh Kenner Estate.)
Figure 1.3.: Montréal Expo Dome, 1967 (Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.)
1.4Geoscope
90Bucky Fuller wanted to build a Geoscope under his Montréal dome. His original plan was
rejected by the US Information Agency, the ever-smiling propaganda arm of the US government,
in favor of a display featuring gee-whiz scientific gew-gaws like a monorail ride and a space
capsule, American pop culture pin-ups like Marilyn Monroe, and some picturesque mylar
balloons and multi-coloured parachutes floating in the dome’s upper reaches. So for reasons of its
own, the US government gutted Fuller’s dome long before fire finished the job. He was retained
as architect of the building, which amounted to little more than the shell of his original vision for
Expo ‘67.
92 I have been at pains to bring the New England context of Fuller’s vision up into high relief in
order to emphasize its distinctively American character. Although global and in some ways
abstract, both what Fuller was looking for and what he found had local roots. Indeed much of
the world today sees ‘globalization’ as nothing more nor less than global ‘Americanization,’
although Americans tend not to see the baggage they carry with them into the world at
large. This paradoxical contrast—global vision as a local phenomenon—is all the more
striking since Fuller himself so relentlessly emphasizes its planetary consequences. His
Geoscope was an idea, first hinted at in his early 4D time lock , and never in fact fully
realized. It was to be a miniature Earth through which one could discern all sorts
of trends and phenomena not detectable by ordinary human senses—movements of
populations, resource distribution, long-term patterns of discovery (e.g., of the periodic table)
or invention. It would permit computer modelling on a vast scale, and serve as the
ultimate playing field for the World Game, Bucky’s inventory of Earth’s resources
and deployments. It was one of the main tools he hoped to use to ‘make the world
work.’
93 What then is the connection between the local roots I have been stressing and Bucky’s global,
indeed planetary, vision? There are many factors, of course—extrapolations of his ‘geometry of
thinking,’ for example, as we shall see later—but I would single out one: the sea. New Englanders
have always been seafarers, and Bucky was no exception. Fuller looked at the planet with a
sailor’s eye; he always claimed that his generalized Navy training as a midshipman in the First
World War was his introduction to comprehensive, world-around thinking. Seafaring technology
inspired him by its elegant efficiency, and the seafarer’s world-around experience lent credibility
to his own planetary ‘designs.’ Landlubbers take ‘solid’ things to be real; they find comfort in
national sovereignties, in the assurances of institutionalized religion, in the reforms advocated by
politicians. Fuller knew that once you set sail, it’s just you and the elements. You
leave your drawing room theories behind, and learn to survive in the real world. You
have to know how to sail with the wind, and when to tack into the wind. You have to
work with Nature at her most elemental if you’re going to get where you want to
go.
94 Now the Earth’s land masses are all ultimately islands in the one great interconnecting World
Sea, just as the ‘solids’ or compressive members in Fuller’s tensegrity figures are ‘islanded’ in an
elastic continuum of tension. Go back to Herman Melville’s exotic South Seas journeys, or recall
the uncannily precise knowledge of the world’s oceans his New Bedford whaling men possessed in
Moby Dick, and you see that New Englanders who made their living from the sea were
thinking in world-around terms for a couple of centuries before Bucky Fuller. The sea
was Fuller’s unfailing source of inspiration. Whether spinning his tales of Polynesian
genesis—where humans evolved in the warm waters of lagoons in the South Seas (a
hypothesis contending quite dramatically over the past decade with the conventional notion
of an African genesis); or his cautionary tales about the Great Pirates—who knew
and exploited the sea routes while everybody else squabbled over chunks of dirt; or
deriving his geometry from watching bubbles form in the wake of a ship—‘‘I knew
then that Nature doesn’t use pi’’; Fuller returned to the sea in his ‘cosmic fishing’ for
ideas at least as often as he returned to his family’s Bear Island estate off the coast of
Maine.34
He had houses in many places—a dome in Carbondale, Illinois, an office in Philadelphia, another
in Los Angeles—but he always seemed most at home at the helm of a sailing ship. When he finally
acquired a seventeen-ton, ocean-going sloop of his own, he christened her Intuition, and as a
memorial of the occasion wrote an epic poem of the same name which remains one of the most
concise and readable summaries of his thinking.
Figure 1.4.: Cornell University Geoscope (Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)
96 For the landlubber, the sea divides. For the seafarer, the sea connects. The difference is
crucial for Fuller’s thinking, and for the way he built things. What most of us see
as solid—the bricks, for example—Fuller sees as discontinuous and often redundant.
What most of us see as discontinuities—the mortar, to stick with our example—Fuller
sees as a continuum, the tensional structure holding any ordinary bricks-and-mortar
building together. Hugh Kenner, in his Bucky, A Guided Tour, cites many other
instances: When most people look at plywood, they see the wood. Bucky saw the
glue.35
And, even more tellingly, when most people look at planet Earth, they see over 180
nation-states, each with clear and distinct borders. Fuller saw one island Earth in one
World Ocean, not unlike the view soon popularized by photos from the NASA space
flights.
97 The
flat Earth mentality Fuller railed against is a landlocked view; order is to be found only within
lines we ourselves have drawn. Landlubbers think the sun rises and sets upon their own fixed
position. On the ocean, however, one senses the swell of the waves, the ebb and flow of the tides,
and even the curvature of the Earth. At night, your sail slices between the sea and the Milky
Way. When Fuller called the Earth a space ship, people criticized him for comparing the
planet to one of NASA’s tin cans floating in the void. Such a view would indeed be
severely reductionist. Yet Fuller’s perspective was exactly the reverse; the Earth is the
proper model, a fully-provisioned sailing craft winging amongst the stars: we are all
astronauts.
98 In the ambitious lecture given in 1962 and published as Education automation: freeing the
scholar to return to his studies: a discourse before the Southern Illinois University,
Edwardsville Campus Planning Committee, April 22, 1961, Fuller already foresaw
an electronically ‘wired’ world gathering all its fundamental survival information to
be fed into a Geoscope ‘hub’ to help coordinate ‘total world planning’ and facilitate
educational ‘comprehensivity.’ He would no doubt be dismayed, now that such a Worldwide
Web is up and running, to discover how today’s Internet has veered into the further
fragmentation of purely self-interested groups furthering their own ideological agendas,
rather than congealing into the total learning ‘environment,’ served by access to all the
world’s electronic media, that he had in mind when proposing the Geoscope in the
1960s.
99 It was probably no coincidence that Fuller finally became known to the world in the mid-1960s,
at the time when photos of Earth from space began to transform conventional outlooks and even
to transfer many people’s allegiances from political or religious sovereignties to the planet as a
whole. The mythologist Joseph Campbell saw in those photos the beginnings of a planetary
mythology, encompassing not only a new environmental sensitivity, but a new spirituality
as well. Of course Fuller had seen it all already, in his own way. The first practical
application of his synergetic/energetic geometry, as it happens, was the Dymaxion
Air/Ocean Map, using an icosahedral projection to divide the Earth’s surface into twenty
triangles, which could then be cut out and laid flat in such a way that either the land
masses were continuous, and surrounded by water, or the one ocean was continuous,
and surrounded by land. Amazingly, his was the first, and so far it is the only, flat
cartographic projection in human history which does not distort the actual shape of
the land masses. Early in the 1990s, National Geographic magazine commissioned a
‘new’ world map and, ignoring Fuller completely, produced yet another variant of the
Mercator projection which not only still distorted everything at the poles, but again
centered on the North Atlantic, a purely political (one might even say colonialistic)
orientation.
100 Now besides the realistic shapes, such a map is also useful for plotting quantities—of things,
people, trees, cars, telephones, televisions, etc.—in a way that makes world-around trends often
invisible (the deforesting of the temperate zones over the past couple of centuries, for example, or
today’s rapid destruction of the rainforests) immediately evident to anyone with eyes. Fuller’s
Geoscope idea derived directly from the Dymaxion map; it was the 3D version, and
since trends over time could be modeled with a little help from computers, it was
potentially a four-dimensional, ‘virtual’ Earth. We’ve all been to planetariums for
simulated trips to the moon or the planets. Bucky wanted to build a unique kind of
‘Whole Earth’ planetarium, if you will, which would also serve as a comprehensive
database of all human knowledge of the Earth and her resources—precisely the sort of
compendium first proposed by Bacon 400 years earlier in his New Organon. No doubt Bucky
drastically underestimated the quantities of data involved, just as he over-estimated the
computing capability of his time. Even Japan’s Earth Simulator, the latest evolution of
Fuller’s idea and the largest supercomputer currently up and running, attempts only to
handle weather simulations, not the entire past history as well as a gamut of possible
future scenarios for ‘Spaceship Earth.’ But if credit for the original idea of such a
vast compilation of Earth-data must go to Bacon, credit for reviving the idea belongs
to Fuller, with perhaps a nod of appreciation to the folks who took him up on it in
the early Whole Earth Catalogs. He reviewed the concept retrospectively in Critical
path:
102I told the United States Information Agency in 1964 that by 1967 the regard
of the rest of the world for the United States would be at its lowest ebb in
many decades—if not in the total two centuries of the U.S.A.’s existence. Since
each country’s World’s Fair exhibit would be well published all around Earth,
I felt that it would be very important that the United States do something
that would tend to regain the spontaneous admiration and confidence of the
whole world. This could be done by inaugurating at Expo ‘67 a computerized
exploration for the most universally creative and economically sound internal
and external U.S.A. policy formulation…
103On the working assumption that humanity had established implicit confidence
in …computers and automated instrumentation, I proposed in 1964 that the
United States Expo ‘67 exhibition should have a 400-foot-diameter 5/8 sphere
building similar in shape to the 250-foot-diameter building actually built for
Expo ‘67. In the basement of this building would be housed an extraordinary
computer facility. On entering the building by thirty-six external ramps
and escalators leading in at every ten degrees of circumferential direction,
the visitors would arrive upon a great balcony reaching completely around
the building’s interior quarter-mile perimeter. The visitors would see an
excitingly detailed 100-foot-diameter world globe suspended high within the
400-foot-diameter 5/8 sphere main building. Cities such as New York, London,
Tokyo, and Los Angeles would appear as flattened-out, basketball-sized blotches
with the tallest buildings and radio towers only about one-sixteenth of an inch
high.
104Periodically the great spherical Earth would be seen to be transforming
slowly into an icosahedron—a polyhedron with twenty (equilateral) triangular
facets…Slowly the 100-foot-diameter icosahedronal Earth’s surface would be
seen to be parting along some of its triangular edges, as the whole surface
slowly opens mechanically as a orange’s skin or an animal’s skin might be peeled
carefully in one piece…The icosahedronal Earth’s shell thus would be seen to
gradually flatten out and be lowered to the floor of the building. The visitors
would realize that they were now looking at the whole of the Earth’s surface
simultaneously without any visible distortion of the relative size and shape of
the land and sea masses having occurred during the transformation from sphere
to the flattened-out condition we call a map. My cartographic projection of the
‘Sky-Ocean World’ functions in just such a manner as I have now described.
105This stretched-out, football-field-sized world map would disclose the continents
arrayed as one world-island in one world-ocean with no breaks in the continental
contours. Its scale would be 1/500,000th of reality…When completely installed
and ready for use, [the Geoscope is] oriented so that [its] polar axes are
always parallel to the real Earth’s north-south polar axis, with the latitude
and longitude of the installed Geoscope’s zenith point always corresponding
exactly with the latitude and longitude of the critically located point on our
real planet Earth at which the Geoscope is installed. As a consequence of
the polar axis and zenith correspondences of the Geoscope mini-Earth and
the real Earth, it will be found that the miniature Earth Geoscope’s real
omnidirectional celestial-theater orientation always corresponds exactly with
the real omnidirectional celestial-theater of the real planet Earth.
106Since the two spheres (mini-Earth and real Earth) are rigidly coupled together
tangentially…the geographical-geometrical orientation attitudes brought about
by their respective axial rotations and orbital travel around the Sun will be
identical. The Geoscope has the same relationship to the Earth as has one of
the relatively small lifeboats mounted fore and aft on the davits of an ocean
cruise ship to the big ship herself. If the big ship changes its course from north
to east, the lifeboat does likewise. If the bow rises and falls in a head-on sea,
so too does the bow of the davits-mounted lifeboat…
107The great map would be wired throughout so that mini-bulbs closely installed
all over its surface would be lighted by computer at appropriate points
to show various, accurately positioned, proportional data regarding world
conditions, events, and resources. World events would occur and transform
on this live world map’s ever-evoluting face. If we had 100,000 light bulbs
for instance, each mini-light-bulb could represent 40,000 people…The bulbs
could be computer-distributed to represent the exact geographical distribution
positioning of the people. Military movements of a million troops would be
dramatically visible. The position of every airplane in the sky and every ship
on the world ocean would be computer-control displayed. Weekend and holiday
exoduses from cities into the country or travel to other cities would be vividly
displayed by computer-controlled tallying instruments.
Figure 1.5.:
Top: Dymaxion Air/Ocean Map (1954). Bottom: Dymaxion Projections
re-assembled at South Pole to show British Empire’s ‘One Ocean World’ (R.
B. Fuller and S. Sadao. Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.)
108I proposed that on this stretched-out, reliably accurate, world map of our Spaceship
Earth a great world logistics game be played by introducing into the computers all
the known inventory and whereabouts of the various metaphysical and physical
resources of the Earth. (This inventory, which took forty years to develop, is now
housed at my headquarters).
109We would then enter into the computer all the inventory of human trends, known
needs, and fundamental behavior characteristics.
110I proposed that individuals and teams would undertake to play the World Game with
those resources, behaviors, trends, vital needs, developmental desirables, and
regenerative inspirations. The players as individuals or teams would each
develop their own theory of how to make the total world work successfully for
all of humanity. Each individual or team would play a theory through
to the end of a predeclared program. It could be played with or without
competitors.
111The objective of the game would be to explore ways to make it possible for anybody and
everybody in the human family to enjoy the total Earth without any human interfering
with any other human and without any human gaining advantage at the expense of
another.36
1.5Synergy & Entropy
112The
Geoscope was nothing less than Bucky Fuller’s vision for planet Earth in a nutshell. But of
course it was never built, never even seriously considered by the USIA—although his
proposal for a much larger Geoscope to be anchored in the East River outside the
United Nations building in New York City did receive approval—if not funding—from the
U.N.
113 What happened? Maybe certain powers didn’t want ‘‘military movements of a million
troops’’ in Vietnam to be ‘‘dramatically visible,’’ let alone the deployment of many
thousands of nuclear warheads. Indeed, with twenty-first century satellite imaging
and remote sensing power, who knows what ‘We the people’ might see were we ever
permitted a close-up look at the planet we live on? With fiber optic cable and broadband
information superhighways already available, a big, centralized Geoscope like the one
Bucky envisaged for Montréal would be only one possible display screen, perhaps for
special effects like today’s giant IMAX cinemas. Size, as Fuller never tired of pointing
out, is not a generalized principle. He anticipated today’s rapid miniaturization of
everything with his concept of ephemeralization —‘doing more and more with less and
less’—as the driving force in technological development. Indeed, there is no technical
reason why everybody’s home computer, which currently displays planetary information
from weather satellites and the like, could not have access to long-range historical
scenarios and future projections as well. But maybe most of us are content to accept our
evening news from government, military and corporate media sources. Maybe we’re just
not as curious about the Big Picture as Bucky was, or supposed us to be. At any
event, Bucky’s Geoscope was never built. Something went wrong, something was out of
sync…
114 Bucky would have calibrated his mini-Earth so that it would be oriented in the
‘‘celestial-theater’’ on exactly the same axis as the big Earth Mother Ship but, plainly, Fuller’s
dream was no longer America’s dream.
115 I suspect that the rejection of his ambitious design for the Expo Dome did not come as a
surprise to Fuller, who always thought big and knew that only portions of his projects would be
realized in his lifetime. He had, moreover, worked for Fortune magazine in the 1940s, and over
the years hobnobbed with the likes of Henry Kaiser and Henry Ford II. In later life Bucky
claimed that in order for the ‘Great Pirates’ to pursue their multinational machinations
unperturbed, the rest of us were being kept ignorant, preoccupied by the details of our own
short-term getting and spending, and utterly unaware of any Big Picture. I had the chance to ask
him, only a month before his death in 1983, whether there really was such a global conspiracy, or
whether the sorry state of the world was simply the result of ignorance compounded over
generations. ‘‘Young man,’’ he replied, ‘‘I’ve lived on this planet 87 years. I’ve met
these people, I know how they operate. And you better believe it’s a conspiracy.’’
I’m still not entirely comfortable with conspiracy theories (maybe the conspirators
are ignorant, too, of what really will insure their own well-being?), but I can testify
that the shock of recognizing the absolute degradation of the American dream was
not so much Fuller’s as it was that of an entire young generation who once believed
that if you found a better way to live, or to do something, it would be welcomed and
supported by the society around them. Not a chance…just ask some of the folks who have
come up with improvements in automobile manufacture what Detroit has done with
their ideas. In Vietnam, young Americans learned they were the bad guys. On the
home front, they soon discovered they were the enemy. And when the system forces
you to fight merely to save your own skin, the Big Picture does tend to fade into the
background.
116 In the description of the Geoscope above, you might have noticed that Fuller draws an
analogy between his project and a lifeboat. He was well aware that the big ship is
sinking, at least if present trends prevail. Typically unconcerned about aesthetics,
however, he did not remark that the ‘‘ever-evoluting face’’ of such a globe, mirroring the
Earth’s constantly changing contours with the resolution of a high definition television
screen, might quite possibly have been the most beautiful man-made object on the
planet.
117 Yet during those heady years of the 1960s and 1970s, there were still plenty of young people
who wanted to play Bucky’s World Game rather than war games—with or without a Geoscope in
Montréal. After all, the Leakeys, reviewing the evidence on human origins they found
at Olduvai gorge, had put forward the thesis that we humans became who we are
because we learned how to cooperate and share food in interdependent communities. The
dream of Emerson and the Shakers, not to mention the political innovations of the
Iroquois Confederacy, now had a firm anthropological basis and, seemingly, a global
arena.
118 Perhaps we have to step back to see such dreams clearly. Since the rise of Laissez-faire
capitalism and the so-called Manchester School of economics with its ‘free’ market and
‘invisible hand’ in the early decades of the nineteenth century, there have been a range
of vigorous alternatives to it—some religious, some secular, some vaguely socialist,
some stringently Marxist, some tribal, some familial, some simply neighborly and
communitarian. Taken together these trace a coherent alternative stream of thought about the
foundations of human community. Bucky Fuller’s thinking sails along with this current, even
today driven underground by the prevailing mercantile propaganda. The New England
Transcendentalists would be an early American example, interacting with, critiquing and
reflecting on, various other such American experiments in community like Brook Farm or the
Shakers. John Dewey’s pragmatism, with its emphasis on consensus, sociability and
cooperation rather than competitive individualism, would be another example of the
continuing vitality of this alternative American dream. In England, John Ruskin’s ‘‘law
of help’’ would be the high water mark of the mid-nineteenth century, his response
to what he called ‘‘the law of force,’’ and the ‘‘illth’’ (assuredly not wealth) of the
marketplace.37
The same stream of thought enters the twentieth-century well defended by Pietr Kropotkin’s
Mutual Aid, a counterblast to Thomas Huxley’s attempt to assert the imperial English designs
and dominion of Social Darwinist values in the global marketplace of his day.
119
Half a century later, we find Bucky attempting to re-order the world into a series of
interlocking service industries which would ‘‘take care of everybody’’ at a very high,
technologically-enhanced standard of living. The Geoscope was to be a step in this direction: you
have to know where in the world things are, and who needs precisely which things, in
order to get them from here to there. In the 1980s and 1990s, Medard Gabel and
others from Bucky’s Philadelphia office were quick to put Fuller’s inventory of ‘‘human
trends, known needs, and fundamental behavior characteristics’’ onto a Hypercard
program, in which form it was made available as ‘‘Global Recall’’ and ‘‘Global Data
Manager’’ (you have my permission to cringe at the latter name). They were presumably
anticipating the sort of decentralized home computer version of the Geoscope mentioned
earlier, although they seemed to be a good deal more thorough at inventorying the
physical resources than the metaphysical. Stewart Brand and his San Francisco Bay
Area Whole Earth Catalog cohort of hip capitalists also got going with these ideas of
Fuller’s in the late 1960s, providing mail order ‘access to tools’ for anybody, anywhere,
to build an alternative lifestyle to their own design—and they did include at least as
much philosophy as physics. But by the time it was published by Random House as
a gigantic bestseller, I suspect the final Whole Earth Catalog (1985) was less often
used as intended, and more often as a kind of icon that sat unopened upon coffee
tables or bookshelves. You had to have it, but you didn’t really have to do anything
with it. Nowadays that entire operation goes on as the Whole Earth Review, and is
available in the software world for electronic cottages everywhere as WELL (Whole
Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a pay site that is now part of salon.com (major credit cards
accepted).
120 As a matter of fact, I first encountered Fuller as a kind of intellectual curiosity in the pages of
Norman Cousins’ Saturday Review during the mid-1960s, but did not really catch his drift until
the late 1960s, when everything seemed to be drifting his way. At the University of California,
Santa Cruz, where I spent my undergraduate years, Fuller was one of the elements in
a complex and exhilarating mix of new ideas with which we were going to save the
world.
121 If Berkeley was political and controversial, Santa Cruz in the late 1960s was much quieter,
more mystical and mythopoetic. There were about three million redwood trees on the often
fog-shrouded campus, which helped give the place a mossy, timeless air. The university itself
was a ‘devolution’ of the vast UC multiversity into something resembling the Oxford
system of small colleges with the resources of a large university, where you got to know
renowned professors on a first-name basis. Fuller’s domes were going up on one side
of my college—that would solve the world’s housing shortage, eh?—while up the hill,
thanks to the good offices of Paul Lee (a.k.a. the Herbal Trading Company), Alan
Chadwick and his disciple Jon Jeavons were hard at work putting in the first French
Intensive garden to demonstrate the biodynamic agriculture that would feed everybody.
‘‘Our job is to MAGNIFY life,’’ boomed Chadwick in his stentorian English stage
voice, and he would plant by the light of the full moon. (Nowadays his method is
hailed by the UN as the most effective, and least intrusive, kind of food production
‘development.’)38
There were impromptu seminars on Fuller every week, led by avid students who later formed the
Cathedralite build-your-own-dome kit company.
122
While I’m on this personal note, I might add something about the festive atmosphere—just in
case you missed that party. There was always music in the air in those days, from visiting
musicians like Ali Akbar Khan or Joan Baez or Keith Jarrett, who had just gone back to his
acoustic piano—‘‘Electricity is in everything’’—or from students with talents not in the least
hidden by their long hair and beards, or simply Jefferson Airplane or good ol’ Grateful Dead on
somebody’s stereo. What was going on in Northern California at the time may well have been the
last renaissance of the original American dream, although perhaps only historian Page Smith
(heading up Cowell College) saw that aspect clearly through all the psychedelic pageantry.
Norman O. Brown might be found by night leading Dionysiac revels through the redwoods (or
maybe he was just tagging along, on the track of ‘‘Love’s Body’’?), whilst philosopher
Albert Hofstadter wandered solitary by day through the same forests, no doubt mulling
over his luminous English translations of Heidegger’s ‘‘Poetically Man Dwells …’’ And
those were just some of our own faculty; the entire 1960s’ carnival of wonders came
trooping through Santa Cruz, at one time or another. And, in so many words, some of us
adopted Bucky. He plainly belonged in the company of those who were going to steer this
crazy world back on course. Bucky himself was caught up in this vortex of energy and
insight; he knew how to sail with the wind at his back. He came to California often,
saying things like, ‘‘We can do it. We can make it work. It’s now or never, utopia or
oblivion.’’ And we young folks listened, enthralled at his three-hour ‘‘thinking aloud’’
monologues, inspired by his mind-bending geometry, astonished at his architectural
sleights-of-hand.
123 As I wrote the foregoing paragraph, it struck me that all of that came to pass barely a third of
a century ago. The pattern held, indeed, for quite a while. As far as I was concerned, the party in
California went on a good nine years at least, from about 1967 to 1976. But then it seemed to
vanish…into tough economic times, New Age hucksterism, political cynicism, yuppies, etc.
Or else it splintered into factions: women against men, the Weather Underground
versus the New Right, gays against straights, environmentalists versus developers,
etc.
124 And yet in a sense, it is not lost. As Fuller’s geometry demonstrates, you miss a lot if you look
only at the surfaces. Much of what I have described took place during the dog days of the
Vietnam war when Ronald Reagan was playing the role of Governor of California. Soon enough,
a grateful nation hired the same bad actor to play President for eight years, all the while
supposing they were about to recapture the germinal impulse of the lost American
dream. Instead, what they got was a re-run of the values of the 1950s: unregulated ‘free’
enterprise, fundamentalist Christianity, the patriarchal family, back-to-basics schooling,
jingoistic patriotism, etc., all gussied up for the media in pretty ‘photo opportunity’
packages.
125 Reagan’s Hollywood background completes our scenario (without any need to fast forward to
the America of George W. Bush or today’s California of ‘Gubernator’ Arnold Schwarzenegger). It
must be admitted that the American dream became, in the twentieth century, mainly a
Hollywood production, reflecting not early American history but instead the corrupt
and ruthlessly competitive dreams of avarice that went into building Los Angeles.
Mike Davis’s City of Quartz is instructive here; LA is the junkyard of everybody’s
dreams.39
Perhaps immigrant Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life captures the last moment in the late
1940s when Americans still could see they had a choice between the original dream of a
cooperative community and the grubby, grabby, glitzy ‘Pottersville’ of Jimmy Stewart’s
nightmare. Today’s global village may be no more than Los Angeles writ large, but Los Angeles
is just heartless ‘Pottersville’ sprawling to infinity, and ‘Pottersville’ was surely Capra’s vision of
the neighborhood going to Hell. The cherished chestnut It’s a Wonderful Life still airs every
Christmas Eve (as a suicide prevention measure!), but Americans by the 1980s had plainly
elected to follow the lead of the Angelenos and spend the rest of their days in ‘Pottersville.’
Hollywood attempts to revive something of the original small-town American dream in the
final decades of the twentieth century succeeded only in taking the notion to quirky
(Northern Exposure) and politically correct (Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman) points of no
return.
126 Yet
even in the Reagan era, some incongruities could never quite be suppressed between the
ideological ‘image’ of flag-waving Americanism, and the ‘ghost’ of the original vision. Picture if
you will that supremely ironic moment of bland Reagan-esque incomprehension as he
awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor the US government can bestow, to R.
Buckminster Fuller—a man who had just had the temerity to suggest to the US Senate
that, since national sovereignty was patently obsolete, the United States really ought
to set a good example to the rest of the world by desovereigntizing immediately. (A
resurgence of the manitou of the Iroquois Confederacy? Bucky thought it was his own
idea.)
127 For twenty years, Fuller had been advocating a global, push-button democracy which would
give everybody on the planet an up-to-the-minute vote on all the issues of the day. We now
take electronic polls at the drop of a hat; why not make these the government, asked
Bucky, and reinstitute direct democracy rather than the so-called ‘representative’
democracy subject to all the abuses we all know all too well? Government by the
people, indeed, by all the people on the planet; that was Fuller’s version, or vision, of the
global village. Electronic world democracy may be seen as an extension of Fuller’s early
perception of ‘Continuous Man,’ the band of waking consciousness—two-thirds of humanity
awake and thinking at any given moment—which circulates, almost unnoticed, around
the globe every day. He was always looking for ways to tune in this critical band of
wakefulness, which he considered among the most important of the Earth’s planetary
rhythms. The diurnal oscillations of mindfulness—a feature of the noosphere, in Teilhard de
Chardin’s phrase—would of course have been dramatically evident on an electronic
Geoscope, marked by the wide band of sunlight rippling East to West over its seas and
continents.
128 Although almost within reach technically, Fuller’s idea of a world democracy never did catch
on. Is it any wonder? The staunchest American ‘defenders of democracy’ don’t seem so anxious
to play if the game is to include well over a billion highly-motivated Chinese, another billion
more potential savvy voters in India, and so on. And Bucky’s more recent plan was even more
challenging. In the early 1980s, he had proposed to Canadian Prime Minster Trudeau, and
Trudeau in turn to the USSR’s Brezhnev, to link up all the world’s electrical grids—a move which
in Bucky’s view would not only make solar power practicable on a global basis (and eliminate the
need for oil-fired power stations, or more nuclear and hydro plants), but instantly eliminate both
political sovereignties and all the current flim-flam that passes for economics into the
bargain.40
Russian engineers pronounced the plan feasible and desirable; mainstream American science had
no comment. After Fuller’s death, however, his idea of a planetary electrical grid has been eagerly
touted by multinational energy industries as an excuse to build more polluting and destructive
power plants in the Third World; a blatant instance of Bucky’s ideas corrupted by today’s
‘globalism-for-profit’ crowd. Ignore Bucky’s ideas for the free distribution of energy, a
cynic might observe, and in twenty years what you get is Enron. But Bucky was no
cynic…
129 All
these spin-offs and undercurrents (and even the distortions) indicate something crucial to Fuller’s
vision: In our synergetic universe, entropy is only apparent. A local system loses energy, granted;
things run down and wear out over time. Yet the energy is never irretrievably lost. In the
totality of universe, it is eventually harvested and taken up into other systems. Life is
anti-entropic. A living pattern—a weather front, a microbe or a mouse, a fern frond, you
or me—holds its shape for a time, then disintegrates. We say it ‘dies.’ But Life goes
on.
130 Did the original American dream really die? And did Fuller’s vision, for that matter, die with
him?
131 In many respects, the American dream we hear about these days has become a nightmarish
orgy of greed and a moral lesson in the abuse of power. Instead of vision, we have willful mass
blindness. Instead of ‘livingry,’ we have homelessness and ever more weaponry. Certainly Fuller’s
vision, too, splintered after his death. Various disciples like J. Baldwin, Medard Gabel and Amy
Edmonson, or collaborators like Shoji Sadao, Ed Applewhite and Kiyoshi Kuromiya
kept parts of it alive. But shortly before Fuller’s death, he was introduced to Werner
Erhardt, the infamous founder of Erhard Seminars Training, or est. So now you can find
bits of Bucky’s dream marketed like components of any other ‘leadership training
course,’ a New Age version of the now thoroughly debased American dream: success at
any cost. Yet Fuller himself claimed he never set out to change people’s minds. If he
changed the environment by making better artifacts, he supposed, people would just
naturally be sensible enough to make up their minds for themselves (and agree with
him, presumably). Maybe some of the people, some of the time, but not everybody all
at once, and not quickly enough to suit some entrepreneurs of marketable New Age
ideas.
132 So all is not roses, not all of the time, for either the American dream or genuine
American dreamers like Bucky Fuller. But all is not thorns, either. Maybe that’s what the
victory of synergy over entropy really means. A synergy is a whole system, a pattern
integrity not comprehensible from a single point of view. The various manifestations of
the original American dream we excavated earlier were themselves synergies, integral
patterns, knots in complex social, philosophical, environmental and religious nets. Such
patterns hold together, sometimes for centuries (when the ‘self-reliant’ Emerson’s house
burned down in 1872, his neighbors took up a collection and rebuilt it), then pass away
like waves on the sea of time. Fuller describes synergy as one member of a ‘‘family of
interaccommodative generalized principles’’ (leverage, for instance, or the inescapable
co-existence of tension and compression), a ‘family’ which functions somewhat like the kinship
system of the Iroquois Confederacy—each principle distinct, none interfering with the
operations of any other: ‘‘The wellspring of reality is the family of weightless generalized
principles.’’ In such a ‘family,’ each principle implies all the others. The synergy of
synergies, the whole concatenation of principles, Fuller called Nature, or in more rapturous
moments, Universe: ‘‘the aggregate of all humanity’s consciously apprehended and
communicated…experiences.’’41
And Universe abides. It accommodates the rising and falling, the living and dying, the emerging
and passing of creatures like us with immense equanimity. ‘‘That Universe tolerates our
protracted nonsense,’’ Fuller once wryly observed, ‘‘suggests significant unrealized
potentials.’’
133 To
return to the Montréal Expo Dome, there is surely no reason why Fuller’s own artifacts should
be exempt from this dynamic interplay of entropy and syntropy. What appears to be entropy, the
dissipation of energy from a local system, must be taken up somewhere, into some other integral
pattern. At least Bucky himself would see it so. And now that time, fire, ice and wind
have ripped through its very fabric, where did the energy—or, indeed, the integrity—of
that vast structure go? Parts have been rebuilt, and the shell repainted. Bits of the
whole structure fell back as ash into the native American soil and landforms, but other
parts—above all, the intact skeleton of the whole —can still touch the eyes and minds
and hearts of all who lay eyes upon it. In a sense, that energy has gone into you and
me, as well as into Robert Duchesnay’s starkly enigmatic photographs. Both Harry
Kroto and Richard Smalley, joint discoverers of Buckminsterfullerene, had visited the
Montréal Dome during its Expo heyday, and Kroto had built a geodesic playdome for his
kids. The two say they hit upon the soccer-ball structure of ‘Buckyballs’ by recalling
Fuller’s domes, which show plainly that in order to bend the surface of a flat hexagonal
matrix all the way round into a sphere, you have to take out ten (36°) pentagonal
tucks. Bucky had solved their problem, years before it arose, and they honored him by
naming the new molecule after him. But this is only a single instance. Surely Bucky’s
shapes have inspired plenty of other people as well, in many and even more subtle
ways.
135 For decades, Bucky’s domes seemed to be ‘the shape of things to come.’ They were
even used in the color sequel to the H. G. Wells’ film of that name, as well in other
sci-fi films like Silent Running to symbolize the farthest reaches of human dwelling.
Once upon a time, the first Sumerian and Egyptian attempts at civilization tried
pyramidal and hierarchical forms—not only for their monumental architecture, but for the
organization of their totalitarian societies. In our own day, we’ve tried square and cubical and
gridiron forms, and a more egalitarian society mirrored these shapes. For nearly a
century, the machine age gave us merely the vertical projection of these forms, pulled up
into the skyscraper and the new corporate and bureaucratic hierarchies these shapes
tend to accommodate. Bucky wanted to take the industrial tooling of architecture
a step further, to give us a spherical or at least hemispherical model for building,
and perhaps also a more well-rounded notion of human dwelling within the living
biosphere.
136 In a sense, all knowledge is local, and partial—bound by language, culture, tradition and
landforms. Bucky might be reluctant to admit it, but his own grand, globe-girdling schemes had
detectable New England roots. Yet every local truth is equally bound to the whole Earth, and
every partial discovery seeks the widest possible stage upon which to play its part. Fuller never
consciously constructed his domes to fit into their particular settings the way Frank Lloyd
Wright designed his houses. (In the year 2000, Wright’s beautiful ‘Falling Water’ home
was found to be leaking and falling down; more attention to structure might have
headed off the seven-million-dollar restoration effort.) Geodesic domes, by contrast,
were usually designed in the abstract, with more respect for sheer principle than for
setting.
137 It is therefore more than a little uncanny to travel through Asheville, North Carolina, where
Bucky built the first geodesic domes at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s, and discover a
place where domes actually look like the landforms—or rather vice-versa. Asheville
straddles the juncture of the Blue Mountains and the Great Smokeys. This is Cherokee
country, the old arch-rivals of the Iroquois Confederacy. And here, wherever you turn,
you find little dome-like hills above you and below you, the result of the two rippling
mountain chains merging in steep little troughs and weathered crests. Here, oddly enough
at their very birthplace, Bucky’s round houses would seem to leap right out of the
surrounding landscape as the most obvious and adaptive human variation on a natural
theme.
138 The strong spirit of place notwithstanding, there are no domes remaining here, no artifacts at
all from those first experiments in geodesics. When I visited, the site of Black Mountain
College had become a conventional boy’s school. Yet it was for a few memorable years
one of the most remarkable American efforts to create a free-form open university.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s it was presided over by the titanic Charles
Olson, with occasional faculty like Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown,
‘musician’ John Cage, filmmaker Arthur Penn, or choreographer Merce Cunningham, and
attended mostly by unconventional, creative types like poets Robert Creely, Denise
Levertov and Robert Duncan. Years on, one could still feel the reverberations of that
experiment in the hopes and dreams of faculty members who eventually tried to recreate the
Black Mountain experience at places like UC Santa Cruz, or more recently Naropa in
Colorado. Something similar may be said of Fuller’s domes. Not a trace left at the site
of their origin, not even a commemorative plaque (in a town which has fastidiously
preserved novelist Thomas Wolfe’s house as a civic shrine), and yet powerful seeds
were flung from this place, and proved so hardy that by now over 350,000 geodesic
domes (if you count playdomes) have sprouted up, a sprinkling on every continent—even
Antarctica.
139 Physical structures deteriorate over time, it is true. Entropy rules the physical. Yet synergy, as
Fuller saw it, is patterned integrity—timeless, weightless, indestructible: ‘‘We are now
synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have
long suspected—like it or not—life is but a dream.’’
140 In so many words, integrity, and maybe only integrity, endures the bite of time. Once again, it
is a matter of principle.
141 I suspect Bucky Fuller himself would not be overly exercised about his own ‘legacy.’ He would,
however, be intensely interested to see whether the human race manages to survive the
twenty-first century:
143Though humans are born equipped To participate In the supreme function of Universe, This does not guarantee That they will do so. … They must first discover the overwhelmingly superior efficacy Of mind, as compared to muscle. And humans also must discover That the physical, Which they tend to prize as seemingly vital, Is utterly subordinate To the omni-integrity of metaphysical laws Which are discoverable only by mind. … Only if man learns in time To accredit the weightless thinking Over the physical values, In a realistic, economic and philosophical accounting Of all his affairs, Will the particular team of humans Now aboard planet Earth Survive to perform their function.42
