1Edited by Tom Solari
2 Sections on pattern integrity and geometry from the film ‘‘Buckminster Fuller on Spaceship Earth’’ used by permission of Robert Snyder
3 Quotes copyrighted and printed by permission of R. Buckminster Fuller
4 Cover Design by John Divers
5 Lithography by Triangle Lithograph • Los Angeles
6
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8ENVIRONMENT
to each must be
EVERYTHING
That isn’t me
9UNIVERSE
in turn must be
ALL THAT ISN’T me
AND me
15 I decided that man as
16 designed was designed to be an extraordinary success;
17 his characteristics were just magnificent…
20 …and what would be necessary was really
21 to find out what were the great comprehensive patterns
22 operating in Universe.
25 A child is comprehensive. He wants to understand the
26 whole thing…Universe.
29 Children will draw pictures with
30 everything in them …houses and trees and people and
31 animals …and the sun AND the moon. Grown-up says,
32 ‘‘That’s a nice picture, Honey, but you put
33 the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time
34 and that isn’t right.’’ But the child is right!
35 The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time.
36 A child plays with balls that are round like
37 the earth and touches whole things. He touches his
38 mother a lot when he is young…and she
39 is big and sort of round.
40 A child thinks in terms of wholes.
44 A child has 1000 whys…
45 Why is the sky dark at night?
46 Why is the earth round?
47 Why…?
50 Adults are often busy. They don’t answer
51 the child’s questions. And then the child goes to
52 school and the teacher says,
53 ‘‘First you’re going to learn A, B, C.’’
54 The child still wants to understand UNIVERSE and
55 has big questions, and the teacher says,
56 ‘‘Never mind that…you learn the parts first…A, B, C…‘‘
57 Then the child goes to college
58 and never does get back to the whole.
60 If you want to do something good for
61 a child…give him an environment where he can
62 touch things as much as he wants.
65 Sometimes we should send people fishing.
67 I’m not my hair that grows and gets cut off.
68 I’m not my fingernails. I’m not the food I eat that
69 turns into cells in my body…
71 Man is a pattern integrity.
72 He is like the knot tied in a rope.
73 He is not the rope.
74 I’m going to splice a piece of manilia rope to
75 a piece of cotton rope and then splice the
76 other end of the cotton rope to a piece of nylon rope.
77 I’m going to make the very simplest
78 knot that I know. The rope has not done this,
79 I have done it to the rope.
80 I can slide this knot along …I slide it along the
81 rope and now it leaves the manilia
82 and now it’s on the cotton. I keep sliding it
83 along and now it’s on the nylon.
84 So …and suddenly it’s off the end.
85 We say the knot was a pattern integrity, it wasn’t
86 manilla, it wasn’t cotton, it wasn’t nylon.
87 Cotton and nylon and manilla;
88 any one of them are good to let us know
89 about its shape, what its pattern was,
90 but it was not that; it had an integrity in its own.
91 Man sometimes thinks like a tree…
92 but he was built to move.
95 All anywhere about man,
96 within and without,
97 is eternally, ceaselessly motion,
98 whether he senses it or not.
99 Nature is so beautiful…How she is
working is so beautiful.
101 We need to find out what nature is doing so we
can be in harmony with her.
103 The kinds of ways in which man is measuring
104 tend to be much more complicated
105 than what nature is doing. Man starts off teaching
106 his children about measuring with a plane
107 and a line and a pair of lines parallel to each
108 other, and then 90 degrees to that, another
109 pair of lines, making something called a square.
110 But I find that that’s all very well
111 if you could really live in a plane; and nobody can
112 live in a plane. Nobody can squash their body
113 into a flat plane. That’s not the way nature is.
114 She’s not in a plane. She’s omni-directional.
115 So when I really look at a square
116 I find it’s very unstable.
117 It doesn’t want to stay square at all.
119 We take a side out of the square and…
120 suddenly it’s very stable.
121 It doesn’t get all
122 flexible the way it had been with the square. So this
123 is what we call tri-angle, three angles.
124 And triangle, with its three angles,
125 is the only stable structure.
128 Nature is doing things in very logical clean-cut
129 ways. And we begin to study these even more
130 and I find that she’s using beautiful geometry; this
131 always finally gets down to the simplest geometry
132 you can get down to. You can’t have a
133 geometrical form of less than four faces: 1, 2, 3, 4.
134 This is the tetrahedron, four faces,
135 and then sometime after, it gets its corners knocked off
136 and it gets to be a beautiful tetrahedron.
137 So this rock was once a tetrahedron.
139 I begin to look at all these rocks,
140 and it doesn’t look like anything. Then I begin to
141 pick them up, and I pick up any rock, and
142 I find it has a beautiful face here, and then
143 another beautiful face, another
144 beautiful face…These are not carelessly done.
145 You begin to study these rocks a little
146 more, and you find face, face, face, face.
147 Their corners have been very knocked off…but
148 all of these rocks were once tetrahedrons.
150 We find nature doing more with less.
151 Nature doesn’t build things that fall down.
153 The most creative woodworking I know of is
154 a tree. It can grow its branches straight out…
155 and each limb can support tons of weight.
157 We should do things with wood that the wood
158 likes. There are certain things
159 it likes to be used for. When I use wood I make
160 sure it likes what I’m doing to it.
163 I’m not trying to imitate nature,
164 I’m trying to find the principles she’s using.
165 Nature has no ‘‘weeks/’ There is no
166 ‘‘Monday,’’ ‘‘Tuesday,’’ ‘‘Friday’’ in nature.
168 Energies are not lost…the universe is not running down.
171 We say sunset…but there is no sunset…if you
172 back up and look at earth you see the earth turns.
173 People sometimes say, ”I wonder how it
174 feels to be on a spaceship’’…and I say, ‘‘Well
175 look around you…you are on one.
176 How does it feel? You are on spaceship Earth.’’
178 We are just about
to step out from amongst the pieces of our
just-one-second-ago-broken eggshell.
180 PHILOSOPHY
181 R. Buckminster Fuller is the inventor of the geodesic dome…but he is so much more. Explorer of the ‘‘big comprehensive patterns operating in universe,’’ Buckminster Fuller knows that the world can be made to work for all of humanity. Youth, he says, see this and will settle for nothing less. He sees man’s capabilities wonderfully reflected in the fresh minds of children…and speaks to the child who lives in all people.
184 Cam Smith grew up in the mountains, can sit on a rock for a long time, wants people to be happy, likes to work hard, knows how to let children learn, thinks up things to communicate to people, takes photographs, listens, has fun, wants the world to make it, knows responsibility and happiness start with the smallest thing in front of one, and is a free being.
185 She has taught school, had photography exhibitions, and has published a book of her own poems and photographs, Notes From the Mountain, and a book on teaching, What it is, What it Ain’t.
186 ISBN: 0-385-02979-9