Buckminster Fuller was not a shy man, he knew the worth of his ideas and was not reticent in self promoting them. When I read this book in my late teens he was a familiar name without my understanding exactly who he was and what he'd done i.e geodesic domes, maps etc
If there was a person who personified thinking 'outside the box' it was Buckminster Fuller. To my teenage eyes his relentlessly practical idealism I found inspiring. Yes, some of his ideas might strike you as cranky. But the questions he posed and his analysis were frequently right on the button, though usually coming at you from left field. It was like briefly inhabiting the mind space of some one who dared to dream, then systematically brought them into life.
He was critical of traditional scientific and industrial research because he thought they resisted working outside the conventions of existing knowledge and technology. If you wanted to find truly revolutionary ideas he said, you wont find them in universities, MIT or the Ford Company. There was probably some thing personal in him saying this, having had a lifetime struggling to convince those self same institutions to invest in and develop his ideas, but it holds a degree of truth nonetheless.
He famously once asked an architect how much his buildings weighed. This was his way of opening up the subject of how you made efficient use of limited resources, which he explored further in his book of futuristic thinking - Critical Path. Within it inward looking nationalistic viewpoints are challenged by a book full of Big Ideas and global collaborative solutions to humanities resource and climate problems and ultimately it's survival. So not entirely without contemporary relevance.
Other Buckminster Fuller Reading:
- Critical Path
- Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth
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