A Brief Introduction to Buckminster Fuller and His Techno-Optimistic Ideas
Buckminster Fuller was, in many ways, a twenty-first century man: an achievement in itself, considering he was born in the nineteenth century and died in the twentieth. In fact, it may actually count as his defining achievement. For all the inventions presented as revolutionary that never really caught on — the Dymaxion house and car, the geodesic dome — as well as the countless pages of eccentrically theoretical writing and even more countless hours of talk, it can be difficult for us now, here in the actual twenty-first century, to pin down the civilizational impact he so earnestly longed to make. But to the extent that he embodied the faith, born of the combination of industrial might and existential dread that colored the postwar American zeitgeist, that technology can rationally re-shape the world, we’re all his intellectual children. In the video above, Joe Scott provides an introduction to Fuller and his world in about ten minutes. After a much-referenced Damascene conversion, the once-dissolute Fuller spent most of his life “trying to solve the world’s problems,” Scott says, …