At the edge of SIU-E’s campus, what was once the future
On the campus of Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, you will spot an unusual, beautiful shape in the distance. A geodesic dome, set apart from the main buildings, and somehow beckoning. This is the Center for Spirituality & Sustainability, designed (in partnership with architect Shoji Sadao) by Buckminster Fuller, back when he was on the SIU-E’s faculty. The dome is a transparent replica of Earth, the planets outlined against a clear blue ocean.
“Buckminster Fuller” and “geodesic dome” are phrases I have heard for years, mainly in reference to the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden. I knew the significance transcended tropical plants and had a vague whiff of futurism. But suddenly I want to know more about this man who described himself as “an engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer, and choreographer.” For quite a while, people also thought he was a crackpot, bent on saving the world from itself.
Now that seems a necessary skill.
• • •
Cross-eyed, with one leg shorter than the other, Bucky was unprepossessing. But in kindergarten, when he and his classmates were told to build a house with some dried peas and toothpicks, he made a series of interlocking tetrahedra. At Harvard, he borrowed his sister’s wolfhound and walked Boston’s darkest streets at night. When he missed his midterms and got summarily kicked out, his parents sent him to work in a small town textile mill as punishment—and he solved one problem after another. He returned to Harvard and got himself kicked out again. He would later be elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa, but he would continue to maintain that “everything you’ve learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”
These revelations began in the Navy. Patrolling for submarines, Fuller studied the bubbles made by his boat’s propellors. There are no objects, he realized. Geometry describes forces.
Whatever Fuller experienced, he used. Even tragedy. After his firstborn daughter died at age four (of influenza followed by pneumonia and spinal meningitis), he worried that their damp and drafty home had sickened her. So he invented an efficient, simple, affordable sort of housing that could overcome poverty and prevent disease.
He patented this Dymaxion House at age twenty-nine and offered it to the architects at an American Institute of Architects meeting in St. Louis. Nobody was interested. Three years later, with no savings and no job prospects, he had an epiphany he later dramatized with a story, probably exaggerated. He said he had set out to drown himself in Lake Michigan, then realized that he belonged not to himself but to the universe. He needed to think, he announced, and would not utter a word until he knew what he truly thought. He wanted to know what a single individual, namely himself, could do to help change the world.
While filling notebooks with ideas, he took a job as an asbestos flooring salesman, something he later omitted from the myth. But the higher quest went on, sparking a series of inventions. He came up with concepts for floating cities and for a zoom-mobile car that could “hop off the road at will, fly about, then, as deftly as a bird, settle back into a place in traffic.” Driving through Illinois, he saw the corrugated metal of round grain bins shining in the sunlight and thought of adding windows and doors to make them houses. They were later shipped overseas as emergency housing for American soldiers.
Above all, he gave us the geodesic dome—a prime example of biomimicry, using nature’s geometry for stability.
Fuller did not invent the geodesic dome, but he saw its strength, simplicity, and sustainability. He showed the world, patenting a surface of triangles that created incredible strength without internal supports. He designed the U.S. Pavilion for Expo 67, the 1967 world’s fair in Montreal, as a transparent geodesic dome 250 feet in diameter. More than 300,000 geodesic domes were built during Fuller’s life, and the structure continues to find applications: as sports arenas; in industry; as museums, disaster relief, greenhouses, tents for people who have no home, weather stations, stargazing portals, yoga studios, or glamping pods. Patagonia has the Eco-Dome, the world’s first fully sustainable geodesic dome hotel. In Paris, La Géode houses an Omnimax theater. The Jeddah Superdome, the world’s largest, hosts sports, cultural events, and international conferences. India has a golden meditation dome.
Few structures are as simultaneously pragmatic and spiritual.
And when we all move to outer space, we may be living in them.
So maybe it was gratitude that prompted scientists, when they discovered a spherical carbon molecule structured like a tiny geodesic dome, to name it the buckyball, full name buckminsterfullerene. It has amazing tensile strength and the potential to suppress HIV and other viruses. Fuller would be proud. Anything that cut through class lines to help the world made him happy. (“Obviously, there is no such thing as class,” he once said. “This is clear as hell.”) That idealistic temperament makes sense when the connection clicks into place: he was Margaret Fuller’s grand-nephew! Never knew her, as she died four decades before he was born. But she left him her Transcendentalist beliefs, and her famous declaration, “I accept the universe,” no doubt widened his perspective. He once wrote a jingle:
Fuller is a name,
For better or for worse,
Of two who grappled with the Universe.
I accept it, said the famous spinster;
I explain it, said the bold Buckminster.
He also kept Margaret’s torch of social reform alight. He wanted to “make the world work, for 100 percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
Neither Fuller suffered fools, and they both had enough confidence and resolve to be indifferent to their detractors. But somehow I think he was more optimistic than his great-aunt. He saw scarcity as merely a distribution problem and said competition for necessities was no longer necessary. Cooperation was now the optimum survival strategy—surely people would realize that? “I expect that we’ll come to a point where humanity will spontaneously do the logical things together,” he said. “It will find ways of understanding a little more about what others are thinking.”
Bless his heart.
Fuller thought human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy. “We won’t be burning up our fossil fuels and saying to the next generation, ‘How are you going to get on?’” he predicted in a 1972 Playboy interview. “Racism, pollution and the rest of it are themselves very close to extinction…. The racists are a dying group; they’re dealing in something that’s untrue.”
Hardly prophetic. But Fuller was prescient in other ways. He fully expected technology to displace human labor, and this did not bother him: “I see man coming into quite a new function in relation to the universe,” he said, “a function having nothing to do anymore with the struggle to stay alive.” Long before the attention economy took hold, he observed that “controlled time is our true wealth.” In 1972, he predicted, “Very soon we’ll have little devices on our wrists and we’ll be able to say ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it’ as we go along, and there will be an electronic pickup and computers will tell us what everyone around the world is thinking about each problem. We’ll be able to act reasonably in relation to one another.”
Mmm. It happened—and we act less reasonably than ever. But Fuller was not entirely naïve. He did wonder whether humans, given this extraordinary new ability to acquire information and communicate instantaneously, were ready for the responsibility. He warned of the conditioned reflex that causes us, when we are in trouble, to “look for a bigger and tougher guy, someone who’ll say, ‘All right, follow me.’” He even predicted civil warfare, if naïve Americans were “pushed to considerable pain.” That did not offend his patriotism, because he saw the idea of separate nations as merely “a convenience to the great pirates, the men of power who wanted to divide and conquer.”
• • •
There is much of interest in the documentary “Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse” about technique, layout, framing, visual style, and the burden of guilt in storytelling, because these things cannot do enough.
There is much of interest in the documentary “Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse” about technique, layout, framing, visual style, and the burden of guilt in storytelling, because these things cannot do enough.
Half a century ago, Buckminster Fuller, crackpot though he could be, was saying things we need to hear now. He emphasized our ability to bring about change through small but well-considered actions. He urged renewable energy, sustainability, “doing the most with the least.” He reminded people, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” In the social, psychological realm, he said, “We attach the wrong significance to things. We make people ashamed when they need not be ashamed.” The world was changing, he added, but nobody had sent out the memo. People at the top, assuming “they’re going to be pulled down…[will] pull every trick they can, just when they don’t need to anymore.”
He also said, and this is the line I intend to cling to: “Our breakthroughs have always come when we were risking ourselves very close to the brink.”
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
