Richard Buckminster Fuller Basic Biography

Richard Buckminster Fuller Basic Biography
Author: R. Buckminster Fuller
Publisher: Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller
Total Pages: 71
Release:
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

R. Buckminster Fuller kept a basic biography at his office for official purposes. This is that document.

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
Author: R. Buckminster Fuller
Publisher: Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller
Total Pages: 77
Release: 2008-07-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

One of Fuller’s most popular works, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, is a brilliant synthesis of his world view. In this very accessible volume, Fuller investigates the great challenges facing humanity. How will humanity survive? How does automation influence individualization? How can we utilize our resources more effectively to realize our potential to end poverty in this generation? He questions the concept of specialization, calls for a design revolution of innovation, and offers advice on how to guide “spaceship earth” toward a sustainable future. Description by Lars Muller Publishers, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller

Critical Path

Critical Path
Author: R. Buckminster Fuller
Publisher: Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller
Total Pages: 892
Release: 1982-02-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0996827803

The masterwork of a brilliant career, and an important document of the crisis now facing mankind. Today we find ourselves in the midst of the greatest crisis in the history of the human race. Technology has placed in our hands almost unlimited power at the very moment when we have run up against the limits of our resources aboard Spaceship Earth, as the crises of the late twentieth century—political, economic, environmental, and ethical—determine whether or not humanity survives. In this masterful summing up of an entire lifetime’s thought and concern, R. Buckminster Fuller addresses these crucial issues in his most significant, accessible, and urgent work. Critical Path traces the origins and evolution of humanity’s social, political, and economic systems from the obscure mists of prehistory, through the development of the great political empires, to the vast international corporate and political systems that control our destiny today to show how we got to our present situation and what options are available to man. With his customary brilliance, extraordinary energy, and unlimited devotion, Bucky Fuller shows how mankind can survive, and how each individual can respond to the unprecedented threat we face today. The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future.

Synergetics

Synergetics
Author: R. Buckminster Fuller
Publisher: Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller
Total Pages: 916
Release: 1982
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0020653204

Synergetics, according to E. J. Applewhite, was Fuller's name for the geometry he advanced based on the patterns of energy that he saw in nature. For Fuller, geometry was a laboratory science with the touch and feel of physical models--not rules out of a textbook. It gains its validity not from classic abstractions but from the results of individual physical experience. Description by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller
Author: Michael John Gorman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2005
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Hailed as one of the greatest minds of our times, Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) is known as an American visionary. Designer, architect, engineer, inventor, and philosopher, he was undeniably one of the key innovators of the 20th century.This volume provides a visually rich and complete overview of Fuller's design and architectural production, situating Fuller's projects in their historical context. The book features never-before-published material from the Fuller archives that were recently donated to Stanford University.Michael John Gorman's essay offers an in-depth analysis of Fuller's work-focusing more attention on his innovative architectural projects than to other aspects of Fuller's "design science"-as well as an interesting perspective on post-war American society and architectural culture. Chapters include concepts of Fuller's philosophy, his manifesto for mass-produced housing, the role of mobile shelter in transforming behavior, geodesic domes, and Fuller's early experiments. Fuller's achievements, astonishing design, and production are fully documented using original and often unknown archival materials.

Utopia or Oblivion

Utopia or Oblivion
Author: R. Buckminster Fuller
Publisher: Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller
Total Pages: 225
Release: 1963
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Utopia or Oblivion is a provocative blueprint for the future. This comprehensive volume is composed of essays derived from the lectures he gave all over the world during the 1960’s. Fuller’s thesis is that humanity – for the first time in its history – has the opportunity to create a world where the needs of 100% of humanity are met. “This is what man tends to call utopia. It’s a fairly small word, but inadequate to describe the extraordinary new freedom of man in a new relationship to universe — the alternative of which is oblivion.” R. Buckminster Fuller. Description by Lars Muller Publishers, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller

Grunch* of Giants

Grunch* of Giants
Author: R. Buckminster Fuller
Publisher: Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller
Total Pages: 136
Release: 1983-04-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0312351941

With the appearance of Grunch of Giants, R. Buckminster Fuller consummates his literary canon, his panoramic lifetime survey of all aspects of the responsibility of human beings for their own destiny. This book is a modern allegory - his long-gestated myth-of the villainy of capitalism and the fecklessness of classic economics. For Fuller, the academic discipline of economics is irrelevant since it derives from an invalid assumption of scarcity. In fact, he has long argued that future historians of our era may subsume our business practices as a branch of mythology; thus it is not surprising that the word economic appears nowhere in his text. Fuller’s myth is no idle fairy tale, since he faces his question - the question of a technological imperative which only he could raise with the deadly seriousness of satire. That question is: Can our system of national political sovereignties and corporate profits survive the inevitable technology revolution required to obviate wars by effecting a worldwide rise in the standard of living. One of the functions of myth is to resolve contradictions in our culture. Grunch of Giants portrays the rising of multinational corporations in the paradoxical role of function both as the epitome of capitalistic selfishness and as the inadvertent vehicle for the dissolution of national political boundaries - the last deterrent to a one-world economy. The result is more subversive of the property and profit values of the capitalist system than anything dreamed of since Karl Marx. —E.J. Applewhite, collaborator with RBF on Synergetics and Synergetics 2, author of Cosmic Fishing: A Memoir of Working With R. Buckminster Fuller

Your Private Sky

Your Private Sky
Author: Richard Buckminster Fuller
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2001
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9783907044940

This title, which complements the volume Your Private Sky: The Art of Design Science (see page 44), gives an authentic insight into the development of Fuller's architectonic, technical, & anthropological concepts. Fuller was the epitome of the poet as engineer, the thinker as designer, the artist as researcher. He left behind a voluminous quantity of writing, including texts of visionary importance & penetrating linguistic force, as well as of urgent topicality. The book documents various aspects of Fuller's widely respected texts. These testaments were intended to be shared with the whole world, or, as Fuller coined it in 1950, with "Spaceship Earth."###3-7643-6072-0

New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller

New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller
Author: Hsiao-yun Chu
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2009
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0804752095

In this book, leading scholars in architecture, design, history, and communications discuss the work of R. Buckminster Fuller in the context of the larger social and cultural patterns of the twentieth century.

A Fuller Explanation

A Fuller Explanation
Author: Amy C. Edmondson
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1468474855

In a broad sense Design Science is the grammar of a language of images rather than of words. Modern communication techniques enable us to transmit and reconstitute images without the need of knowing a specific verbal sequential language such as the Morse code or Hungarian. International traffic signs use international image symbols which are not specific to any particular verbal language. An image language differs from a verbal one in that the latter uses a linear string of symbols, whereas the former is multidimensional. Architectural renderings commonly show projections onto three mutually perpendicular planes, or consist of cross sections at differ ent altitudes representing a stack of floor plans. Such renderings make it difficult to imagine buildings containing ramps and other features which disguise the separation between floors; consequently, they limit the creativity of the architect. Analogously, we tend to analyze natural structures as if nature had used similar stacked renderings, rather than, for instance, a system of packed spheres, with the result that we fail to perceive the system of organization determining the form of such structures.