Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller

by Alec Nevala-Lee

Hardcover, 2022

Status

Available

Call number

620.0092

Publication

Dey Street Books (2022), 672 pages

Description

"From Alec Nevala-Lee, the author of the Hugo and Locus Award finalist Astounding, comes a revelatory biography of the visionary designer who defined the rules of startup culture and shaped America's idea of the future. During his lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century. As the architectural designer and futurist best known for the geodesic dome, he enthralled a vast popular audience, inspired devotion from both the counterculture and the establishment, and was praised as a modern Leonardo da Vinci. To his admirers, he exemplified what one man could accomplish by approaching urgent design problems using a radically unconventional set of strategies, which he based on a mystical conception of the universe's geometry. His views on sustainability, as embodied in the image of Spaceship Earth, convinced him that it was possible to provide for all humanity through the efficient use of planetary resources. From Epcot Center to the molecule named in his honor as the buckyball, Fuller's legacy endures to this day, and his belief in the transformative potential of technology profoundly influenced the founders of Silicon Valley. Inventor of the Future is the first authoritative biography to cover all aspects of Fuller's career. Drawing on meticulous research, dozens of interviews, and thousands of unpublished documents, Nevala-Lee has produced a riveting portrait that transcends the myth of Fuller as an otherworldly generalist. It reconstructs the true origins of his most famous inventions, including the Dymaxion Car, the Wichita House, and the dome itself; his fraught relationships with his students and collaborators; his interactions with Frank Lloyd Wright, Isamu Noguchi, Clare Boothe Luce, John Cage, Steve Jobs, and many others; and his tumultuous private life, in which his determination to succeed on his own terms came at an immense personal cost. In an era of accelerating change, Fuller's example remains enormously relevant, and his lessons for designers, activists, and innovators are as powerful and essential as ever"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member willszal
Richard Buckminster Fuller was one of the most famous personalities of the 21st century. This biography documents his life and begins to touch on his legacy.

To begin this review, I will frame it in the context of two other biographies in the "great man" archetype. The first is Andrea Wulf's
Show More
biography of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)—"The Invention of Nature." The second is Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs (1955-2011). All three of these biographies are "critical," in the sense that they don't shy from the personal failings of each of these men (Jobs and Fuller in particular had very strong "reality distortion fields" which often prevented all but the most dogged of investigative journalists from approaching truth). Apparently there are a number of biographies of Fuller already, although it sounds like many of them have been swept up in mythology as opposed to history (still useful, but in a different way).

The way that these three books differ is in the temporal perspective they've been able to achieve. Jobs just died a few years ago, so although Isaacson was able to speak of Jobs' influence during his lifetime, it is still too soon to tell how Jobs will shape the 21st century. With Humboldt, at the distance of a few centuries, it is possible to follow his influence on the arc of a number of different disciplines in generations of subsequent thinkers (which Wulf does a brilliant job of documenting). Nevala-Lee has had the luxury of being just far enough away from Fuller in time to be able to craft a book that not only documents all the intimate eccentricities of Fuller, but is also able to paint a picture of some of his influence on future generations of research (although I wish more of the book was dedicated to this subject, as Wulf had done; there is no mention of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, for example).

Another similarity between Humboldt, Fuller, and Jobs is that they were all generalists (or, some people might say, experts in a wide range of disparate fields). Fuller in particular capitalized on the articulation of his contributions through a generalist role (implicitly and often explicitly critiquing a societal trend towards specialization). Myself and a number of my peers have follow in this vein in our own professional careers, partially due to the influence of these men.

Now to turn our attention to Fuller himself:

If you had known Fuller in the earlier decades of his life, you would not have believed that he would achieve so much influence and esteem in his later years. Fuller struggled with alcoholism for much of his life. Despite his upper-class heritage, he had a bumbling professional life, with various fits and starts throughout his entire career. Similar to the way in which Enzo Ferrari didn't found the car company for which he is famous until he was fifty, Fuller only began to achieve success in his fifties.

Fuller also had a series of three long-term extra-marital relations with women in their early twenties, which would be judged as inappropriate (both then and now). Similar to Jobs, he also had the unfortunate habit of taking credit for the inventions of others (Tensegrity, for example).

I've always associated Fuller with California (despite the fact that Fuller spent most of his life based out of the Northeast and the Midwestern US). More than anyone else, Fuller could be credited with popularizing the Silicon Valley ethos. Back in the 1920s, he began popularizing a concept known as "ephemeralization," which documented the way in which technological progress was resulting in the physical mass of the things we use to be decreasing towards the asymptote of zero (the classic example of this being the airline industry). He was a big advocate of what we now call the sharing economy (counter to architects such as Christopher Alexander, who believed that people can bring more aliveness to the built environments they make their homes when they have the agency that comes with ownership as opposed to tenancy). He also was somewhere between a scientist and a public relations agency, often stretching science into the realm of metaphysics and cosmology. All of these tendencies are dominant within the archetype of Silicon Valley today. Fittingly, Stanford University is the home of Fuller's mammoth archives, and San Francisco is the home of the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Additionally, Fuller's mechanistic analogies—the most famous of which might be "spaceship earth"—often undermine a living-systems paradigm; this too is something that Silicon Valley has inherited.

Despite documenting Fuller's shortcomings, the book is still predominantly a celebration of Fuller's magnificent achievements, and if anything, the reader comes away all the more impressed that Fuller could have achieved so much when held in the perspective of the personal challenges he faced.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Shrike58
My reaction to this book is going to be conditioned by the fact that Fuller was never a hero of mine. Sure, I probably noticed the Dymaxion Car by the time I was 12 (1970), and became aware of the man's architectural achievements by the time I was in high school (the mid-1970s). But, by the time I
Show More
was in my twenties, and old enough and educated enough to have some engagement with the Fuller's writings, my hot take was that I was looking at a lot of double-talk. This is not to mention that I tended to lump Fuller with the rest of the architects who were being criticized for the failures of the "International" Style (see the writings of Peter Blake).

Fast-forward forty or so years, and we have this new life of Fuller, by an ostensible admirer, and Nevala-Lee finds much to be dubious about. Too much hard drinking, too many dubious sexual adventures, too much exploitation of other folks' intellectual property, and too much personal myth making. My overall reaction; so what? This all seems par for the course for a self-invented American man of affairs of the 20th century: "There is no such thing as an original sin." Still, there is the critique Fuller's personal style might be one of the man's most notable lingering influences, and he basically created the template of entrepreneur as public philosopher, as exemplified by the Silicon Valley Set. Still, what impressed me more is that Nevala-Lee can trace continued influences in the worlds of architecture, the physical sciences, and applied humanities, and that is what impresses me most; this is considering that Fuller's real original goal was to become the Henry Ford of private housing, not the guru of geodesic domes. Keeping in mind that this is a surprisingly dry read, there is much food for thought here.
Show Less

Language

Original language

English

Physical description

672 p.; 9 inches

ISBN

0062947222 / 9780062947222
Page: 0.2505 seconds