Buckyballs: The Amazing Magnetic Desktoy You Can’t Put Down! (by zoomdoggle)
I bought Sam a set of these at Powell’s last week.
Have you ever read much about Buckminster Fuller? He’s an eccentric thinker/designer worth knowing about, though not many of his ideas were every successfully implemented. His life story is also fascinating.
Wikipedia’s entry on him starts with this: “Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society.”
I found this 2008 profile by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker (as the Whitney Museum had a show on him then).
Dymaxion Man: The visions of Buckminster Fuller
Excerpts from the article:
Castro-like, Fuller could lecture for ten hours at a stretch. (A friend of mine who took an architecture course from Fuller at Yale recalls that classes lasted from nine o’clock in the morning until five in the evening, and that Fuller talked basically the entire time.) Audiences were enraptured and also, it seems, mystified. “It was great! What did he say?” became the standard joke. The first “Whole Earth Catalog,” which was dedicated to Fuller, noted that his language “makes demands on your head like suddenly discovering an extra engine in your car.”
…
The fact that so few of Fuller’s ideas were ever realized certainly makes it hard to argue for his importance as an inventor. Even his most successful creation, the geodesic dome, proved to be a dud. In 1994, Stewart Brand, the founding editor of the “Whole Earth Catalog” and an early, self-described dome “propagandist,” called geodesics a “massive, total failure”.
…
Fuller was also deeply pessimistic about people’s capacity for change, which was why, he said, he had become an inventor in the first place. “I made up my mind … that I would never try to reform man—that’s much too difficult,” he told an interviewer for this magazine in 1966. “What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions.”
You can follow him on Twitter — yes, someone is doling out his quotes — though they haven’t updated it too recently.
See also The Buckminster Fuller Institute
