R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern-Thinking

↻ 2024-11-19

R. Buckminster Fuller wrote extensively on the need to recognize the interconnectedness of disciplines. Perhaps because of his belief in this rampant interconnectedness, many of the artifacts he left behind are obtuse, or at least significantly open to interpretation.

This book follows threads of translation in Fuller’s artifacts, attempting to demonstrate both the relationships (between geometry, material systems, language, and intellectual property) and the directionality of Fuller’s translational representations (whether he intended to illustrate a concept graphically or whether he intended to develop a concept through illustration).

This is a beautiful book, the illustrations and commentary are well cross referenced, and it’s worth reading for anyone who is a Fuller reader.

I don’t necessarily believe one requires such a careful analysis of the directionality and and relationships between ideas for Fuller’s work, though. Perhaps this analysis is correct, but part of Fuller’s appeal, to a reader of his work, is his wide ranging synthesis of subjects, not necessarily the picking apart of his sources.

A lot of his work was experimental, and in a very risky way - some of his building concepts simply failed to be structurally sound, while others were unusually sound for their cost / weight of materials. This is to say that Fuller was not a person of small, safe steps. He was a person who’d devise synthesized from nature, say, and run with it, perhaps finding out that there was something to his understanding of the underlying foundational idea and perhaps finding out that he’d misunderstood the underlying foundational idea entirely.

Anyway, I appreciate Fuller, I think he was right that the world becomes both a more boring place and a less innovative place when we pigeonhole ourselves into specialties. This book is a very beautiful, academically deep analysis of Fuller’s work which may not have been necessary, that’s all.

home | github | mastodon