BUCKMINSTER FULLER
The Synergetic Artist - One of the great things about Bucky Fuller is that no professional category can hold him. Architect, engineer, inventor, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, poet, teacher, cosmogonist—he is all of these and something beyond them, something that turns them, synergetically, into more than the sum of their parts. His own word for this is "comprehensivist," one who works with whole systems. We could make life easier for ourselves and call him an artist, which amounts to the same thing. Intuition and knowledge weigh equally on his personal scales. "I never work with aesthetic considerations in mind," he said once, "but I have a test: If something isn't beautiful when I get finished with it, it's no good."
In the thirties, after he had been definitively rejected by the business world—fired from the building material and construction company that he had spent five years getting started—Bucky found his new spiritual home in Greenwich Village, among the artists of that place and time. He got to know them all during those years: Isamu Noguchi, Sandy Calder, Arshile Gorky, Walt Kuhn, Jo Davidson, Stuart Davis, and a lot of others who are no longer so well remembered. They used to meet at Romany Marie's cafe, where Bucky would appear every other evening, by arrangement, to sit at a corner table and talk about his wide-ranging ideas. The ideas seemed crackpot to the people Bucky had grown up with, but most of the artists found them comprehensible and well worth listening to. Bucky had decided by then that he was going to devote the rest of his life to finding out how nature really worked, which in a sense was what the advanced modern artists also had in mind. "I don't imitate nature," as Picasso put it, "I work like her."
The Dymaxion House, the bathroom, the three-wheeled car, the Airocean World Map, the geodesic dome, and all Fuller's inventions have to be seen in a comprehensivist light. No matter how interesting (and how beautiful) they may be individually, each one is a special case adaptation of Bucky's lifelong involvement with nature's basic system. And in this respect the visual dimension gives only part of the story. To get the full effect of the patent drawings, one should, ideally, read and digest the two volumes of Fuller's "Synergetics," take part in one of his famous "World Game" seminars, and, let's say, spend an evening with Fuller at his house on Bear Island, out in the middle of Penobscot Bay, listening to him explain (with collapsible models) nature's geometry. Bucky is the most generous and hospitable soul on earth, and he dearly intends for all of us to become comprehensivists. He often tells his lecture audiences that he is the most ordinary person he knows. Anybody, he says, could have done what he has done; there was no special talent involved. That may be so, but nobody else has done what he has done, or anything like it. In fact, there is good reason to view his whole performance—life and works—as one of this century's most astonishing works of art.
Calvin Tomkins, 1981
47 Honorary Doctorate Degrees
Medal of Freedom, United States of America
Engineering and Science Hall of Fame
Planetary Citizen Award, United Nations
Gold Medal of Honor, National Arts Club
Gold Medal, American Institute of Architects
Award of Achievement, Industrial Designers Society of America
Humanist of the Year, Americaqn Association of Humanists
Distinguished Service Award, World Future Society
BUCKMINSTER FULLER RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION:
A comprehensive exhibition of the life and work of
Buckminster Fuller entitled "Your Private Sky"
October 14-Jan 10, 2000 Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, Germany
March-May 2000 Kunsthalle Tirol Hall, Austria
June 15-October 15, 2000 Design Museum London, England
Nov 11,2000-Jan 16,2001 Bauhaus Dessau Dessau, Germany
February-April, 2001 Aichi Arts Center Nogoya, Japan
May-June, 2001 Modern Art Museum Kamakura, Japan
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