2023 book #24. 2022. Fuller was a very popular figure up to his death in 1983. Hailed as a futurist he had a lot of ideas and remains influential in some fields but I think most people today don't know of him. He was the inventor of the geodesic dome. Very interesting. ( )

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 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, that Nevala-Lee can trace continued Fuller's influences in the worlds of architecture, the physical sciences, and applied humanities 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 rather dry read, there is much food for thought here. ( )

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 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. ( )

Reviewed favorably in "The Career Builder: The dreams and carefully create legacy of the American futurist Buckminster Fuller," by Witold Rybczynski, New York Times, August 21, 2022, Book Review, p. 10.