Operating Manual For SPACESHIP EARTH

A blog about Buckminster Fuller

[buckyoperating]

“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” - Buckminster Fuller

[mrbuckyfuller]

Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965) R. Buckminster Fuller, 1963, Tempera on board, 21 ½ x 17", National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine.

[mrbuckyfuller]

Interior of Dymaxion House

[buckyoperating]

I used to think there was something so alien about the Dymaxion House, but the panoramic view it offers seems incredibly humane.. so unlike the typical box. Moving through a circular space could have an interesting link to time that we often don’t experience..

[pacificdomes]

The best way to predict the future is to design it.

[buckyoperating]

Bucky Fuller’s grain silo houses represented a solution for housing shortages in the war-ravaged 1940′s. Unfortunately steel was in heavy demand for weaponry, and the houses were therefore never mass produced. 

[buckyoperating]

Buckminster Fuller- Thinking out Loud (1996)

[bookpickings]

Critical Path

R. Buckminster Fuller

“Love is metaphysical gravity.”

Bucky Fuller’s scientific revision of The Lord’s Prayer – a secular definition of divinity as a curiosity-driven love of truth bent through the prism of our subjective experience

[wakinglithiumflower-blog]

You never change things by fighting the existent reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller (via wakinglithiumflower)

[visualgraphc]

[tim-theincrediblemachine]

Buckminster Fuller’s classes Black Mountain College, North Carolina. 1948-1949 (via State Archives of North Carolina)

[rethreads-blog]

‘Glass Half Fuller’ Buckminster Fuller inspired, 2-color letterpress print

[thegoldeneternity]

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Richard Buckminster Fuller in New York Magazine, March 30th, 1970. (via thegoldeneternity)

What if everyone were allowed to explore? What if no one had to prove their worth by the amount of money they make? Fuller believed in a society where creativity and innovation could flourish through technology. Where everyone had a basic right to life.

[blankonblank]

“I must reorganize the environment of man by which then greater numbers of men can prosper” - Buckminster Fuller 

As told to Studs Terkel during interviews recorded in 1965 and 1970

Our New Series: The Experimenters: Episode 1

[buckyoperating]

This video is absolutely beautiful.  “Are you going out to make money or are you going out to make sense?”

[buckyoperating]

“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant or their value”

-Buckminster Fuller

If health and global warming aren’t good enough reasons for companies to decrease pollution, perhaps this logic would change their minds. 

[polychroniadis]

Buckminster Fuller, ‘Envisioning Architecture’ (MoMA, New York) 1927.

[modeshannonlong]

Tensegrity “The word ‘tensegrity’ is an invention: a contraction of ‘tensional integrity.’ Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors. Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder”

- Richard Buckminster Fuller (Synergetics, p. 372.)

[magictransistor]

Richard Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains To The Moon (Cover art detail), Arcturus Books, 1963.