"Buckminster Fuller... was an American type—self-invented, overflowing with ideas and theories, eager to see the universe whole, and born to evangelize...."

"On his lecture tours he could speak for hours without stopping, and he mesmerized his audiences even as he baffled them. 'Students find themselves tuned in to the unique Fuller wave length, with its oddly necessary word coinings and its synergetic constructions,' Calvin Tomkins wrote in an adulatory 1966 profile in The New Yorker. In print—and Fuller’s books are mainly edited versions of his lectures—his prose is a word salad, the same phrases and catchwords combined and recombined until the mind reels. 'Physical points are energy-event aggregations,' he would say. 'When they converge beyond the critical fall-in proximity threshold, they orbit coordinatedly, as a Universe-precessed aggregate, as loose pebbles on our Earth orbit the Sun in unison, and as chips ride around on men’s shoulders.'..."

From "Space-Age Magus/From beginning to end, experts saw through Buckminster Fuller’s ideas and theories. Why did so many people come under his spell?" by James Gleick (NYRB).

"He believed in a coming utopia. He thought no one should have to work merely to earn a living. He had a gift for slogans: 'God is a verb.' 'Nature never fails.' 'Either war is obsolete, or men are.' 'Universe is eternally regenerative.' One young listener said, 'When I listen to Bucky talk, I feel I’ve got to go out and save the world. Then when I go outside, I realize I don’t know how.'...  Even Stewart Brand has come to regret touting Fuller in the Whole Earth Catalog. 'Domes couldn’t grow or adapt,' he says. 'When my generation outgrew the domes, we simply left them empty, like hatchlings leaving their eggshells.'”

"Fuller’s theory of ephemeralization anticipated the digital age; his invented terms 'synergy' and 'Spaceship Earth' became part of the language..."

"... scientists who discovered a carbon molecule that looked like a geodesic sphere were aided by his insights (and named it buckminsterfullerene). But it’s also hard to take some of his more eccentric ideas seriously, such as 'air-deliverable housing,' or the proposal to cover Midtown Manhattan with a huge dome. National Lampoon parodied his apparently limitless technological optimism in a feature titled 'Buckminster Fuller’s Repair Manual for the Entire Universe.'... Fuller’s public lectures, which could go on for five or six hours, were famous. Always extemporaneous, these modern-day Chautauquas were a startling weave of poetry and science, delivered in his own peculiar locution. Stewart Brand summed it up well: 'Fuller’s lectures have a raga quality of rich, nonlinear, endless improvisation full of convergent surprises.'... The counterculture eventually lost its enthusiasm for the domes, which, according to Brand, always leaked, wasted space and were impossible to subdivide and furnish. 'When my generation outgrew the domes,' Brand wrote, 'we simply left them empty, like hatchlings leaving their eggshells.'"

 
Writes Witold Rybczynski, in "Buckminster Fuller, Role Model and Cautionary Tale/The biography 'Inventor of the Future,' by Alec Nevala-Lee, explores the dreams and failures of an American optimist" (NYT).

There's a Wikipedia article for "Spaceship Earth," and it refutes the assertion that Fuller "invented" the term:

"The Bubble. It's Brooklyn. With a bubble on it."

Glad to see "Saturday Night Live" figured out how to do at least some humor in the election aftermath.

By the way, did you know that Buckminster Fuller actually — not just humorously — proposed a bubble to enclose part of NYC?



Looks like Trump Tower is just inside Bucky's bubble.

"Unlike the pure coherence of [Buckminster] Fuller's idea, for instance, Grieb's shifts in geometric patterning are subtly awkward..."

"... and the interstitial building with its squiggly entry leads to unnecessarily crammed interior spaces, for instance."

That's an awkward sentence about awkwardness — note the double "for instance" — from a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article titled "The singular vision and big ambition of Domes architect Donald Grieb."

The Domes — the Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory — "have become an emblem of civic neglect."

There are a lot of domes out there, from the time when domes seemed like The Future, and even the purely coherent domes of Buckminster Fuller are crumbling into incoherence through neglect.

The Future was once a concept, and when it was made real, real people said no, but we may say yes again, if only to preserve the crazy old idea of The Future we had in the past.