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The Buckminster Fuller symposium at Cooper Union in New York City on September 12th and 13th was a resounding success! The sold-out event represented the culmination of the Whitney Museum's exhibit, Buckminster Fuller Starting with the Universe, which travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in March 2009.
Many thanks to extrememediastudies.org for the images above. To read their thoroughly blogged overview of the event click here.
We look forward to the Whitney Museum's posting of the video of the event in its entirety in the coming months.
Allegra Fuller Snyder's moving talk served as the touchstone for the entire event. Click "Read more" for the full text of Allegra's address.
Introduction to the symposium by Allegra Fuller Snyder
First of all I want to thank the Whitney Museum; Adam Weinberg, director and Dana Miller and Michael Hays, co-curators of STARTING WITH THE UNIVERSE, for their amazing exhibit on my father, Buckminster Fuller. I know it took both enormous courage, and vision, to take on this challenge. I thank all of you, from the bottom of my heart.
I also want to say I feel very thrilled to be talking to you, here, today. I tried to find out when my father last spoke here, and didn’t succeed, but I remember his telling me of the thrill he felt being a little part of the history of this Great Hall.
It is incredibly exciting that the Whitney show on my father has caused many, many thousands of people to ponder or reexamine who R. Buckminster Fuller was and is. Several years ago, in 2004, a US Postage Stamp was issued acknowledging his work. It was the very powerful image created by Artzybasheff which is also included in the Whitney Exhibit and appears as plate number one in the catalogue. We see geodesic domes and the Dymaxion car, air deliverable housing, but even more exciting to me is the sense of going into my father's mind. My father's mind is really central to the vision that the stamp's image presented to us and I think the exhibit begins to help us understand that too.
While the geodesic dome, and so many others, of what my father called tools, were very significant but they weren't the heart of my father's concerns. And Dana and Michael have so brilliantly succeeded in pointing this out through the wonderful inclusion of many pieces from the Fuller Archive at Stanford University. As Dana has mentioned, in a piece in the ARCHITECTUAL RECORD, these pieces bring us the ideas being worked out in his archive, in his journals, and in the sketches that show him really working though his ideas and developing them on paper and the results as Michael suggests, is that we begin to view and understand anew “partly with a kind of open-mindedness and partly with new technologies and new conceptual tools...that complexity...can be an index of totalities and connectedness” Michael goes on to say, “he saw forces, he saw vectors, he saw movement, and he saw that when you mess with one part of the system, it ripples through the whole. The earth as both an object and an ecosystem.” And Dana continues, “But it’s a closed system. That’s the important thing - doing more with less is really important...taking best advantage of the finite resources within our closed system.” - Issues that have become central in all our thinking today.
My father spent most of his life "thinking out loud" I found him to be a truly great teacher, and, I think, this is what great teachers do.
He criss-crossed the country, and traveled around the world, talking to people. He was famous for his lectures. Some of them would last four, eight, ten hours, and people, amazingly, stayed to hear him, because they were excited to be connected to his thinking process. IT MADE THEM THINK.
What was this "thinking out loud"? He gave himself permission, unencumbered by previous thoughts, to explore, to re-examine, to test, to challenge, his experiences and, ultimately, to come to knowing yet again. There was an integrity to his thinking. In fact one of his suggestions was that we all be given a scholarship to think. If we would really do our own thinking, not worrying about others' opinions or our own survival, he said that there would be enough world transforming ideas generated that they would pay for the scholarships of all humanity.
His thinking, thinking out loud; trusting his thinking, was critical to him. He said of himself that he was a very ordinary man. I think he was right. What he had was courage - and discipline - and that if we all had the courage to really think for ourselves our Spaceship Earth would be transformed.
I find the titles of my father's books really suggest his process of thinking. Let me tell you some of them.
INTUITION (1972). He was inspired by that place of kinesthetic grasping that proceeds articulation. He said, (and I am now quoting from the marvelous four volumes call SYNERGETICS DICTIONARY, THE MIND OF BUCKMINSTER FULLER (1986), compiled from direct quotes of my father’s by E. J. Applewhite.) “Intuition operates in the twilight zone between conscious and subconscious. Intuition is a pulsative, tidal phenomenon...Intuition is the dawning awareness of the experienced...dawning awareness of the experienced” He both, consistently and persistently, advocated that all of us shed all of our pre-fabricated ideas and adopt new ones based on direct experience, direct inquiry, and direct assessment That insistence that experience be the key source of information is absolutely central to understanding Bucky
Thence for him it was essential to state I SEEM TO BE A VERB (1970); NO MORE SECOND HAND GOD (1963), Yes, for him direct experience was the basis of all knowledge.
IDEAS AND INTEGRITIES (1963) “The only thing that has beauty is the truth. Integrity is more than truth: it is the integration of truth, a very comprehensive truth” - integrity, another essential.
These titles suggest something of his process. What were some of his concerns? Again the titles tell us. He wrote a book called EDUCATION AUTOMATION. My father felt that the educational process, must, at essence, be life long and self-motivated, but it would be truly facilitated by technology. His use of the word "automation" but what he envisioned is what we now call the information revolution - that book was written in 1963.
Universe, nature and science, were essential areas to be examined and reexamined. His very first book, and his last, are in some way inspired by space exploration, which, he felt, truly demonstrated how science and nature lead us into better understanding of Universe. My father's first book was called NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON (1938); his last, CRITICAL PATH(1981) takes its title from the process NASA used to articulate its first moon landing. This process starts with the biggest picture, a successful landing in all it details, and steps back from there to define all the critical steps that must be taken toward a successful outcome. The biggest picture is the starting point, not the end result. If you really understand this process, you will fully understand what my father meant by “comprehensive anticipatory design science”, those words clearly identify “the critical path” process and they define my father’s own thinking process, because he called himself a comprehensive anticipatory design scientist
And his own Critical Path process led to OPERATING MANUAL FOR SPACESHIP EARTH (1969).
And then there was his essential work SYNERGETICS, EXPLORATIONS IN THE GEOMETRY OF THINKING, a unique mathematical world view, inspired by nature’s principles, which he regarded as relevant to every aspect of life. He presents it as a guide not only to understanding Universe itself but to the self-discipline of thinking.
A writer in the New York Sun (Oliver Schwaner-Albright), reviewing the Whitney show, states, and, I think, he thought, a little facetiously “It turns out that Fuller didn’t invent the dome so much as he divined it. The universe had engineered it long ago.” You know what, he’s right! That’s exactly what my father thought. Synergetic Geometry, which my father, and many students of his work, consider his most important contribution, is “an exploration of systems found in and employed by nature and repeated throughout the universe” - (to quote the jacket cover) A geodesic structure is just that, a demonstration of a building principle in nature, which is why it led Robert Curl, Harry Kroto and Richard Smalley to identify the Nobel Prize winning Buckminsterfullerene, which has further led to nano technology.
Somewhere in the middle of his process he wrote a book called UTOPIA OR OBLIVION(1969). This is a challenge to all of us. If we are thinking comprehensively and taking actions on our thoughts, an optimum state of living for all humanity is possible - Utopia. If we are not, Oblivion is equally possible. To quote Daddy “We are all on a spaceship called Earth. It took billions of years to develop. We’re not going to get another...therefore living only on our energy savings by burning up the fossil fuels which took billions of years to impound from the Sun or living on our capital by burning up our Earth's atoms, is lethally ignorant and also utterly irresponsible to our coming generations and their forward days. Our children and their children are our future days. If we do not comprehend and realize our potential ability to support all life forever we are cosmically bankrupt...how do we make this spaceship work?”
Answers? Answers? Answers? That is why the Buckminster Fuller Institute initiated the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award, first presented this year to Dr. John Todd, for his Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia.
But it is my hope that the Whitney Exhibit will challenge many, many more to do their own thinking and come up with their own answers.
First of all I want to thank the Whitney Museum; Adam Weinberg, director and Dana Miller and Michael Hays, co-curators of STARTING WITH THE UNIVERSE, for their amazing exhibit on my father, Buckminster Fuller. I know it took both enormous courage, and vision, to take on this challenge. I thank all of you, from the bottom of my heart.
I also want to say I feel very thrilled to be talking to you, here, today. I tried to find out when my father last spoke here, and didn’t succeed, but I remember his telling me of the thrill he felt being a little part of the history of this Great Hall.
It is incredibly exciting that the Whitney show on my father has caused many, many thousands of people to ponder or reexamine who R. Buckminster Fuller was and is. Several years ago, in 2004, a US Postage Stamp was issued acknowledging his work. It was the very powerful image created by Artzybasheff which is also included in the Whitney Exhibit and appears as plate number one in the catalogue. We see geodesic domes and the Dymaxion car, air deliverable housing, but even more exciting to me is the sense of going into my father's mind. My father's mind is really central to the vision that the stamp's image presented to us and I think the exhibit begins to help us understand that too.
While the geodesic dome, and so many others, of what my father called tools, were very significant but they weren't the heart of my father's concerns. And Dana and Michael have so brilliantly succeeded in pointing this out through the wonderful inclusion of many pieces from the Fuller Archive at Stanford University. As Dana has mentioned, in a piece in the ARCHITECTUAL RECORD, these pieces bring us the ideas being worked out in his archive, in his journals, and in the sketches that show him really working though his ideas and developing them on paper and the results as Michael suggests, is that we begin to view and understand anew “partly with a kind of open-mindedness and partly with new technologies and new conceptual tools...that complexity...can be an index of totalities and connectedness” Michael goes on to say, “he saw forces, he saw vectors, he saw movement, and he saw that when you mess with one part of the system, it ripples through the whole. The earth as both an object and an ecosystem.” And Dana continues, “But it’s a closed system. That’s the important thing - doing more with less is really important...taking best advantage of the finite resources within our closed system.” - Issues that have become central in all our thinking today.
My father spent most of his life "thinking out loud" I found him to be a truly great teacher, and, I think, this is what great teachers do.
He criss-crossed the country, and traveled around the world, talking to people. He was famous for his lectures. Some of them would last four, eight, ten hours, and people, amazingly, stayed to hear him, because they were excited to be connected to his thinking process. IT MADE THEM THINK.
What was this "thinking out loud"? He gave himself permission, unencumbered by previous thoughts, to explore, to re-examine, to test, to challenge, his experiences and, ultimately, to come to knowing yet again. There was an integrity to his thinking. In fact one of his suggestions was that we all be given a scholarship to think. If we would really do our own thinking, not worrying about others' opinions or our own survival, he said that there would be enough world transforming ideas generated that they would pay for the scholarships of all humanity.
His thinking, thinking out loud; trusting his thinking, was critical to him. He said of himself that he was a very ordinary man. I think he was right. What he had was courage - and discipline - and that if we all had the courage to really think for ourselves our Spaceship Earth would be transformed.
I find the titles of my father's books really suggest his process of thinking. Let me tell you some of them.
INTUITION (1972). He was inspired by that place of kinesthetic grasping that proceeds articulation. He said, (and I am now quoting from the marvelous four volumes call SYNERGETICS DICTIONARY, THE MIND OF BUCKMINSTER FULLER (1986), compiled from direct quotes of my father’s by E. J. Applewhite.) “Intuition operates in the twilight zone between conscious and subconscious. Intuition is a pulsative, tidal phenomenon...Intuition is the dawning awareness of the experienced...dawning awareness of the experienced” He both, consistently and persistently, advocated that all of us shed all of our pre-fabricated ideas and adopt new ones based on direct experience, direct inquiry, and direct assessment That insistence that experience be the key source of information is absolutely central to understanding Bucky
Thence for him it was essential to state I SEEM TO BE A VERB (1970); NO MORE SECOND HAND GOD (1963), Yes, for him direct experience was the basis of all knowledge.
IDEAS AND INTEGRITIES (1963) “The only thing that has beauty is the truth. Integrity is more than truth: it is the integration of truth, a very comprehensive truth” - integrity, another essential.
These titles suggest something of his process. What were some of his concerns? Again the titles tell us. He wrote a book called EDUCATION AUTOMATION. My father felt that the educational process, must, at essence, be life long and self-motivated, but it would be truly facilitated by technology. His use of the word "automation" but what he envisioned is what we now call the information revolution - that book was written in 1963.
Universe, nature and science, were essential areas to be examined and reexamined. His very first book, and his last, are in some way inspired by space exploration, which, he felt, truly demonstrated how science and nature lead us into better understanding of Universe. My father's first book was called NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON (1938); his last, CRITICAL PATH(1981) takes its title from the process NASA used to articulate its first moon landing. This process starts with the biggest picture, a successful landing in all it details, and steps back from there to define all the critical steps that must be taken toward a successful outcome. The biggest picture is the starting point, not the end result. If you really understand this process, you will fully understand what my father meant by “comprehensive anticipatory design science”, those words clearly identify “the critical path” process and they define my father’s own thinking process, because he called himself a comprehensive anticipatory design scientist
And his own Critical Path process led to OPERATING MANUAL FOR SPACESHIP EARTH (1969).
And then there was his essential work SYNERGETICS, EXPLORATIONS IN THE GEOMETRY OF THINKING, a unique mathematical world view, inspired by nature’s principles, which he regarded as relevant to every aspect of life. He presents it as a guide not only to understanding Universe itself but to the self-discipline of thinking.
A writer in the New York Sun (Oliver Schwaner-Albright), reviewing the Whitney show, states, and, I think, he thought, a little facetiously “It turns out that Fuller didn’t invent the dome so much as he divined it. The universe had engineered it long ago.” You know what, he’s right! That’s exactly what my father thought. Synergetic Geometry, which my father, and many students of his work, consider his most important contribution, is “an exploration of systems found in and employed by nature and repeated throughout the universe” - (to quote the jacket cover) A geodesic structure is just that, a demonstration of a building principle in nature, which is why it led Robert Curl, Harry Kroto and Richard Smalley to identify the Nobel Prize winning Buckminsterfullerene, which has further led to nano technology.
Somewhere in the middle of his process he wrote a book called UTOPIA OR OBLIVION(1969). This is a challenge to all of us. If we are thinking comprehensively and taking actions on our thoughts, an optimum state of living for all humanity is possible - Utopia. If we are not, Oblivion is equally possible. To quote Daddy “We are all on a spaceship called Earth. It took billions of years to develop. We’re not going to get another...therefore living only on our energy savings by burning up the fossil fuels which took billions of years to impound from the Sun or living on our capital by burning up our Earth's atoms, is lethally ignorant and also utterly irresponsible to our coming generations and their forward days. Our children and their children are our future days. If we do not comprehend and realize our potential ability to support all life forever we are cosmically bankrupt...how do we make this spaceship work?”
Answers? Answers? Answers? That is why the Buckminster Fuller Institute initiated the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award, first presented this year to Dr. John Todd, for his Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia.
But it is my hope that the Whitney Exhibit will challenge many, many more to do their own thinking and come up with their own answers.
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