Product Description

"A pleasure to read." -Architectural Review

"A wonderful, nontechnical introduction to one of this century's most fascinating minds." -Whole Earth Review

"Original . . . [and] valuable, because it describes . . . Fuller's original techniques." -Architectural Record.

Architect, mathematician, engineer, inventor, visionary humanist, educator, inspirational orator, and bestselling author, R. Buckminster Fuller has been rightly called "the 20th-century Leonardo da Vinci." Written by a fellow inventor who worked with Fuller for more than three decades, BuckyWorks is an inspiring celebration of the man, his ideas, his inventions -and his legacy for our future. Featuring over 200 photographs and drawings, plus dozens of fascinating excerpts from Fuller's lectures and conversations with the author, this book offers a breathtaking inside look at one of the truly great minds of our time.

J. BALDWIN is an inventor and teacher who worked under, with, and for R. Buckminster Fuller for more than three decades. He served as an editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth Review for 25 years.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #183973 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.com Review
Often alluded to as a 20th-century Leonardo da Vinci, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was a visionary of the modern age. As an architect, inventor, engineer, writer, mathematician, and educator, his utopian humanism was evident in the way he devoted his life to designing objects, including buildings and cars, that would solve many of the problems of modern living. He was an early proponent of geodesic domes--semispherical structures made up of incredibly light and extremely strong triangular components--which he recommended for economical and energy-efficient housing and other purposes. An entire chapter in this engaging book is devoted to domes; other chapters cover Fuller's far-reaching ideas on the Dymaxion House, Dymaxion Transportation, Synergetics, and Megastructures. ("Dymaxion" was a term Fuller coined to describe getting the most output from minimal input of energy and materials.) With more than 200 black-and-white photos and drawings, this is a wonderfully nontechnical introduction to and celebration of the man, his remarkable inventions, and their modern-day relevance.

From Publishers Weekly
A useful, informal introduction to visionary engineer Buckminster Fuller's ideas, discoveries and inventions, this survey is illustrated with some 200 photographs, drawings and plans that help demonstrate how Fuller nurtured concepts from paper napkin to finished gizmo. Baldwin, an editor of Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review, is an inventor who worked closely with Fuller (1895-1983) and who has designed and built experimental domes. Along with Fuller inventions and blueprints such as the aluminum, aerodynamically modeled Dymaxion car, the geodesic dome, "Lightful House" 12-deck residential towers and energy-efficient corrugated cottages with silo tops, Baldwin explains synergetics, Fuller's system purporting to describe the coordinates and energy flow of the universe. He also discusses the World Game Institute, founded by Fuller in 1972, which conducts workshops demonstrating how a small fraction of the world's military expenditures could be redeployed to eliminate starvation and malnutrition, stabilize the population and provide clean, safe energy.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Architect, mathematician, engineer, inventor, educator, and more, Buckminster Fuller was twice kicked out of Harvard. Eventually, he joined the navy, which appealed to his sense of organization and interest in engineering and invention. Baldwin met Fuller at the University of Michigan while a freshman design student and studied and worked with him for the next 30 years. His book, which reflects its subject's eclectic nature, tries to capture both the breadth and depth of Fuller's ideas and creations. Photographs of the early prototypes are intriguing, and Baldwin's comments that many of Fuller's engineering concepts are just now becoming viable due to the development of appropriate construction materials shows us how far ahead of his time Fuller was. The structure of this book is somewhat unclear, but the content is always fascinating. For popular science collections.
Hilary Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., Livermore, Cal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

When do we declare victory in The Industrial Revolution?
Buckminster Fuller has fascinated me since my teens because of his borderline science-fictional ideas and his quest to use technology to provide for 100% of humanity -- which unfortunately is a moving target during an era of population growth. Baldwin's book doesn't quite satisfy my curiosity about the current state of Fuller's posthumous work, since he gives me the impression that it's stuck somewhere back in the post-Hippie 1970's. I certainly hope that the field has advanced further along than the dumbed-down "Whole Earth Catalogs" version which celebrated geodesic model kits and "sustainable" (i.e., voluntarily hardship-inducing) technologies.

What I would like to see in a proper review of Fuller's legacy includes (a) mathematicians' assessment of his synergetic geometry, which is more radically anti-Euclidean than non-Euclidean in that it rejects the whole Greek paradigm of "abstraction" from physical objects; (b) economists' assessment of his argument that with proper resource use and rational design decisions we really could take care of 100% of humanity; (c) a discussion of why, if Fuller's goal is indeed practical, after 250 years of industrial and technological progress we've devolved from objectively useful work -- making and moving stuff on farms, in mines and in factories -- into to a situation where we hold absurd, time-wasting and nonproductive "jobs" in "services" (which sociologist Daniel Bell characterized as postindustrial "games between persons"), while billions of other humans don't even have the basics for a materially decent life; (d) and why this goal isn't on the agenda of any major politician or other world-recognized and respected figure.

In other words, I find implicit in Fuller's work the question, "When do we declare victory in the Industrial Revolution, and go on our long-overdue vacation that futurists used to call 'The Postindustrial Leisure Society'?" Although Baldwin supplied me with some useful information on "Buckminster Fuller's Ideas for Today," it wasn't quite what I wanted.

A Man Before His Time
Inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller, "Bucky," died in l983 at age 88. He is known the world over for his invention of the geodesic dome. The author of this book knew him for 31 years.

Bucky, as he was known to everyone, (except his wife of 66 years) was not a college graduate, yet he received 47 honorary degrees during his lifetime. His influence on architectural and product designing was--and still is--tremendous.

This book is of interest not only as a tribute to his inventiveness, but for detailing why many of his concepts, to this day, have not been accepted. The full-page cartoon on page 20 is a classic example of his frustration. It depicts an automobile being made on the driveway of a home. Bucky argued for years how ridiculous it is that we build houses 'from scratch' on a house lot. If we built cars that way, as the cartoon shows, they would cost $300,000! It should be noted that the American Institute of Architects (AIA), in 1928, passed a resolution "...on record as inherently opposed to any peas-in-a-pod-line reproducible designs." Others, sewer system builders, carpenters, electricians, etc., indicated they too would oppose home-building innovations.

One reason the geodesic dome concept succeeded was that the military did not need to consult zoning and codes when it needed a transportable light weight and super strong structure for a mountain top or an Arctic location.

You will be amazed at how much his 1934 car designs resemble today's vans. Equally amazing is his "traveling cartridge," a small car transportable by air or rail. No need to rent a car. It could even be used as a sleeping unit.

His "Triton City" was designed as a floating city (100,000 people) for Tokyo Bay. You see variations of this idea almost every year and it is invariably presented as a new idea. His "Fly's Eye" dome is now under commercial development and you may be seeing into the future when scanning this section of the book.

An example of the tremendous respect for Fuller's concepts can be seen in the naming of the 60-atom carbon molecule discovered in the early 1970s. It is called "buckminsterfullerene" and is often referred to as "Buckyball." Its soccer-ball-pentagon-hexagon pattern very much relates to Fuller's icosahedron-based constructions.

Fuller maintained that the entire universe, from atoms to galaxies, "is make made up of islands of compression in a continuous sea of tension." This "tensegrity" concept may even apply to biological cells according to a recent (1993) paper by Dr. Ingber.

As the author often notes, Fuller--as a person and as a designer--had his faults. However his accomplishments and his influence on others far outshine his failures. Many inventors can relate to the problems due to being "before your time" and to the difficulty of displacing the "established way" of doing something.

This book is crammed with photos, many never before published. Buy it, enjoy it. Donate it to your local school library. There is a whole new generation out there that can be inspired by it.

This is the book for learning total design and about the man himself
I bought tis book several years ago based on a recommendation as a good intro th Buckys work. This book is a gem for all of those who are inclined to engineering and design, not only because of the explanations and ilustrations, but also as testimonial to the thought of the great genius.

Im still amazed that Bucky's thought have not been embraced by us modern citizens.

I am trying to introduce a revolutionary solar coating here in Venezuela [..], I think of the aluminum domes built in Ghana that used natural convection for cooling, and people thoight they were in fact to cold!!! sustainable development has been around longer than we thought, are we ever going to strat smelling the coffee???