Buckminster Fuller on The Geodesic Life

(tape rewind sound) (light keyboard music) - [Studs Terkel] One of the most original spirits of our time, Buckminster Fuller, sings of man's potency.

Everyone aware of his work agrees that Buckminster Fuller's one of the original minds of our time.

- [Buckminster Fuller] I was born in the era of the specialist and I set about to be purposefully comprehensive, just the opposite.

I made up my mind that you don't just find out something to entertain yourself, you may find out things and ought to be able to turn everything, not just in a philosophical statement, but into actually tools.

I must reorganize the environment of man by which, then greater numbers of men can prosper.

That's been my main undertaking.

(light playful music) - [Studs Terkel] We can turn this tape, it's no problem.

There's so many questions to ask you, Mr. Fuller.

- [Buckminster Fuller] Please call me Bucky.

- [Buckminster Fuller] Please call me Bucky.

- [Voiceover] Yeah.

- [Voiceover] Yeah.

- [Buckminster Fuller] I was married in World War 1.

Our first child was born, and she caught spinal meningitis and infantile paralysis.

It was an awful struggle.

This child lived to just before her fourth birthday and she died in November 1922.

So, for five years, I was feeling really horribly sad about this kid.

I felt that if the kind of technology that went into making a battleship and an aeroplane and guns had gone into -- I'm sure this child would caught these things out of the environment, and I was sure there was something wrong about our environment.

about our environment.

I'd use mathematics very powerfully, I'd use mathematics very powerfully, I'd use mathematics very powerfully, I was sure things were just not being done in logical ways.

I was sure things were just not being done in logical ways.

In 1927, our second child was born.

At that time, I have suddenly a new child after five years (mumbles) who already knows so much.

I said, "I've got a chance now to look out "for this new life, "and I'm really going to have to really rethink "everything I have."

I had absolutely no money, suddenly this new child and everybody tells you you gotta earn a living.

I said, "I think this is an absolute blinding thing."

I'm either gonna say you go out to make money or you're gonna make cents.

I recall, in Chicago, wheeling my little child in her baby carriage in Lincoln Park.

I was amazed because a little biplane went over Lincoln Park.

Aeroplanes were not very common in those days.

I said, "Isn't it amazing?

"Here's my child looking up at that aeroplane "and that aeroplane in the sky is as natural to her "as a bird."

Because when I was born, the aeroplane did not exist.

It was really the beginning of impossible things happening.

(light piano music) I began to feel for what really needs to be done the very biggest way.

When I found that I couldn't improve an airplane very much, I'm not gonna improve electronics very much.

There are a great many people preoccupied with that.

Where man was living, he was really very ignorant.

It's where people live that need attention.

I saw that the way in which we built was very, very ignorant.

When you build a boat, it's got to float.

You learn to do a whole lot with little.

She's gotta be strong enough not to sink, it's got to carry a cargo.

The world of building on the land was very different from the sea and the sky, why was the difference because man used to build fortresses.

The heavier and higher, the thicker the walls, the thicker the walls, - [Voiceover] Some do think of a house as a fortress - [Voiceover] Some do think of a house as a fortress rather than a place to live.

- [Voiceover] I'm gonna see what happens if I would take the kind of technology's gone into the sea and the sky and apply it over to the land.

- [Voiceover] So many things to ask you, Bucky, that you have foreseen, I think your geodesic dome.

Do you see actually roofed cities ever?

- [Buckminster Fuller] We're continually doing more with less and my geodesic domes do a very great deal with very little.

But I think they're only symptomatic, Studs, and I wouldn't be surprised if we found ways to control an environment over the city without even seeing the roof there.

An electrical field control so we could make the water go and dump over here and pipe it there, and so forth, whatever it might be.

- [Studs Terkel] It seems that Buckminster Fuller speaks outrageously and yet, you've come up with so many outrageous explanations that turn out to be right and accurate and true and practical.

- [Buckminster Fuller] Time and again, I am asked, "Who else do you know "who thinks the way you do, "or does what you do?"

I find it very strange to have to answer, "I don't know anybody else."

Simply because I really did choose a very different grand strategy, and not because I think that I have capabilities other human beings don't have.

(light, upbeat music) My daughter, who I was wheeling the baby carriage, who had an airplane as normal in her sky, now has her daughter.

That daughter was born in New York.

It was right in the flight path for the flights out of LaGuardia and Idlewild.

This little child then, in her crib, would hear this roar as the airplane goes, and so she saw many thousands of aeroplanes before she ever saw a bird.

I saw the children's books that were sent to her which were the same kind of children's book that were sent to me and our child.

There were farmyard, there was a barn and all the nice, natural things that a child would see.

The horse, and the pig, and the cow and the goat, sheep, rooster.

My granddaughter in New York City looked out the window and saw those aeroplanes and she saw the automobiles going by by the millions, but when they gave her this farm book, she'd never seen a sheep or a cow or anything and as if you gave her these imaginary pictures of dragons and things.

She was very accommodating about it.

She laughed about it, they were amusing.

They weren't natural to her.

(playful piano music) (tape rewind sound)