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June 15, 2008
Architecture
The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller
By JAMES STERNGOLD
PALO ALTO, Calif.
AS the designer R. Buckminster Fuller liked to tell it, his powerful
creative vision was born of a moment of deep despair at the age of 32. A
self-described ne’er-do-well, twice ejected from Harvard, a failure in
business and a heavy drinker, he trudged to the Chicago lakefront one
day in 1927 and stood there, contemplating suicide. But an inner voice
interrupted, telling him that he had a mission to discover great truths,
all for the good of humankind.
That was the pivot on which, he claimed, his life turned. The onetime
loser entered a period of such deep reflection that he was struck
silent, then emerged bursting with creativity as he developed the
“Dymaxion” inventions: technologies that he promised would transform
housing, trans****tation, urban organization and, eventually, the human
condition. From 1927 on, Fuller seemed utterly self-assured, even
messianic, as he developed innovations like the geodesic dome, equal
parts engineering élan and poetry.
Those pioneering creations will go on display next week in “Buckminster
Fuller: Starting With the Universe,” a sprawling show at the Whitney
Museum of American Art that testifies to the wide-ranging intellectual
curiosity of Fuller (1895-1983), who inspired several generations with
his quixotic vision and his zeal for the liberating power of technology.
But recent research has shed new light on Fuller’s inner life and what
really drove him. In particular, it now appears that the suicide story
may have been yet another invention, an elaborate myth that served to
cover up a formative period that was far more tumultuous and unstable,
for far longer, than Fuller ever revealed.
That is one of many insights gleaned by researchers who have begun
exploring the visionary’s personal archives, deposited in 1999 at the
Stanford University library by his family.
Because he believed his ideas and life would hold enduring interest,
Fuller collected nearly every scrap of paper that ever passed through
his hands, including letters that raise questions about the suicide
story. At 45 tons, it is the largest personal archive at Stanford,
according to Hsiao-Yun Chu, a former assistant curator of the papers and
co-editor of a book, “Re*****sing R. Buckminster Fuller,” to be
published by Stanford University Press next year.
Barry Katz, a Stanford historian who wrote one of the studies in Ms.
Chu’s book, said, “If you really look for the details of his life at the
time, it’s easy to see that the suicide story was a creation.”
“There was nothing even remotely in the archives suggesting feelings on
the scale he later described” in 1927, he said.
In 1927 Fuller, living in Chicago, and his wife, Anne, in New York,
exchanged almost daily letters and telegrams. Not a single one makes
reference either to thoughts of death or to an epiphany. In addition,
Mr. Katz said, he found references to lectures that Fuller gave and
other evidence that he was far from silent.
Mr. Katz said he found instead signs of depression and anxiety
stretching from the time his first daughter, Alexandra, died in 1922,
through his financial failures and, finally, the collapse of a torrid
extramarital romance in 1931. Still, he said, the suicide story seemed
to serve a purpose.
“That’s why I now call it a myth, but it was an effective myth. It gave
a trajectory to his career. The story was constructed after the fact to
show how he suddenly developed these new ideas. I think he came to
believe the story himself.”
On a recent day in the library Ms. Chu gave a sort of guided tour of the
personality known as Bucky, rummaging through boxes of his letters,
overdue bills, drawings and writings. Over the course of the visit a
detailed inner ****trait emerged of a man known for his pioneering
designs for inexpensive, prefabricated houses suspended from masts, a
highly efficient teardrop-shaped auto and then a series of structural
designs that were strong yet lightweight and remarkably graceful.
Ms. Chu held up a crinkly letter written by Fuller in 1931, when he was
a regular at Romany Marie’s cafe in Greenwich Village and intriguing
friends like Isamu Noguchi with prophecies on how his automotive and
housing technologies would help usher in a new era of plenty. “He used
to drink like a fish,” Noguchi would recall years later in an interview
with Time magazine.
What his friends did not know was that Fuller was becoming unhinged
because of the collapse of an affair with Evelyn Schwartz, or Evy.
Fuller was 36, with a wife and 4-year-old daughter, Allegra; Ms.
Schwartz had just turned 18. The two exchanged letters almost daily,
with Fuller writing that their relation****p was “completely my
realization of the ideal of love.”
He wrote of marrying her, of her apparent efforts to get pregnant, and
insisted, “Evy you and I bear a universal responsibility of forward
thinking for which we are extraordinarily gifted.”
But when she decided she had “gotten over” him, as he related it, Fuller
unleashed a cascade of desperate letters. He admitted to stalking her at
her Brooklyn home “so that you may have no feeling of panicky
abandonment.”
In the most revealing note, feverishly scribbled in heavy block letters
across four large sheets of onion-skin drafting paper, Fuller confessed
that he had suffered a “nervous breakdown” in 1931 — not 1927 — because
of the romantic tumult. “Later in his life, when he was lecturing all
the time, people loved him, he made them feel very special,” said Ms.
Chu. “He was an oracle, a guide, and he was so confident. But when he
was writing those early letters, he didn’t know who he was.”
Jay Baldwin, a designer who helped to edit the Whole Earth Catalog
(which was inspired by Fuller) in the 1960s, knew Fuller and wrote a
book about him, said that he learned of the affair during his own search
of the archives but chose not to mention it.
“To a lot of us he just seemed so much the master of his emotions, but I
read those letters, and he just lost it,” Mr. Baldwin said. “It wasn’t
the only thing like that. He wrote one paper about his ideas early on
that sounds like a raving maniac.”
In Mr. Baldwin’s view those episodes missed the point. “Focusing on the
affair is like spending all your time thinking about van Gogh’s ear
instead of his paintings,” he said. “It’s very off track.”
Mr. Katz disagreed, saying that the seemingly crazy writings were
im****tant because they showed that in recurrent dark periods Fuller was
not trying only to persuade others his ideas were im****tant, but to
persuade himself that he mattered. The letters, Mr. Katz suggested, were
a form of self-encouragement as Fuller struggled to find a reason for
going on.
Sup****ting that view is Evelyn Schwartz Nef. “Those days were really
quite exciting because he was so convincing that he was trying to save
the world,” she said in an interview. Now 94 and a retired
psychotherapist, she recalled Fuller vividly. “The question I had is
whether he was as convinced as we were. He was trying to reassure
himself that he was something.”
Fuller’s daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, a retired professor of dance
at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she was not surprised
to learn that the 1927 epiphany may not have been literally true.
“It was a kind of parable of his interior thinking, really,” Ms. Snyder
said. Because he had such a powerful personality and was so well known
for his unshakable self-confidence, few understood, as she did, that he
had interludes of real doubt, often because of concern for his family’s
financial well-being, she said. “That was part of Daddy, always,” she
said.
She recounted another occasion on which her father seemed to find
inspiration at an especially dark moment. Fuller had tried to turn his
prefabricated housing idea into a business after World War II by teaming
with the Beech Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kan., and other investors.
But in 1946, after prototypes were built, the project collapsed.
Ms. Snyder distinctly recalled her father coming home to their small
apartment utterly despondent. She said she went to bed then got up in
the morning only to find that he had been up all night working at a
small wooden table.
“I remember very well that he was talking about this new thing, the
geodesic dome,” she said. “That’s what he said to me. He’d been working
on what he called synergetic geometry before that, but suddenly he saw
the fusion of that with the structure. That was when the idea came
together for him.”
By 1948 Fuller developed his first dome prototype; in 1954 he had
perfected the structure and took out a patent on the dome, one of his
more memorable, and profitable, designs.
For all his creative energy, Fuller’s legacy is slippery. By
conventional measures he accomplished little. The efforts to
mass-produce his houses, though written about widely, failed. His
project to develop his efficient three-wheeled autos collapsed after an
accident killed the driver of one. His soaring geodesic domes, built
with a distinctive pattern of triangles, have been used — memorably for
the United States pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal — but never for the
large-scale projects he envisioned, like the dome he hoped would cover
most of Manhattan.
But Fuller had great influence through his design principles and his
almost endless series of lectures and writings. His book “Operating
Manual for Space****p Earth” helped make him a symbol of the
counterculture. He even influenced some Silicon Valley pioneers.
For Ms. Chu one of the great insights of the archives is the sheer
number of letters Fuller received and wrote. He nearly always responded
personally to every note. (When a former collaborator in his design
work, Kenneth Snelson, wrote angrily in 1979 that Fuller was unfairly
claiming credit for what Fuller called the tensegrity structure, Fuller
responded with a 51-page rebuttal.) “He didn’t just write this
incredible number of letters, he saved them all,” she said. “It was
almost like they proved he existed, that he mattered. The files were
almost like the proof he needed.”
As Mr. Katz put it, “Fuller’s greatest invention was not a house or a
car or a dome. It was himself.”
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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