Experiencing Bucky
Kirkwood Meadows, California, August 15, 1981: Buckminster Fuller, his gentle eyes grotesquely magnified behind his thick glasses, watches intently as I insert the final balsa-wood struts in a twenty-five-inch-diameter geodesic sphere that models his latest structural innovation. His large head, prickly with white hair, angles forward from the compact eighty-six-year-old frame—alert, anticipating. As Fuller’s new engineering assistant I am on my first “business trip.” Guided loosely during his brief office visits, I have gradually learned to decipher the code. His goal is always simplification: fewer components, greater efficiency.
We are in a remote ski resort for a late-summer conference of business people. Bucky is scheduled to lecture for thirty-six hours during the next six days, and I’m looking forward to the break of listening to him. Crouched by my balsa-wood model, I am thrilled and relieved by the confirmation of months of mathematics. It works. Now it’s finished and we will celebrate, I think. Bucky inspects my model, nods, and looks up.
Suddenly the unexpected. He wants the hundred or so conference attendees to construct—led by me—a full-scale prototype of the dome. The glue on my model is not yet dry. I begin to suspect that his eighty-six years are catching up with him. “I know for a fact,” the voice runs inside my head, “these people are here with felt-tip pens, not with band saws and drill presses.” I feel sad that Bucky will have to find out the hard way.
He wants me to calculate the weight (”assume Douglas fir”) of tomorrow’s dome, figure out the stresses (“use good-quality wood, not too many knots”), then tell someone what materials we’ll need. How am I going to tell him? I wonder, dreading the confrontation. New to the job, I hadn’t yet seen Bucky Fuller in action. To Bucky Fuller, a captive audience of one hundred ablebodied Americans appearing right after the completion of his latest geodesic design was an invitation.
It turns out, of course, that he knows just what he’s doing. He knows that a truck will start toward Reno immediately to buy lumber; he knows that eager carpenters in the crowd will soon surface and offer their skills. I am the one learning—not the hard way at all, but rapidly, adrenaline flowing, excitement building. I soon find myself thinking: It’s as if people have been waiting their whole lives to put down their felt-tip pens and stand outside for hours holding two-by-fours in place until their backs ache, listening to urgent instructions flying back and forth.
Twenty-four hours and eight hundred dollars later, a twenty-five-foot-diameter geodesic dome stands complete, exhibiting a strength beyond the relative frailty of its’ parts (that’s synergy). The fragile-looking structure becomes a model for photographing, a scaffold for climbers (can it really support me?), the makeshift chapel for a wedding, and, finally, an education.
How many campuses were electrified this way? How many groups have shared this elation? I begin to understand that this sense of urgency, this skillful channeling of human energy, is the secret fuel behind Fuller’s eighty-seven years of perpetual motion.
