Ian Keay forwarded me a fascinating New York Times article a couple of days back on R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller. Fascinating to see how Fuller wove his own myth, consciously or not. Ian had introduced me to Fuller’s work in the early 1960s, building geodesic domes out of matchsticks in his bedroom in Icomb. Given my enthusiasm for these structures, our home in Barnes was lucky not to sprout a truly geodesic extension, since experience shows that they often leaked when put up by non-experts.
I eventually met Fuller in Reykjavik in 1977, I think it was, and had breakfast with him. Included some of that conversation in the article I wrote for New Scientist on the plane back to London – the first time I had to write against a really urgent deadline. A fair bit of Fuller’s writing, which still occupies considerable shelf space at home, was pretty inaccessible. Even so he had a profound impact on my thinking – whether or not he contemplated suicide on the Chicago waterfront one day in 1927, fully half a century before our paths crossed. He died in 1983.
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