![]() ![]() Barry Katz, a Stanford University scholar who wrote about Fuller, found signs that around this time in his life Fuller had developed depression and anxiety. His daughter Alexandra had died in 1922 of complications from polio and spinal meningitis just before her fourth birthday. Depression and epiphany įuller recalled 1927 as a pivotal year of his life. During the early 1920s, he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing lightweight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing-although the company would ultimately fail in 1927. After discharge, he worked again in the meat-packing industry, acquiring management experience. Navy in World War I, as a shipboard radio operator, as an editor of a publication, and as commander of the crash rescue boat USS Inca. Wartime experience īetween his sessions at Harvard, Fuller worked in Canada as a mechanic in a textile mill, and later as a laborer in the meat-packing industry. By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment. He was expelled from Harvard twice: first for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe, and then, after having been readmitted, for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest". Education įuller attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and after that began studying at Harvard College, where he was affiliated with Adams House. Fuller earned a machinist's certification, and knew how to use the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment used in the sheet metal trade. Years later, he decided that this sort of experience had provided him with not only an interest in design, but also a habit of being familiar with and knowledgeable about the materials that his later projects would require. Later in life, Fuller took exception to the term "invention". By age 12, he had invented a 'push pull' system for propelling a rowboat by use of an inverted umbrella connected to the transom with a simple oar lock which allowed the user to face forward to point the boat toward its destination. He experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats. He often made items from materials he found in the woods, and sometimes made his own tools. To him these were illogical, and led to his work on synergetics. ![]() He was dissatisfied with the way geometry was taught in school, disagreeing with the notions that a chalk dot on the blackboard represented an "empty" mathematical point, or that a line could stretch off to infinity. įuller spent much of his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine. He used to sign his name differently each year in the guest register of his family summer vacation home at Bear Island, Maine. As a child, Richard Buckminster Fuller tried numerous variations of his name. The unusual middle name, Buckminster, was an ancestral family name. He also received numerous other awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented to him on February 23, 1983, by President Ronald Reagan.įuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews, and grand-nephew of Margaret Fuller, an American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. In 1977, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. Also in 1970, Fuller received the title of Master Architect from Alpha Rho Chi (APX), the national fraternity for architecture and the allied arts. ![]() He became a full Academician in 1970, and he received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects the same year. The same year, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968. He was elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1967, on the occasion of the 50-year reunion of his Harvard class of 1917 (from which he was expelled in his first year). įuller was awarded 28 United States patents and many honorary doctorates. He also served as the second World President of Mensa International from 1974 to 1983. ![]() Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as " Spaceship Earth", " Dymaxion" (e.g., Dymaxion house, Dymaxion car, Dymaxion map), " ephemeralization", " synergetics", and " tensegrity".įuller developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres. Richard Buckminster Fuller ( / ˈ f ʊ l ər/ July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. ![]()
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