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Richard
Buckminister "Bucky" Fuller was born on July 12, 1895 in Milton, MA.
Spending his youth on Bear Island off the coast of Maine, Bucky had a
natural propensity for design and for making things. After
graduating high school, he attended Harvard University and the U.S.
Naval Academy. Although he never earned a college degree, he was
awarded 47 honorary doctorate degrees from some of the nation's most
prestigious universities during his lifetime.
After serving in
the U.S. Navy in World War I, Bucky returned and started a company with
his father-in-law manufacturing light-weight, fireproof housing.
However, his father-in-law sold the business after a few years due to
financial failures. Bucky, who never had much success as a
businessman, was fired by the new owners.
Bucky's wife,
Anne, gave birth to his second daughter, leading to his crisis on the
shores of Lake Michigan. Bucky considered himself a failure and
contemplated suicide. But on that fateful day in 1927 on the
shores of Lake Michigan, he decided that he would only be a failure if
he continued trying to earn a living according to society's rules.
On that day, Bucky decided to start working according to his own rules.
For almost two
years, Bucky took a vow of silence. He wanted to break himself of
the habit of just talking out of repetition. He wanted to
carefully choose his words and mean every word he said. Writer
John Love described how Bucky was affected by these two years: "He
emerged from this period of monkish silence a changed man. He set
about to discover nothing less than the operating principles of the
universe, and then to apply them to designs for new kinds of shelter and
other life-enhancing inventions."
Bucky's geodesic
dome first gained international fame during Ford Motor Company's 50th
anniversary celebration. Ford had commissioned a conventional
structure to enclose the courtyard of the Ford Motor office building in
Dearborn, Michigan. However, the original design, weighing 160
tons, was discarded because it was too heavy to be supported by the
existing building walls and foundations. Bucky's geodesic dome
weighed in at only 8.5 tons and was constructed in a matter of weeks -
just in time for the 50th anniversary celebration attended by media from
around the world.
Bucky's geodesic
dome was hailed in 1970 by the AIA (American Association of Architects)
as the "the strongest, lightest and most efficient means of enclosing
space yet devised by man". The U.S. Marine Corps, for which Bucky
built numerous domes, described it as the "first basic improvement in
mobile military shelter in 2,600 years."
Bucky wrote 28
books and thousands of articles. One of his more famous books is
Operating Manual for the Spaceship Earth (1969). In it, he
describes the Earth as a spaceship, and like any mechanical vehicle, it
needs maintenance to continue operating well. Bucky was deeply
concerned about issues of sustainability. He strongly advocated
phasing out fossil fuels and atomic energy in favor of solar, wind,
waves and other renewable energy resources.
In 1969, Bucky was
nominated for the Noble Peace Prize. He received numerous awards
during his lifetime, including the U.S. Medal of Freedom, the AIA Gold
Medal Award, the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian award, and the Royal
Gold Medal for Architecture awarded by Her Majesty the Queen of England.
Bucky Fuller died
on July 1, 1983 at the age of 87. In 1999, the Engineering
News-Record named Bucky Fuller among its 20 greatest structural
engineers of the last 125 years.
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