The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 121

SD SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1999, THE HERALD 11H Archives could revive ideas of Buckminster Fuller video. Everything Know, a precise catalog organizing his thoughts. It typified his earnestness and his unshakable confidence that mankind could accomplish any practical task, assuming people had the patience to sit through the exercise. Somg of his disciples have con-tinueato work on his ideas, and in Europe he still is a celebrity, at least some circles. There is a huge exhibition on him, Your Private Sky: R.

Buckminster Fuller and the Art of Design Science, at the Zurich Museum of Design in Switzerland. Allegra Snyder said no show of that breadth has ever been mounted by a museum in the United States. His descendants are hoping that transfer of his archives to Sinford, where they will be more acessible, will allow a new gener-aon to discover Fuller. His gndson said he believed Fuller presented a positive, optimistic sie of the 60s that has been cscured by current cultural (bates. The utopianism he stood for was emblematic of the 60s, Jaime Snyder said.

I think Bucky, the best sense, really believed in progress. In that sense, the whole 60s thing hasnt gone away. Its sort of gone underground, and some of these ideas may be coming to the surface again. fJ, Ai i ft Buy Now Move In Before the Holidays 'f RESIDENCES STARTING FROM 135,990 TO 212,990 Wf Garden ills, a walled community in a tropical setting with lighted meandering sidewalks, two enchanting entrances, and your own school on site. A place you can call home.

Choose fromO spectacular spacious model homes, 3. 4 or 5 bedrooms, 1 or 2 stones, all priced from thtow 130 and in your choice of oversize lot, 60 100 or 75 100. Plus all our residences me with the comfort and convenience you expect from a luxury estate home: European style fully -tuipped kitchens, high ceilings, designers fixtures, ceramic tile floors in your choice of colorthroughout the home, cultured marble roman tub, interlocking dnvcway paverilarm system, large backyards big enough for a pool, and much more Ad best of all, no maintenance or association fees. '2251 Garden Hills finally you are home CHOICES OF LOT SIZE 6CX 100 'OR 75 'X 100' Me you home yet? Us GrdenHJIills Bjr JAMES STERNGOLD New York Times Service -SANTA BARBARA, Calif. Perhaps the most illuminating impression one gets from a stroll through the Buckminster Fuller Institute, a framped warren of offices in thd balcony of an old movie theateihere, is how familiar all the artifacts produced by his great thinker seem today, t- The geodesic domes, the Dymaxion maps, the tensegrity models and octatrusses, all Fuller inventions that at one time seemed radically new, have become ubiquitous in the late 2Qth Century.

Though the terminology may still1 be obscure to isome, his designs are common in everything from playgrounds to giant shopping mall roofs to soc-icer balls. Indeed, Fullers clever jeometric vocabulary has so insinuated itself into the grammar of contemporary design that it takes a few moments to realize that some of the objects at the institute a Balinese woven basket, a turtle shell, a spiky stuffed puffer fish that Fuller had collected and studied sprang from sources other than his awesomely original mind. It is just as revealing, though, that one of the least familiar images at the institute may be that of R. Buckminster Fuller himself. The kindly looking old man in a business suit with close cropped white hair and thick glasses, the man who graced the cover of Time magazine in 1964 as a towering genius and who was widely known as Bucky, has slipped, much like the institute, from the publics mind.

That is one of the reasons that Fullers daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, and his grandson, Jaime Snyder, are about to finish transferring the huge archives at the institute, hundreds of boxes of letters he seems to have saved nearly every one he ever wrote or received manuscripts, photographs, blueprints and videotapes, to Stanford University in Palo Alto after several years of planning and negotiations. The donation seems unlikely to resuscitate Fuller to the cult status he had when he wrote Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and was embraced by the Whole Earth Catalog and its followers in the 1960s. But the family hopes the donation will foster renewed interest in his extraordinary and at times deeply subversive ideas about everything from home construction (he designed a cheap prefabricated house that was suspended from a mast in the 1920s) and automobiles (in the 1930s he made a three-wheeled cigarshaped car that went 120 mph on a 90-horsepower engine) to political organization (he thought military expenditures a colossal waste and felt governments generally frustrated a more even distribution of wealth). In short, his descendants say it may again be time for people to be exposed to a romantic visionary who had few commercial instincts, little use for accepted wisdom and extraordinary foresight. He felt he was surfing history in a sense, trying to anticipate the trends, Allegra Snyder said.

Now some of those waves have come in. Theres also a different kind of chemistry today, especially among young people, and that opens doors to his thinking once again. The intellectual exile into which Fullers ideas seemed to slide and the spark of new interest in his prodigious work, which Stanford hopes to enhance by organizing and cataloging his archives, is a commentary on shifting fashions in ideas. By the time he died in 1983 at 87, Fuller and his work were already falling out of favor, his daughter said. He seemed out of step with a time when there was suspicion of anyone who rejected traditional thinking so cheerfully and thought in such grandiose terms.

The earth was almost too small a unit, and he frequently spoke of the universe and mans place in it. His Selfless creed was that people should gather not wealth but information and knowledge with the purpose of sharing it to make society more successful by improving living standards. He hewed to an absolute ethic of technological efficiency, of producing more with fewer resources, a motivation that created astounding results but that he regarded as the minimum society should expect if people liberated their minds as he had. In 1937 a large geodesic dome auditorium was built so swiftly in Honolulu that 22 hours after the parts were delivered a full house of hundreds of people were happily taking in a concert. When Ronald Reagan became president and the country took a turn to the right, Fuller became identified with the counterculture.

Yet his daughter and other experts on his work regard such a characterization as misleading and argue that he was a victim of the reaction against the 1 960s. E.J. Applewhite, who collaborated with Fuller on his two-volume behemoth, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, said that it was true that Fuller was even more radical than many so-called 1960s radicals. But that had nothing to do with his lifestyle, which was fairly conventional. He was from an old New England family and, though twice thrown out of Harvard as a youth, nearly always wore business suits and spent much of his career teaching at universities.

His grandson, Jaime Snyder, recalled being taught table manners by Fuller, a staunch New England Yankee. What was so unusual about Fuller, Applewhite said, was that he was completely apolitical and believed not in philosophies but in principles for problem-solving. What he disliked were impediments to technological solutions of common problems. Chief among those impediments, in his view, were tradition and cultural legacies, which thwarted the clear-eyed thinking needed to invent efficient ways of improving peoples lives. He said change was not only good but also essential to saving the Earth.

I dont know what I am, he once said. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process, an integral function of the universe. His free thinking appealed to a new generation eager to break old intellectual models and enticed by the liberating promise of all kinds of change.

Young people, dropouts, loved him because he said you dont have to earn a living, said Apple-white, who collaborated with Fuller for several decades even though he had spent his career working for the CIA, which Fuller loathed. But these people generally ignored the rest of what he said, which was that you have to just do what has to be done. Just see what the needs of society are, and fill them. His thinking was so eccentric that he was often regarded as something of a crackpot until his ideas started to prove themselves and found their way into common use. No one ever took him up on his idea of covering Manhattan with a dome, for instance (he believed the savings in snow removal alone would pay for the structure), but the U.S.

pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal was in a memorably giant geodesic dome and his octatrusses, a lightweight, strong honeycomb of a structure that can span great distances, are common at shopping malls and convention centers. He ultimately had 25 patents, wrote 28 books, received 47 honorary doctorates and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He invented not only objects (he called them artifacts) but words as well with an eye to literalness. For instance, he called people earthians, referred to sunsets as sunclipses and prefaced the names of many of his inventions with the term Dymaxion, a combination of dynamic, maximum and tension. Globalization, now a popular concept, was an idea he championed, along with the development of wind, solar and wave power.

In turn, he became a name: When scientists discovered a new type of carbon molecule in 1985 that resembles his geodesic dome, they called it a buckyball. Toward the end of his life, ever eager to share his vision, he recorded a 42-hour program on A ESIDENTIAL COMMIMTI BY LICKYTART 10400 S.VV. 158 Avenue 305-382-5747 3, Sind 5 bedroom homes, 1 or 2 stories on Full Lots 10 decorated models Open Daily Oral rclwj ipr rrw ns. he rcfto-Tx its n- rfx Jerafcjvr eTTr-ctt -tiAc rve arwi t. rhr jrxumenK reuwl wtsvi 1 surutc nr fun vted a jrvtkve a Kaiy Vm, IRK ftvc B-m Si Graciously designed 2, 3 and 4 bedroom residences from $268,000 to over $1 Million.

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