A importância de Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller. Um homem do nosso tempo e dos próximos. Um filósofo e um visionário..

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something build a new model thatmakes the existing model obsolete.”

Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983)[1] was an American architect, author, designer, futurist, inventor, and visionary. He was the second president of Mensa.[2] He lends his name to a family of complex carbon structures called Buckminsterfullerene also known as Bucky Balls.

Throughout his life, Fuller was concerned with the question "Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?"[citation needed] Considering himself an average individual without special monetary means or academic degree,[3] he chose to devote his life to this question, trying to find out what an individual like him could do to improve humanity's condition that large organizations, governments, or private enterprises inherently could not do.

Pursuing this lifelong experiment, Fuller wrote more than thirty books, coining and popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetics. He also worked in the development of numerous inventions, chiefly in the fields of design and architecture, the best known of which is the geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes or buckyballs were named for their resemblance to a geodesic sphere.

Late in his life, after working on his concepts for several decades, Fuller had achieved considerable public visibility. He traveled the world giving lectures, and received numerous honorary doctorates. Most of his inventions, however, never made it into production, and he was strongly criticized in most fields he tried to influence such as architecture[citation needed], or simply dismissed as a hopeless utopian. Fuller's proponents, on the other hand, claim that his work has not yet received the attention that it deserves.

Philosophy and worldview

The grandson of a

Unitarian minister (Arthur Buckminster Fuller),[14] R. Buckminster Fuller was also Unitarian.[15] Buckminster Fuller was an early environmental activist. He was very aware of the finite resources the planet has to offer, and promoted a principle that he termed "ephemeralization"—which in essence, according to futurist and Fuller disciple Stewart Brand, Fuller coined to mean "doing more with less."[16] Resources and waste material from cruder products could be recycled into making higher value products, increasing the efficiency of the entire process. Fuller also introduced synergetics, a metaphoric language for communicating experiences using geometric concepts, long before the term synergy

became popular.

Fuller was one of the first to propagate a

systemic worldview and explored principles of energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design.[17][18] He cited Francois de Chardenedes' view that petroleum, from the standpoint of its replacement cost out of our current energy "budget", essentially the incoming solar flux, had cost nature "over a million dollars" per U.S. gallon (US$300,000 per litre) to produce. From this point of view its use as a transportation fuel by people commuting to work represents a huge net loss compared to their earnings.[19]

Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet optimistic about humanity's future. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the "technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life", his analysis of the condition of "Spaceship Earth" led him to conclude that at a certain time in the 1970s, humanity had crossed an unprecedented watershed. Fuller was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of key recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had reached a critical level, such that competition for necessities was no longer necessary. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. "Selfishness", he declared, "is unnecessary and...unrationalizable...War is obsolete..."[20]

Fuller also claimed that the natural analytic geometry of the universe was based on arrays of tetrahedra. He developed this in several ways, from the close-packing of spheres and the number of compressive or tensile members required to stabilize an object in space. Some confirming results were that the strongest possible homogeneous truss is cyclically tetrahedral.[citation needed]

His technologically oriented point of view can also be taken as a metaphor for what it is to be human generally. In his 1970 book I Seem To Be a Verb, he wrote: "I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. 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."

Duas notas: Pergunte-se ao multimilionário Richard Branson da Virgin Galaxy o que aprendeu com Bucky...

Reconheça-se que Casanova deixou de ser um leitor anónimo do Macro para querer, ainda que envergonhadamente, participar das grandes narrativas modernas e post-modernas.

Pioneiro em inúmeras questões, Buckminster Fuller mostrou - através da sua vida - que sempre tratou o mundo por "tu".

Enfim, um exemplo a seguir, um caso a estudar.

Call me Trimtab: Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller - Live Your Life as an Experiment

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe

Buckminster Fuller World Game Synergy Anticipatory