Bucky's world

TODAY, WHEN PEOPLE hear the name R. Buckminster Fuller, most probably think of geodesic domes: leaky hippie houses, Cold War radar installations, Epcot Center, jungle gyms.

But as Michael John Gorman, a historian of science and a former associate curator of Stanford University's Buckminster Fuller Collection, writes in his illuminating new book, ''Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility" (Skira), those few associations hardly do justice to Fuller, who was born in Milton and died in 1983 at the age of 87.

Bucky, as he was known to his friends, family, and acolytes, was part inventor, part engineer, part philosopher, and he remains a presiding spirit for architects, designers, and environmentalists alike. ''He was this unique, one-off figure with this sort of ingenious sensibility," says Stanford Anderson, an MIT architectural historian. And though Fuller never trained as an architect and disliked being called one, Gorman argues in his book that Fuller has ''done more than any 20th-century architect to challenge our received ideas about building, not as an architect but as a philosopher of shelter."

Fuller was, in all things, assiduously unorthodox. He was, Gorman said in a telephone interview, ''a throwback to these people you'd get in the 17th century who would attempt to rebuild all of human knowledge from first principles." Gorman's book, which draws on newly unearthed archival material, describes how Fuller not only devised his own ''Energetic-Synergistic" geometry but spoke and wrote in a unique, telegraphic dialect purged of what he considered obfuscatory inaccuracies such as ''up" and ''down" (illusions of gravity, after all); he instead used terms like ''instairs" and ''outstairs," based on one's direction relative to the center of the earth. He was also, Gorman writes, ''a prolific and original, if unreadable, poet" who composed an epic poem on the history of industrialization.

At the age of 32, recently fired from his job, bankrupt, and with a wife and small child to support, Fuller had something like a religious vision. In one version of the story (he told at least two) he was walking down the street in Chicago and suddenly felt himself lifted off the ground in a luminous sphere. He heard a voice say, ''You speak the truth."

Fired by a mystical sense of calling, Fuller decided that that truth was efficiency. ''He believed that nature always worked in the most efficient way," explained Gorman, and that in his own work he was uncovering the fundamental building blocks of matter and motion. Loathing waste, Fuller was an early spokesman for conservation and recycling; for this, and for his coinage of the phrase ''Spaceship Earth," he has been adopted by environmentalists as a forebear. But Fuller didn't think ecologically-as Gorman put it, ''he would see sulfur dioxide escaping from a factory not as a moral problem but as an economic problem." Henry Ford, proclaimed Fuller, was ''the greatest artist of the 20th century."

Like Ford, Fuller designed his own automobile, a polliwog-shaped wonder called the Dymaxion Car (only three were ever built); more ambitiously, he sought to bring the principles of mass production to bear on housing. It was absurdly wasteful, he believed, to construct houses onsite, each one compromised by the limitations of the builder and the availability of materials.

In his privately published 1928 manifesto, ''4D Timelock," Fuller sketched out a future in which houses would roll off assembly lines and be delivered fully built by zeppelin (trains, he argued, couldn't carry a house of any width and ships couldn't go inland). Cities would disappear as dirigible-distributed homes spread into a worldwide carpet of habitation. Thanks to Dymaxion Cars with retractable wings (a design element that did not make it into his prototypes), there would be no need for a connecting grid of roads. So enamored was Fuller of his delivery system that he proposed that a house's foundation be dug from the air as well: A bomb would be dropped on the desired site, and the home lowered into the resulting crater.

Minus the zeppelins and flying cars, much of Fuller's early design philosophy parallels that of the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, a contemporary of his. But Fuller, constitutionally incapable of acknowledging influences and obsessive about safeguarding intellectual property, insisted he'd come up with the ideas on his own. He also claimed to have worked out the laws of relativity before reading Einstein, and in 1961, when his claim to a structure called the ''octet truss" was challenged by evidence that Alexander Graham Bell had beaten him by 50 years, Fuller got his kindergarten teacher to testify that at age 4 he'd built octet trusses out of toothpicks and semi-dried peas.

Still, Fuller was in his way a more radical thinker than European modernists like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe, who were interested in creating, as Gorman put it, ''buildings with an industrial cosmetic, houses that would embody the machine." Fuller wanted his buildings literally to be machines. His Dymaxion Dwelling Machine of the 1940s, for example, was built from a large steel grain bin and was meant, by way of a vent and revolving air fin in the center of the roof, to cool itself-though in prototypes the system was found to have the opposite effect.

Of all his brainstorms, Fuller had the greatest hopes for ''tensegrity," a modular tension-based structural system discovered by one of his students in 1948. Everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the spinning of the solar system, Fuller claimed, would eventually be understood to work on tensegrity principles. Tensegrity spheres, he wrote, were so light and strong that one could build lighter-than-air cities out of them that could be moored to mountaintops. Or they might simply drift, ''allowing humans," as Gorman puts it, ''to migrate like birds."

The only one of his creations that Fuller, apostle of the assembly line, actually got to see reach something like mass production was his geodesic dome, which-despite the ongoing challenge of waterproofing its many joints-remains a wonder of lightness, scalability, and strength. What's more, his claims for the importance of his structures have, in one instance at least, been borne out. In 1996, three chemists were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of a whole class of carbon molecules structured like geodesic spheres. They dubbed them ''fullerenes," or, more informally, ''buckyballs."

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.