I have been reading and studying Bucky Fuller’s work since 1968. The breadth and depth of his genius and the integrity of his character have been a beacon to my mind and heart. I will be referring to his thought many times in both specific and general ways over the life of this project.
Given the scope of his interests and his productivity, it is hard to say which particular publication or study best constitutes his legacy, but, as the title “Everything I Know” implies, these 42 hours of video from 1975 present a comprehensive survey of his ideas and experiences from his assertion that the tetrahedron is the fundamental building block of the universe to his meetings with many remarkable men and women to his accounts of personal accounts and analytical insights that lead him to conclude that the metaphysical is more important than the physical, that mind is a precursor to matter. It took me several years to complete my immersion in this “course,” although I’m sure that someone with better powers of concentration could get the job done more quickly. I found it useful to take notes as I went along. Of course, I had to read a couple books like Utopia or Oblivion along the way. Bucky wasn’t right about everything. For example, he was sure the the world’s population would top out at ~5 billion quite a while ago and we seem to be on our way to something much larger than that. But he was right about how to be a life long learner, and for this I am eternally grateful. I should also issue a shout out to The Internet Archive, the institution that preserved Bucky’s work in this format and has done so much to make a vast trove of knowledge across a compendium of fields available to all of us and to organize the information in a manageable fashion. Buckminster Fuller Archive
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During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life's work. These thinking out loud lectures span 42 hours and examine in depth all of Fuller's major inventions and discoveries from the 1927 Dymaxion house, car and bathroom, through the Wichita House, geodesic domes, and tensegrity structures, as well as the contents of Synergetics. Autobiographical in parts, Fuller recounts his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization.
The stories behind his Dymaxion car, geodesic domes, World Game and integration of science and humanism are lucidly communicated with continuous reference to his synergetic geometry. Permeating the entire series is his unique comprehensive design approach to solving the problems of the world. Some of the topics Fuller covered in this wide ranging discourse include: architecture, design, philosophy, education, mathematics, geometry, cartography, economics, history, structure, industry, housing and engineering.
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