Like many children of the 60s, D.W. Jacobs discovered Buckminster Fuller in college. “I was studying theater at UC-Santa Barbara,” Jacobs recalls, “and Fuller spoke there a lot. My brother, who was also studying there, told me, ‘You’ve got to hear this guy talk.’ I said, ‘I can’t–I’ve got classes, I’ve got rehearsal.’ He said, ‘He talks all day. Come by when you can.’”
Of all the 60s techno-visionaries, those thinkers who saw the future and declared that it worked, Fuller was the most eccentric and for many the most captivating. He was notorious for his rambling, marathon speeches. Using no notes, his movements quick and birdlike, he would dilate for hours on building materials, the geodesic dome, our outmoded view of the universe, and new ways of educating people for the future of what he liked to call “spaceship earth.” He had designed a light, easily mass-produced house, developed a three-wheeled car, created his own version of the world map, and invented a way of building using lightweight beams and cables fashioned in a grid of triangles, hexagons, and pentagons. He spoke of domed cities, of colonies on the moon, of a worldwide electrical grid that would distribute power based on the time of day and the season in each part of the world. In at least one case, energized by his ideas and the crowds listening to him, Fuller spoke for 42 hours straight.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
He married, and his wife, Anne, gave birth to a daughter, Alexandra. He went into business with his father-in-law, James Hewlett, manufacturing and selling a revolutionary new construction material: a light, durable brick made of concrete and straw, with two large vertical holes that could be aligned and filled with concrete to form a bond more durable than mortar. Fuller was made president of the new Stockade Building System. But all was not well: his daughter had been stricken during the influenza pandemic of the late teens; she contracted polio, then spinal meningitis, and after a long period of suffering, she died at age four. Fuller was devastated. “I couldn’t help feeling somehow responsible,” he wrote years later, “that if she had had a proper environment she would have lived. I began to drink heavily. I also threw myself into my work.”
The design did, however, catch the eye of Marshall Field III, who commissioned Fuller to create a small, single-family home for display in his department store. The PR department at Marshall Field’s renamed his design the Dymaxion house, and it was put on display in 1929. Fuller believed it was perfect for the age of mass production and pointed out, “The average weight of a single family dwelling is 150 tons. The Dymaxion house is three tons.”
That sense informs the show Jacobs brings to town. “My show is very much in the chautauqua spirit of delivering lectures on how we make sense of our lives,” he says. It’s an abbreviated version of the sort of marathon Jacobs heard in 1968, and its arc manages to include a great deal of Fuller’s life story as well as his theories. “Fuller used his life for experiential data and would use examples from his life as symptomatic of the forces of the world. He considered himself the guinea pig for his own personal 50-year experiment.” That experiment ended nearly 20 years ago, but through the sheer audacity of his vision, Buckminster Fuller managed to project himself into the future he so vividly imagined.
