R. Buckminster Fuller

4 Questions for Buckminster Fuller

Stuart Matranga, editor at RockBill, gave this story it's title, alluding to the four questions asked during the Passover dinner ceremony. Matranga and I always tried to 'sneak' Bucky stuff into the magazine and this short interview, published in May of 1983, a month before Fuller died at 88-years-old, was the result of a typed response to my mailed-in quartet of questions.

R. Buckminster Fuller was one of the greatest men of the last millennium. If anyone rebuilds the Temple at Jerusalem, it'll be from Bucky's designs.


What is the function of music in universe?
Musical notes are physical. Music is metaphysical. Music constitutes both the inductive form and the complex of ball, roller, tapered and thrust bearings by, over and through which life is intertransformingly drawn.


What initiatives can young people take in the service of humankind?
All the intiatives leading to a sustainably ever higher standard of living for all humanity, accomplished exclusively through a design science revolution that attains so much sustenance and service from each pound of material, erg of energy, and second of time invested per each unit of accomplished production.


What music do you listen to?
Number one, all music composed by my grandson, Jaime Snyder. Number two, all other music both popular and philharmonic.


Why have you not been properly credited for the EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World?
I've heard that the Disney people say that I had never thought of or accomplished the designing of a complete geodesic sphere. This is incorrect. My first complete spherical geodesic was the 1951 Cornell University 20-foot geoscope, and the next was the 1953 Princeton University campus 50-foot tensegrity geodesic sphere. It so excited Dr. Albert Einstein when he saw it that The Princetonian ran a picture of it on their cover. Many spheres have followed.

Several years ago, John Denver, the singer, who had been asked to do something by the Walt Disney Company, suggested to the Disney staff of designers and engineers that they ask me to come and talk to them regarding major future designs, including the Orlando project. The Disney staff did so, and I gave them a whole day's lecture on geodesic spheres, Spaceship Earth, etc., and the individual designers showed me what their individual exhibits would consist of in the coming Orlando undertaking. It must have been their business people who thought their company might be advantaged by avoiding identifying me with my work, which does constitute the principal structural and architectural breakthrough into the future, and the reorientation of the thinking of humanity to realize we are indeed riding a spaceship at 66,000 miles an hour around the Sun.