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Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller
Hugh Kenner, one of the great critics of our age, his take on Fuller
338 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 9, 2019
Breathlessly energetic, this book is a fast and friendly whirlwind introduction to Buckminster Fuller, the man, and his inventive and intriguing ideas. The hard science is approachable and the writing is upbeat, so readers who suffer from "math anxiety" will be swept along without fear even when we start looking at vector diagrams and exploring complex multi-plane capital-G Geometry. Fuller himself is painted into a historical context with ease, portrayed at once as larger-than-life but also very human. All together, this is an informative and entertaining biography PLUS a fantastic exploration of Fuller's engineering marvels AND a real thought-provoking mindbender to boot.
February 1, 2015
Released in 1973 while Bucky Fuller was still alive and active, Hugh Kenner's biography remains an enlightening glimpse at the "Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century".
Unique amongst the the half-dozen biographies I have read about Buckminster Fuller, Kenner has a strong poetic streak, which invigorates his writing. He uses imaginative language about "vectors radiating from where Bucky stands - twelve of them", and other phrases that make Fuller seem like a sort of alien conduit for universal truth. This language makes for rewarding reading.
This book has three strong points, of interest to contemporary scholars of Bucky Fuller:
• The "day in the life of Buckminster Fuller"-type approach conveyed through chapters 1 and 2. Kenner was fortunate to be able to accompany Bucky on some of his lecturing travels, and notes what it is like to travel and dine with Bucky and Anne Fuller. He also describes what attending one of Bucky's lectures was like: an experience that had not been captured by any of the other biographies I had read.
• Informative and lucid descriptions of Bucky's theories of geometry, physics, and metaphysics. This was a pleasant surprise, as I assumed that the poetic Kenner would mostly excel at describing the man himself. Instead, I found that Kenner's explanations of tensegrity and other concepts were top-notch, and better than Fuller's own words. It was refreshing to see a literate writer with a strong grasp of mathematics.
• Kenner does not take Bucky at face-value, and has a strong awareness of how Bucky's boastful claims measured-up in reality. Kenner dedicates Chapter 9 to a sceptical examination of Bucky's theories. He also understands the wider domains of science and mathematics that Bucky inhabited, and does much to puncture the 'lone genius' myth that many people ascribe to Bucky. This is an approach that would be taken further by other writers through New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller (2009).
The deficiency of Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller is that it is not comprehensive enough to serve as a stand-alone biography. Many allusions to Bucky's insights and philosophies are casually mentioned, without full explanations of their significance (for example, the farm animals/planes story on pp4-5).
Similarly, significant sections of Bucky's career are either barely mentioned (e.g. Stockade Building Systems, the Dymaxion map, the Dymaxion House), or not mentioned at all (e.g. the Dymaxion Deployment Unit, Geoscopes).
For this reason, I suggest reading Hugh Kenner's book after reading a more comprehensive biography, such as Buckminster Fuller's Universe: An Appreciation (1989), which remains the best book I have read about Bucky. Visit Hugh Kenner's book when you want to flesh-out a richer vision of the man himself, that goes beyond the chronological timelime.
Unique amongst the the half-dozen biographies I have read about Buckminster Fuller, Kenner has a strong poetic streak, which invigorates his writing. He uses imaginative language about "vectors radiating from where Bucky stands - twelve of them", and other phrases that make Fuller seem like a sort of alien conduit for universal truth. This language makes for rewarding reading.
This book has three strong points, of interest to contemporary scholars of Bucky Fuller:
• The "day in the life of Buckminster Fuller"-type approach conveyed through chapters 1 and 2. Kenner was fortunate to be able to accompany Bucky on some of his lecturing travels, and notes what it is like to travel and dine with Bucky and Anne Fuller. He also describes what attending one of Bucky's lectures was like: an experience that had not been captured by any of the other biographies I had read.
• Informative and lucid descriptions of Bucky's theories of geometry, physics, and metaphysics. This was a pleasant surprise, as I assumed that the poetic Kenner would mostly excel at describing the man himself. Instead, I found that Kenner's explanations of tensegrity and other concepts were top-notch, and better than Fuller's own words. It was refreshing to see a literate writer with a strong grasp of mathematics.
• Kenner does not take Bucky at face-value, and has a strong awareness of how Bucky's boastful claims measured-up in reality. Kenner dedicates Chapter 9 to a sceptical examination of Bucky's theories. He also understands the wider domains of science and mathematics that Bucky inhabited, and does much to puncture the 'lone genius' myth that many people ascribe to Bucky. This is an approach that would be taken further by other writers through New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller (2009).
The deficiency of Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller is that it is not comprehensive enough to serve as a stand-alone biography. Many allusions to Bucky's insights and philosophies are casually mentioned, without full explanations of their significance (for example, the farm animals/planes story on pp4-5).
Similarly, significant sections of Bucky's career are either barely mentioned (e.g. Stockade Building Systems, the Dymaxion map, the Dymaxion House), or not mentioned at all (e.g. the Dymaxion Deployment Unit, Geoscopes).
For this reason, I suggest reading Hugh Kenner's book after reading a more comprehensive biography, such as Buckminster Fuller's Universe: An Appreciation (1989), which remains the best book I have read about Bucky. Visit Hugh Kenner's book when you want to flesh-out a richer vision of the man himself, that goes beyond the chronological timelime.
January 12, 2012
This is a wonderful introduction to Fuller and his ideas. There is a fair amount of Kenner's interpreting also. The book has lots of links to other sources. For instance, I will probably buy a kit to make one of Fuller's isohedrons, in which tensiion among the elements holds it together, in contrast with traditional building techniques which rely on gravity.
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August 11, 2016i am just reading it
October 15, 2023
TLDR; 5/5 not for being faultless, but for the extent to which Kenner shows how Bucky is not just 'the dome guy.'
I feel that, through this book, I was introduced to Bucky as a worldview: believe in the species, see the universe as more than the sum of its parts, and think outside the box. It's a slow burn to get there, though. It's not until a third of the way in that I don't want to put the book down. The density of the language makes getting to that point a show of effort. Worth it in the end.
Kenner does a great job of both mythologizing Bucky's brilliance and tempering that myth with due criticism. In many practical avenues, Bucky was a failure, not a prophet. His challenge to us, though, is thought-provoking and just as relevant today. For that, this book is well worth a read.
Kenner's highs and lows both come from the color and style of his language. He can make a concept elating:
"Bucky tells us, then, that we are so designed that we can harmonize our decisions with the rest of the Universe, accelerating its evolution in directions that will yield a minimum of disconnects and irretrievabilities. We may not achieve this; we may become extinct. But-he slams the lectern- we *can* achieve it.
Mystical faith, groans the scientist, reaching for his hat. He is apt to forget his own equally mystical faith that neat laws await a discoverer."
A page later, Kenner can make a concept alienating:
"If your theme is attention, sit in the dust, like Job, or by a pond, like Thoreau, and reflect that all you can ever think springs from relationships between points of attention. They are finite in number. Compute, if the mood of Ecclesiastes is on you, the sum of all the relationships of all the days since you were born, each new day rearranging the Gestalt. When you have the number, send for that many oranges, and stack them into a neat tetrahedron. There will be none left over, a result so neat you may feel like sacrificing an epistemologist. Octet Truss patterns will permeate the stack. Their unit, the vector equilibrium, models uniform growth outward from a nucleus, and the tetrahedra it generates configure all carbon molecules and therefore every trace of living tissue."
Kenner's other weakness comes from excessive name-dropping in side references. These outbursts highlight an academic's bad habit of grasping for high-brow intellectual credibility more than they actually generate credibility. They undermine Bucky's goal of supplying "folk no more than normally curious with a coherence for the experience they are likely to have." The most extreme example is citations of James Joyce that permeate the book.
Kenner treats Joyce as a true genius, an objective next step in the field of literature. He cites comparing the nonlinearity of Joyce's books to the rest of literature (personified as "Milton," another highbrow reference) as an analogy for how the three dimensional cannot be explained by two dimensional thinking. While I found Paradise Lost to be a chore, I thought Ulysses was a bunch of hooey best suited to the lifelong academics who have been desensitized to clarity and need a new fix.
The example falls short to me, being more poorly read and with simpler tastes, but the concept is there: the two dimensional falls short in explaining the three dimensional. Kenner treats Bucky's three dimensional "Whole System" ideas as simply too complex for the one dimensional sentence and two dimensional page. In part, it seems that Bucky was just a poor writer. In another part, though, I'm left today feeling both awe and pity for Bucky: his ideas were revolutionary, and they could have been so much simpler to both discover and explain with the power of 3D computer models and animation.
He was on the cutting edge, and the language wasn't yet invented to describe his ideas. He was not an all-seeing prophet. He was undeniably a brilliant mind ahead of his time.
I feel that, through this book, I was introduced to Bucky as a worldview: believe in the species, see the universe as more than the sum of its parts, and think outside the box. It's a slow burn to get there, though. It's not until a third of the way in that I don't want to put the book down. The density of the language makes getting to that point a show of effort. Worth it in the end.
Kenner does a great job of both mythologizing Bucky's brilliance and tempering that myth with due criticism. In many practical avenues, Bucky was a failure, not a prophet. His challenge to us, though, is thought-provoking and just as relevant today. For that, this book is well worth a read.
Kenner's highs and lows both come from the color and style of his language. He can make a concept elating:
"Bucky tells us, then, that we are so designed that we can harmonize our decisions with the rest of the Universe, accelerating its evolution in directions that will yield a minimum of disconnects and irretrievabilities. We may not achieve this; we may become extinct. But-he slams the lectern- we *can* achieve it.
Mystical faith, groans the scientist, reaching for his hat. He is apt to forget his own equally mystical faith that neat laws await a discoverer."
A page later, Kenner can make a concept alienating:
"If your theme is attention, sit in the dust, like Job, or by a pond, like Thoreau, and reflect that all you can ever think springs from relationships between points of attention. They are finite in number. Compute, if the mood of Ecclesiastes is on you, the sum of all the relationships of all the days since you were born, each new day rearranging the Gestalt. When you have the number, send for that many oranges, and stack them into a neat tetrahedron. There will be none left over, a result so neat you may feel like sacrificing an epistemologist. Octet Truss patterns will permeate the stack. Their unit, the vector equilibrium, models uniform growth outward from a nucleus, and the tetrahedra it generates configure all carbon molecules and therefore every trace of living tissue."
Kenner's other weakness comes from excessive name-dropping in side references. These outbursts highlight an academic's bad habit of grasping for high-brow intellectual credibility more than they actually generate credibility. They undermine Bucky's goal of supplying "folk no more than normally curious with a coherence for the experience they are likely to have." The most extreme example is citations of James Joyce that permeate the book.
Kenner treats Joyce as a true genius, an objective next step in the field of literature. He cites comparing the nonlinearity of Joyce's books to the rest of literature (personified as "Milton," another highbrow reference) as an analogy for how the three dimensional cannot be explained by two dimensional thinking. While I found Paradise Lost to be a chore, I thought Ulysses was a bunch of hooey best suited to the lifelong academics who have been desensitized to clarity and need a new fix.
The example falls short to me, being more poorly read and with simpler tastes, but the concept is there: the two dimensional falls short in explaining the three dimensional. Kenner treats Bucky's three dimensional "Whole System" ideas as simply too complex for the one dimensional sentence and two dimensional page. In part, it seems that Bucky was just a poor writer. In another part, though, I'm left today feeling both awe and pity for Bucky: his ideas were revolutionary, and they could have been so much simpler to both discover and explain with the power of 3D computer models and animation.
He was on the cutting edge, and the language wasn't yet invented to describe his ideas. He was not an all-seeing prophet. He was undeniably a brilliant mind ahead of his time.
September 4, 2020
This is a book about the author, Hugh Kenner, and there's not enough about Buckminster Fuller.
September 13, 2023
Makes sense of Bucky, makes Bucky more intelligible. Lots of awesome rabbit holes to chase.
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