R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern-Thinking

Pattern-Thinking reassesses the work of Buckminster Fuller — unique hybrid between theoretician, architect, designer, educator, inventor, and author — as advancing contemporary models of design research, practice, and pedagogy. Drawing extensively on Fuller’s archive, the book follows his unique process of translation between the physical and conceptual dimensions of design, to redefine our understanding of the relationships between geometry, structure, language, and intellectual property.

Rather than being organized around a chronology of distinct narratives, Pattern-Thinking follows these parallel explorations as the basis for Fuller’s artifacts and inventions. In the space between lines, models, words, and patents, it traces his ambition to measure physical experience in an ever-expanding pattern of relationships, while coordinating these into a conceptual network of words and concepts that shape the basis for his thinking. Advocating a multidisciplinary and political perspective, Fuller’s transversal logic expands the knowledge base of contemporary models of design, which seek to find broader participation and to address new publics.

About the Authors:

Daniel López-Pérez, who has a PhD in the history and theory of architecture at Princeton University, is an Associate Professor and a founding faculty member of the Architecture Program at the University of San Diego. López-Pérez edited Fuller in Mexico/Fuller en México! and R. Buckminster Fuller: World Man, awarded as Design Book of the Year 2013 by Architect magazine.

Richard Buckminster Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts. After spending most of his youth in Massachusetts and on Bear Island in Maine, he fell out of Harvard and into the US Navy during World War I. He married Anne Hewlett, the daughter of a prominent New York architect, in 1917 and spent around five years working with his father-in-law on new techniques of housing construction after leaving the navy. From 1927 on he became independent and committed himself to completely rethinking the question of shelter — relentlessly challenging every assumption about structure, function, materials, technology, aesthetics, services, distribution, mobility, communication, collaboration, information, recycling, politics, property, and social norms. He started from first principles to develop a radical philosophy of doing “vastly more with vastly and invisibly less.” The constant goal was a much more efficient and equitable distribution of planetary resources to enable the survival and ongoing evolution of the human species. His work paralleled, radicalized, and critiqued the mainstreams of modern architecture and still defies categorization today. He was a nonstop teacher and communicator around the globe in every possible medium — becoming probably the single most exposed designer and design theorist of the twentieth century. He died on July 1, 1983, in Los Angeles at the bedside of his wife, who died thirty-six hours later.