Architects Should Solve Problems Of Human Survival, Fuller Claims

Architects, not politicians, must lay the basis for the solution of world problems, asserted R. Buckminster Fuller to an audience of 150 at Wednesday night's Charles Eliot Norton lecture.

Noting that architecture brings together many of the artistic, scientific, and technological fields, Fuller remarked that "science paces technology, technology paces industry, industry paces economics, and economics paces politics. Quite clearly, then, political leaders are at the tall end of affairs. And for man to ask change of political leaders is like asking the cow's tall to redesign the cow."

The theories of Malthus and Darwin, he said, gave man the idea that he was reproducing himself faster than technology could raise production, and that life was a matter of the "survival of the fittest" a "you-or-me" question. The fundamental mandate of political leaders was to assure that "it wasn't their country that went down." Wars became the order of the day.

Governments therefore channeled all technological talent and all natural resources into "weaponry," Fuller claimed. But the art of "weaponry" furthered the art of "livingry" by giving rise to the invention of the airplane and the improvement of mass-production techniques.

It gradually became apparent, he said, that the Industrial Revolution made it possible for production to outstrip population growth, thereby nullifying the value of "you-or-me" warfare.

Politicians, however, still find the improvement of "weaponry" the path of least resistance. Architects, and particularly architectural students, Fuller warned, must assume leadership in the development of an efficient and economical science of "livingry."

Fuller proposed that universities allow their students an increasing amount of time for charting the world's resources and developing the necessary mathematics for the purpose of "increasing man's chance to live."

Originator of the geodesic dome and the mass-produceable Dymaxion house, Fuller bases his more efficient architecture on his discovery that the tetrahedron (a pyramid composed of four triangles) has extraordinarily great synergetic force. If one takes six rods and constructs them into a tetrahedron, the strength of the whole is far greater than the sum of the strength of its parts.

The tetrahedron frequently appears in nature: the spatial orientation of a carbon atom's valence electrons, for example, is tetrahedral. Fuller also noted that all three-dimensional geometric figures reduce to combinations of tetrahedra. The tetrahedron, in fact, "is the minimum system for subdividing the universe."

Fuller spoke for two and a half hours without script or notes. "Thinking out loud," he began slowly, but later spewed forth his thoughts at breakneck pace.