An interesting profile of Buckminster Fuller in the current New Yorker, by author Elizabeth Kolbert. The occasion is a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Nice article. Here's a great quote from Fuller:
If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.
He sounds at times like the 1930's equivalent of a blogger, documenting his life with hundreds of thousands of pages of notes.
This is my favorite quote:
Fuller was also deeply pessimistic about people's capacity for change, which was why, he said, he had become an inventor in the first place. "I made up my mind . . . that I would never try to reform man -- that's much too difficult," he told an interviewer for this magazine in 1966. "What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions."
Something to think about in the age of genetic manipulation.
