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 redefi ne our understanding of the relationships between geometry, structure, language, and intellectual property.00Rather 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.

The masterwork of a brilliant career, and an important document of the crisis now facing mankind. Today we find ourselves in the midst of the greatest crisis in the history of the human race. Technology has placed in our hands almost unlimited power at the very moment when we have run up against the limits of our resources aboard Spaceship Earth, as the crises of the late twentieth century—political, economic, environmental, and ethical—determine whether or not humanity survives. In this masterful summing up of an entire lifetime’s thought and concern, R. Buckminster Fuller addresses these crucial issues in his most significant, accessible, and urgent work. Critical Path traces the origins and evolution of humanity’s social, political, and economic systems from the obscure mists of prehistory, through the development of the great political empires, to the vast international corporate and political systems that control our destiny today to show how we got to our present situation and what options are available to man. With his customary brilliance, extraordinary energy, and unlimited devotion, Bucky Fuller shows how mankind can survive, and how each individual can respond to the unprecedented threat we face today. The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future.

One of Fuller’s most popular works, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, is a brilliant synthesis of his world view. In this very accessible volume, Fuller investigates the great challenges facing humanity. How will humanity survive? How does automation influence individualization? How can we utilize our resources more effectively to realize our potential to end poverty in this generation? He questions the concept of specialization, calls for a design revolution of innovation, and offers advice on how to guide “spaceship earth” toward a sustainable future. Description by Lars Muller Publishers, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller

This book complements the volume R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: Design Art Science and gives an authentic insight into the development of Fuller's architectonic, technical and anthropological concepts. This poet of technology was a poet as engineer, a thinker as designer, an artist as researcher who left an immense testament of writings - including texts of visionary importance, great consistency, penetrating linguistic force and not least of urgent topicality. The book documents various aspects of his widely ramified publications. Fuller spoke to the whole world, indeed to Spaceship Earth, the metaphor that he coined in 1950. He did this as one of the greatest and incomparably original individuals of our time in a genuinely American sense. Some of the texts are published here for the first time, such as his first programmatic manuscript Lightful Houses (1928), an informative lecture text on Dymaxion House (1929), his Letter to Einstein (1944) and the convolute Noah's ArkII (1951) as a commented facsimile. Photographs from Fuller's estate complement the texts.

In 1938, inventor Buckminster Fuller observed that the Earth's population, standing upon each other's shoulders, would form nine complete chains to the Moon. Fuller's striking metaphor illustrates his proposal that imaginative uses of limited resources can result in extraordinary achievements. Hailed by Newsweek as "a guide book and a dream book of the future," this volume offers innovative solutions for improving the quality of life through progressive design. Inventor and visionary designer Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) dedicated his life to solving problems related to housing, shelter, transportation, education, energy, ecological destruction, and poverty. His best-known invention, the geodesic dome, has been produced more than 300,000 times around the world. Fuller's innovative design philosophy, with its focus on creating technology that "does more with less," continues to inspire designers, architects, scientists, and artists seeking to develop a more sustainable planet.

Synergetics, according to E. J. Applewhite, was Fuller's name for the geometry he advanced based on the patterns of energy that he saw in nature. For Fuller, geometry was a laboratory science with the touch and feel of physical models--not rules out of a textbook. It gains its validity not from classic abstractions but from the results of individual physical experience. Description by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller

In 1970 and 1971, Fuller was concurrently composing a poem suggested by his new Morgan sloop “Intuition” and rewriting, with my collaboration, the projected first chapter of Synergetics called “Brain and Mind.” Fuller agreed with my suggestion that this first chapter had an integrity of its own separate from the rest of the Synergetics manuscript, and he felt that both of these works had an urgency that argued for their publication at the earliest possible date. WIth the help of Bill Whitehead, our editor at Doubleday, they were combined in Intuition, the first of his two books of blank verse. Description by Ed Applewhite, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller