Buckminster Fuller: utopia and advertising
Inventor, architect and visionary thinker, American Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) sought sustainable solutions to the great challenges of humanity throughout his life. Famous for geodetic domes, he saw Earth as a “spacecraft” with finite resources, defending responsible and cooperative management, based on science, design and efficiency – ‘doing more with less’ – ideas that gathered in the manual manifest instructions for the Terra spacecraft (1969).
Critic of the compartmentalization of knowledge, advocated a holistic and preventive approach to face global problems such as poverty, armed conflicts and environmental degradation. In the middle of the cold war, he believed in the human ability to reinvent the world and create a better future for everyone. It was apolitical, but his ideas were aligned with the US postwar American rhetoric, promoted by figures such as Lyndon B. Johnson and programs such as ‘atoms for peace’, which advocated the conversion of nuclear energy-hitherto associated with destruction-an instrument of development and prosperity. When chosen to conceive of the US Pavilion at Expo ’67, Montreal (visible on the background of the image), it was intended to symbolize the American technological supremacy in the service of peace-escape the reality of the Vietnam War.
The summit that eternalized him was not, however, unprecedented: he was conceived by German Walther Bauersfeld (1879–1959) and built in Jena in 1923 for a planetarium. Fuller disclosed the idea and registered the patent in 1954. Anticipating key concepts of ecological design and principles that would originate the parametric design-creating forms through algorithms-promoted these structures, formed by interconnected triangles that ensure uniform distribution of forces, such as economic and resistant housing, capable of supporting nuclear explosions. According to him, his hemispheric form expressed a universal principle, beyond the atomic pump: the application of the laws of physics to obtain maximum efficiency with minimal resources. He stressed that the only structure that remained standing at the epicenter of the explosion in Hiroxima in 1945 was the Genbaku summit, today Hiroxima peace memorial.
Although indirectly, one of Fuller’s most amazing legacies was Buckminsterfulene, a carbon form discovered shortly after his death. The name is due to the similarity between the geometry of its molecule, C60, and the fuller domes. Consisting of 60 carbon atoms, each linked to three others, the molecule is a truncated icosaedro, with 60 vertices and 32 faces (20 hexagons and 12 pentagons), reminiscent of a soccer ball – which is also known as Futebolene. This carbon alotrop – the different forms in which an element presents itself, resulting from how its atoms turn on, which in the case of carbon includes diamond, graffiti, carbon nanotubes and amorphous carbon – is a black solid that exists in small amounts in soot and has also been detected in space, namely in various types of stars and the medium types Interstellar. Since the late 1960s, his existence was expected, but only in 1985 was identified by Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University in Houston. It was the repetition of a test held the previous year by other researchers, who vaporized carbon with a laser in a supersonic beel bundle. In detecting what had escaped to the former and determining their structure, kroto and colleagues ensured the 1996 Nobel Prize for the 1996. Although widely studied and preached about their potential uses in areas such as electronics and medicine, the C60 has never found a relevant practical application, demonstrating that science also exist or temporary enthusiasm.
As for Fuller’s domes-in its time symbols of science, technology and architecture to the service of humanity-, besides named a molecule, today illustrate the fragility of the line between utopia and propaganda, a situation aggravated by the apparent tendency for the disappearance of scientific-technological advances in political agendas. See Trump’s offensive against universities: Harvard (about which it is often said that if something was not discovered there, then it was not discovered!) Will stop being able to welcome foreign students.
Can Portugal, in the more or less close future, face an analogous situation?
