INVENTOR OF THE FUTURE

A full portrait of the fascinating life of a famed disruptor.

Novelist, biographer, and science-fiction writer Nevala-Lee draws on abundant archival material to fashion a thoroughly researched, comprehensive biography of architect, inventor, and “serial entrepreneur” R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), who famously created the geodesic dome. Fuller, the great-nephew of transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, grew up in Milton, Massachusetts. He entered Harvard in 1913 but did so poorly that he withdrew after a semester. After a stint in the Navy and a job in sales with a meatpacking company, Fuller joined his father-in-law, a designer with an interest in architecture, to invent lightweight building blocks for the construction of efficient, affordable housing. Together, they established the Stockade Building System, with Fuller as chief salesman and promoter—a role he inhabited throughout his long career in many ventures. His interest in housing led him to build his own “scientific housing company,” Fuller Houses, to produce components that could be delivered as a package and assembled quickly on site. Cars and airplanes inspired him to design a blimp-shaped house and car. As Nevala-Lee notes, Fuller’s self-aggrandizement, mythmaking, “expansive claims” and “messianic language” informed many previous portrayals of him as a Renaissance man in the mold of Leonardo da Vinci. While not underestimating the fertility of Fuller’s imagination, Nevala-Lee reveals his subject’s reliance on colleagues and students. Like a virus, he had “a unique talent for using a host to reproduce.” When he taught at various colleges, he recruited students as unpaid labor, taking their discoveries “to the next school on his list, burnishing his image as a genius by assimilating the work of many others.” Hailed as a futurist, among his predictions were online education and remote working. He influenced architects such as Norman Foster and Frank Gehry, and his conviction “that economic forces favored gargantuan service industries,” has been borne out by Amazon.

A perceptive and cleareyed biography of a unique figure.