INVENTOR OF THE FUTURE.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Alec Nevala-Lee's "Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller"

For decades, Buckminster Fuller maintained a reputation as a visionary innovator transforming our approach to everything from auto design to architecture to geometry. He was profiled in Time as early as 1932, and was its cover star in 1964 even before blossoming as a counterculture hero in the late 1960s, with help from fellow multidisciplinary visionary Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog. Fuller became a generation-gapbridging icon of technology as a means to goals both pragmatic and transcendent.

Fuller always had doubters as well as acolytes; rarely did his design or building ideas work out as he hoped, either as objects or as revolutions in cars or housing (or bathrooms--his interests were wide-ranging). As a public intellectual, his prose and speaking style could be so hermetically convoluted that one editor disbelieved one of his books was even in English. (He was punchy at times, though, as when he wisely noted that losing our industrial infrastructure would be an unspeakable tragedy...