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UNIT 11

Questions 34 – 38

It is ironical that a person who contributed so much to the cult of high technology should also
have been instrumental in proposing the conservation of natural resources. However,
Buckminster Fuller has managed both and, in doing so, invented one of the most potent
images of modern ‘alternative’ utopia, the geodesic dome.

Fuller designed several ideal cities of the megastructure class, but he also developed the

concept of ‘Spaceship Earth’ in which the world is seen as a limited entity, with limited
energy income from the sun and limited ‘reserves’ in the energy bank. Thus he stresses that
resources should be used with greater and greater efficiency, as in the case of ‘a one-tenth ton
Telstar satellite outperforming 75,000 tons of transatlantic cable’. Utopia would be possible
only if technology provided more and more goods from fewer and fewer resources:

It was impossible when people thought that there was only enough for a minority
to live in comfort. But utopia is now, for all or for none. Because invisible
technology can do much more with less, utopia is, inherently, possible for the first time.
Bodily needs must precede metaphysical contentment.

During the 1960s, Fuller inaugurated the World Design Science Decade to stimulate the

achievement of this utopia, for he believed that the state of society was such that a utopia was
necessary to ensure its survival:

Let us . . . commit ourselves earnestly to the Design Science Decade approach to
achieving utopia. This moment of realisation that it soon must be utopia or oblivion
coincides exactly with the discovery by man that, for the first time in history, utopia is,
at least, physically possible of human attainment.

Most people believed that science and technology were far more important to utopia than

mere social or political matters. Buckminster Fuller is emphatic in adding design to the list.
‘There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies and all systems,’ he wrote,
‘Revolution by Design and Invention.’ However, it should not be surprising to find the designer
occupying a role as utopian, for design is the necessary link between scientific theory and a
useable product. Moreover, a designer’s work inevitably involves speculations and assumptions
about the future, however much it may be clothed in professional jargon. Indeed, if progress is the
realisation of utopias, it is, to a considerable extent, designers who turn the technical utopias into
working projects and programmes.

The utopian assumptions of these projects need close scrutiny and it should not be assumed

that they are for the good of all. For knowledge, scientific or otherwise, may be a wonderful
thing, but its use in utopia is rarely disinterested or beneficial to all, as is well illustrated by the
control and manipulation of knowledge in Plato’s republic. Just as in Plato’s time, competing
concepts of utopia co-exist — the utopia of the stable state with the utopia of freedom and
cooperation. To date, science and design have almost exclusively served the former, but, if it is,
as Fuller claims, a matter of utopia or oblivion, then it might be appropriate for science to change
sides.

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