R. Buckminster Fuller

Utopia or Oblivion

The Prospects for Humanity

Utopia or Oblivion is a provocative blueprint for the future. This comprehensive volume is composed of essays derived from the lectures he gave all over the world during the 1960’s. Fuller’s thesis is that humanity—or the first time in its history—has the opportunity to create a world where the needs of 100% of humanity are met.

“This is what man tends to call utopia. It’s a fairly small word, but inadequate to describe the extraordinary new freedom of man in a new relationship to universe—the alternative of which is oblivion.”

R. Buckminster Fuller.

Utopia or Oblivion is a provocative blueprint for the future. This comprehensive volume is composed of essays derived from the lectures he gave all over the world during the 1960’s. Fuller’s thesis is that humanity—or the first time in its history—has the opportunity to create a world where the needs of 100% of humanity are met.

“This is what man tends to call utopia. It’s a fairly small word, but inadequate to describe the extraordinary new freedom of man in a new relationship to universe—the alternative of which is oblivion.”

R. Buckminster Fuller.

Author(s): R. Buckminster Fuller

Edited by Jaime Snyder

12 × 19 cm, 4 ¾ × 7 ½ in

448 pages, 32 illustrations

paperback

2019, 978-3-03778-622-2, English
CHF 34.00

R. Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts. After spending most of his youth in Massachusetts and on Bear Island in Maine, he fell out of Harvard and into the US Navy during World War I. He married Anne Hewlett, the daughter of a prominent New York architect, in 1917 and spent around five years working with his father-in-law on new techniques of housing construction after leaving the navy. From 1927 on he became independent and committed himself to completely rethinking the question of shelter—relentlessly challenging every assumption about structure, function, materials, technology, aesthetics, services, distribution, mobility, communication, collaboration, information, recycling, politics, property, and social norms. He started from first principles to develop a radical philosophy of doing “vastly more with vastly and invisibly less.” The constant goal was a much more efficient and equitable distribution of planetary resources to enable the survival and ongoing evolution of the human species. His work paralleled, radicalized, and critiqued the mainstreams of modern architecture and still defies categorization today. He was a nonstop teacher and communicator around the globe in every possible medium—becoming probably the single most exposed designer and design theorist of the twentieth century. He died on July 1, 1983, in Los Angeles at the bedside of his wife, who died thirty-six hours later.