BUCKY FULLER

Buckminster Fuller is a supreme systems thinker. He argued from day one that to understand the part, you have to understand the whole. Early in his education, he rebelled against the manner in which geometry was traditionally taught. He had a difficult time accepting the notion of a flat triangle. He stated that any two dimensional flat plane simply does not exist, even though we are taught that they do exist.

One of Fuller’s basic premises is that you can only understand a part if you understand the whole. He gave the example of a child drawing a triangle in the dirt with a stick. While we are taught that this triangle is flat, in reality the surface is curved, because the earth is a sphere. The triangle also has depth given it is drawn in a thick medium. So Bucky could only imagine a spherical triangle, as this is all that can occur in nature. He could not imagine a plane with no thickness.

You might say that this is picking nits. Nevertheless, it seems that Fuller’s rejection of the flat theoretical plane speaks to how the world works. Things have thickness. The world is round. And abstract concepts are an impediment to the imaginations of young math students. Importantly, he believed that abstract concepts such as flat planes invalidates anyone’s personal experiences. This removal from the way the world works makes it very difficult for practitioners to trelate to other individuals, society and nature.

Fuller goes on to say that when an abstract flat plane is presented, we are taught to only consider what is contained within the boundary lines. Think back to elementary math class in which you were required to determine the area of a plane; in this exercise you were only concerned about what was inside the box. In his view, we need to be taught to think holistically, and not just within the borders of either the plane or a societal group. This creates an “us and them” mentality, which in his view threatens the future of humanity.

Human minds, Bucky continues, have a basic need to search for relationships. He felt that there was a basic human intellectual need to uncover generalized principals. This is undoubtedly correct, or why else would we as humans have striven to understand molecules, astronomy, and relativity.

Basically, Fuller was unable to function in an abstract mode. He was unable to visualize limited and narrow views of phenomenon. Rather, he was continually searching for the relationships between the part and the whole, the cause and effect. He could not imagine an opaque plane. The need to visualize thru elements gave him the tools necessary to construct his fantastic holistic systems.

Trial and error is something else that Fuller believed has been removed from our educational mileu. Yet we learn the most via trial and error. Think back to elementary and high school; how much experimentation was there? If your education was like mine, there was basically zero. Yet experimentation develops our abilities to generalize and associate. It is a basic human orientation to experiment. Yet we have been conditioned to fear mistakes to the point that we avoid risk taking. In experimentation, as in drawing, there is no bad.

This is all we are talking about at Transparent Drawing. Each transparent drawing should indeed be a fantastic holistic system. And transparent drawing gives you the tools to take risks. Because of the complete resolution, you are not being limited to narrow and limited understandings. You, just like Bucky, have the tools with with to synthesize your holistic understanding into a unique and complete system. Don’t limit yourself to artificial restrictions. Draw, and think, comprehensively.