(10 of 11)
The Garden of Eden. In conversation, though, he is usually as clear as spring water—and far more stimulating.
"Do you remember as a child what it was like playing house out in the woods? It was exciting. It was wonderful—until it rained. Well, I could build you that house today, where the sunlight would come through just as in the forest. A house with no walls, no doors, no windows—only paths of green ferns and green trees through a rainbow of flowers. And it would never rain. I call this house 'the Garden of Eden."
"I told my friend John Huston, the movie director, I could build him one like it in Mexico. Huston was fascinated and suggested that I tell Liz Taylor—both of them have bought property in Puerto Vallarta. She loved the idea too, but I don't know if anything will come of it."
Fuller visualizes his Garden of Eden as a dome within a dome. "I might use a 114-ft.-diameter dome, inside a 128-footer. I'd plant vines around the base of the outside dome. Because the lines of the dome are geodesic, the vines will follow those lines. You now have the outer dome covered with vines. You then go up between the two domes, winding a translucent plastic around the surface of the inner dome. This will keep the rain out, letting the sun come through your forest of vines. The plastic can be wound in such a manner that the grooves of it serve as rain-catching troughs. These, in turn, can be run into the swimming pool."
Big Jump. Bucky's peculiar distinction is that, while many of his fellow intellectuals are depressed by the "materialistic" 20th century, he is exhilarated. He is excited by "humanity's epochal graduation from the inert, materialistic 19th century into the dynamic, abstract 20th century." He feels that there is an "important reorientation of mankind, from the role of an inherent failure, as erroneously reasoned by Malthus, and erroneously accepted by the bootstrap-anchored custodians of civilization's processes, to a new role for mankind, that of an inherent success." He is sure the whole world can be fed, housed and happy, if designers can just put to work all the world's skills with Fuller-like efficiency. He is endlessly excited by the massive strides mankind has made in just the last 50 years, of which one of the most dramatic has been the increase in range of the average man's "toing and froing." For thousands of years primitive man traveled on foot by necessity, never covered more than an estimated 300 miles in his entire lifetime. Even with the coming of the horse and later the railroad, as late as 1900, the average man was still traveling no more than 30,000 miles in his entire lifetime. This is less than 1 % of Bucky's own travels. Jetting around as he does, Bucky has already covered 1,500,000 miles, though he started his serious traveling career only five years ago.
Bucky envisions the day when any man anywhere can jet to work halfway round the world and be home for supper. "Today the world is my backyard. 'Where do you live?' and 'What are you?' are progressively less sensible questions. I live on earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I