Blank on Blank — Season 1, Episode 62: Buckminster Fuller on The Geodesic Life

Episode synopsis

"I must reorganize the environment of man by which then greater numbers of men can prosper." - Buckminster Fuller in 1965, as told to Studs Terkel Buckminster Fuller was kicked out of college, and booted by Harvard not once, but twice. As a young man trying out jobs, he best liked working with his hands, and was more at home with mill workers, meat-packers and sailors, than professors. Fuller’s most famous for his Geodesic Dome - think Disney’s Epcot Center. You could call him an inventor-philospher-engineer-architect-artist - but he was outside category, really - and he wanted to ‘do a lot with a little.' All to make the world a better place. The tape we found told us he also had his own deeper, more personal reasons for what he did. Fuller spoke with Studs Terkel for Studs’ Chicago radio show twice. Once in studio in 1970, and the other five years earlier. That’s when he and Studs rode around in a station wagon through the rapidly gentrifiying neighborhood Lincoln Park - see if you can hear the hum of the moving car. A conversation with Fuller was like running through a hedge maze - he spoke in fragments, these big ideas endlessly around the corner from others, warm and charismatic the whole way. Studs is firmly there, both holding the reigns and along for the ride - addressing him with all due respect. But as you’ll hear, Buckminster Fuller wasn’t too big on formalities. Support for this series comes from PRX and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

About Blank on Blank

Vintage interview tapes. New animations. The mission is simple: curate and transform journalists' unheard interviews with American icons. The future of journalism is remixing the past.

More episodes from Season 1

• E1Bono on His Dad's Final Days
• E2Surfer Kelly Slater on Problems in his Perfect Life
• E3Muhammad Ali On Going To Mars
• E4Dave Brubeck on Fighting Communism with Jazz
• E5Larry King on Getting Seduced
• E6Jim Morrison on Why Fat is Beautiful
• E7David Foster Wallace on Ambition
• E8Beastie Boys on Being Stupid
• E9Wilt Chamberlain on Tall Tales
• E10James Brown on Conviction, Respect & Reagan
• E11Maurice Sendak on Being a Kid
• E12Louis Armstrong on His Chops