Foreword

Foreword

2

3This book, written by Richard Buckminster Fuller in 1928, is about housing and our society. It consists of an essay, a patent with drawings, letters to and from Fuller and more drawings.

4 Since the time of this book, 44 years ago, Buckminster Fuller has mellowed. Today some of the book makes sense, and some of it doesn’t make sense. This is an illuminating document about a time, one year before the stock market crash, an idea, mass-produced housing, and about Buckminster Fuller.

5 In the last paragraph of the book Fuller states, ‘‘The 4D book quite evidently has not been designed to flatter any banker, society tin ear, or other material tyrant, into inscribing a ‘forward’ which might insure a faddish sale; nor was it written to secure a free red ticket to Moscow, to join the mob exploiters ‘conference’ of that vast and long-suffering people; nor to receive any minor endorsement of radicalism, but rather, to be the epic of the great ‘middle class’, which is Humanity.’’

6 The Cookbook Fund I of the Lama Foundation is publishing a small edition of 4D to be marketed to libraries.

8STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

9 PROPERTY OF

10 4D

11 AN APHORISTIC ESSAY OF RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS OF THE PAST AND PRESENT CREATION METHODS OF MAN’S LIVING ABODES, THROUGH CONSIDERATION OF THE MATERIAL CREATIONS, AND ABSTRACT ORGANIZATIONS, PROSAIC AND HARMONIOUS. ANALYSIS BY ABSTRACT AND MATERIAL COMPARISONS TO THE ACTIVITIES OF OTHER INDUSTRIES.

12 A WIDE DISCOURSE ON THE ARTISTIC AND PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS SURROUNDING THE PROPER DESIGN OF THE NEW HOME.

13 THE BIRTH OF INDUSTRIALLY REPRODUCED HOUSING—THE INEVITABLE FOURTH DIMENSION—SOME PREGNANT PROGNOSTICATIONS, AND INDIVIDUAL DUTIES.

14

15©4-D 1928 and 1970'

16All Rights Reserved.

17 Published by the Lama Foundation

18

19By Arrangement With The Copyright Owner.

20 Cookbook Fund—Lama Foundation
P.O. Box 422, Corrales, N.M. 87048

21

22With full faith in Love, in the convergence of whose Universal Light of Truth, the assurance of individualism may cast no shadow either of doubt, or egotism, is this stated to be: the working sketch for the greatest of living dramatic compositions. The cast for it shall be the whole of humanity; the settings—the future ages of temporality.

23In it Lord West and Lady East are married, with much necessarily solemn music and jazz symphony—the various ceremonies, civil and otherwise, are progressively blended. Look sharply. Being a working sketch, no unnecessary strokes have been made, wherefore there are no "key passages" from which the meaning may be "skimmed." In Italian, Russian, Esquimaux or Telegrafenglish—the abstract message is the same.

24 NO TIME SHOULD BE LOST BEFORE READING IT

25 NO TIME MAY BE LOST IN READING IT

26 NO TIME SHALL BE LOST WHEN ALL HAVE READ IT

27 COMPLETE ‘‘TIME OUT’’ MUST BE TAKEN TO READ IT B. Fuller, 739 Belmont Ave., Chicago, Illinois
May 21, 1928

28 The revelations will serve to justify our deference to TIME, to the extent of permitting this to go out with so many errors. The subject matter is of great import. Upon complete assurance of its being, in the name of unselfish truth, an eventuality, this paper was devised with 24 hours from its lengthy original manuscript. This was occasioned by the desirability of presenting it last week to a selected group of the country’s leading architects at their national convention in St. Louis, at the informal request of several of its members.

29 It is highly significant, in the light of this paper’s disclosures, that: despite its being a convention of the designers of the most important of life’s necessities, the home; and though composed of as generally intelligent a group as might be convened in this, at present, most resourceful of countries; and despite the economic value of news which St. Louis’ newspapers would gladly have gleaned for the encouragement of conventions in its city; the only unstandard convention gesture, in these most stirring of days, worthy of public print, was the statement of its president that the American Institute of Architects was against certain forms of standardization, aesthetically explicable. This to the public, if read at all, appeared, as in its headline, ‘‘against all standardization.’’ Ignoring the truth of the standard symbols in which it was spoken and printed, this statement stamped the proceedings, of this potentially creative group, as apparently insignificant.

30 Is not the public intuitively aware that the very beauty of a child lies in the clearly revealed, harmonious loveliness, of the spirit, shining through the most regular of material features, unharassed into unbecoming self-consciousness, by the least unstandard deformity? Is it not the truth of standardization that ever pours more individual freedom and happiness into life? Is it not the very secret of nature that it must be recreative after its own image? Was it not a product of complete segregation of the SPIRIT and the MATERIAL, with truthful standardization of the latter, that so immortalized the name of St. Louis, but a year ago today. Was this not this same St. Louis but a few months later, buried alive beneath wind toppled brick walls, with which these convening architects still continue to design? Little wonder they evoked no public ovation.

31 It takes real character to about face, weeding up all the old fallacies of custom, deep-rooted prior to personal responsibility. It is to the everlasting credit of these architects, that, limited only by brevity of opportunity, those chosen for intimate presentation of this paper, were, beyond all expectation, unanimously in accord with its material considerations. Further, while pledged to confidence, they were inspired by it to moral enlistment in the forces of fulfillment of its very much broader meaning. Unobtrusively then did the new spirit of individualism, delivered of its last material impediment of self-consciousness, fly forth from St. Louis once more, this time to girdle the temporal universe.

32 It is the responsibility of the proper guidance of events that will follow upon its public disclosure, briefly touched upon, yet readily perceptible in careful perusal of this paper, that prompts us to submit it thus, to yourself and others, deemed to be a fully representative group of altruistic thinkers.