Foreword
3For many years, R. Buckminster Fuller and his accomplishments were shamefully neglected, if not ignored. He is the kind of person who does not rapidly win recognition—a man of solid common sense, but the common sense of several generations ahead; a gentle revolutionist; a lovable genius; a visionary who is sensitive to the fact that the whole world is leaving home base and moving out into left field. He was a nonconformist before nonconformity became a form of conformity. To express his views and explain his discoveries, he felt it necessary to invent his own modes of expression, even his own vocabulary—a vocabulary which often makes English teachers shudder and plain readers scratch their heads, but which will no doubt be easily intelligible to sons and daughters of astronauts living under climate-proof geodesic domes.
4 Fortunately, he has not had to wait for recognition until posterity accords it. He has already achieved the dignity of a full-dress biography; he has recently filled the Charles Eliot Norton chair of poetry at Harvard (an institution which twice dismissed him while he was an undergraduate); he is a Research Professor at Southern Illinois University; he is a consultant to governmental and private agencies; he is an active businessman. Indeed, he is now subject to all the dangers of success.
5 But he did not come round to the world; the world came round to him. His radical innocence has not changed. Most often, he is still to be found talking like an angel (his head thrown back, his eyes seemingly closed, his hands pressed palm to palm in front of him, his halo almost visible) to a group of listeners who, some time during the second hour, are swept into the stream of his thinking, are convinced that they understand him, and are unwilling ever to let him go.
6 One of Mr. Fuller’s extraordinary discourses to a rapt audience resulted in this book. The attendant circumstances also were unusual. It is the final business of this foreword to recount them as briefly as possible and then yield the reader over to Mr. Fuller.
7 For several years now, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale has been developing a new campus in southwestern Illinois. Since 1949 the University had been operating a small residence center at Belleville, but the citizens of that part of the state felt the need for additional higher education for then-young people at a cost they could afford. They were able to provide for the University’s use the former campus of a small liberal arts college at Alton and a former high school building in East St. Louis. These facilities were obviously inadequate to the needs of their populous area, and so they raised money toward the purchase of land for a new campus near Edwardsville, in beautiful, rolling countryside. Furthermore, the citizens of the State of Illinois shortly thereafter approved a bond issue from which was provided $25,000,000 for the construction of buildings on the new site.
8 Southern Illinois University therefore had the rare opportunity to plan a second major campus from scratch. Buildings, grounds, roads and walkways, parking facilities, and utilities, could be designed as a unit, instead of evolving in a haphazard fashion over several generations, as is customary for university campuses. In October of 1960, President D. W. Morris named a planning committee of professors, administrators, architects, and associate architects to consider proposals for the new Edwardsville campus in the light of their adequacy to the educational requirements of southwestern Illinois.
9 Quite early it became apparent that problems of financing, design, aesthetics, procedure, timing, objectives, community services, zoning, access, parking, social philosophy, and instructional methods were so interinvolved that the usual advice of technicians would have to be supplemented by the thinking of highly creative people experienced in educational and architectural planning. From early March to early June of 1961, therefore, the planning committee met once a week at East St. Louis with a series of distinguished visitors, each of whom brought the weight of his knowledge to bear on one or more of the problems. The full effect of their suggestions will become known only after the new campus is completed and occupied, but everyone who participated in the planning sessions came away with gratitude to the consultants for adding to his store of insights and for stretching his understanding. The consultants included William Birenbaum of Wayne State University; Francis H. Horn, President of the University of Rhode Island; Alonzo F. Myers and John Dale Russell of New York University; Ernest 0. Melby and John X. Jamrich of Michigan State University; Howard Y. McClusky of the University of Michigan; Harold Taylor, formerly President of Sarah Lawrence College; Edmund Bacon, Philadelphia city planner; Howard Becker, sociologist of Kansas City, Missouri; Earl Bolton of the University of California; Sybil Moholy-Nagy of Pratt Institute; Hideo Sasaki, landscape architect from Harvard University; Paolo Soleri, Arizona architect and sculptor—and R. Buckminster Fuller.
10 Mr. Fuller’s talk to the planning committee, East St. Louis, April 22, 1961, was startling and rare because of its profound comprehensiveness. It was in part a personal confession and credo, in part an account of his discoveries, in part a criticism of society, in part a prophecy, and in part a statement of educational philosophy in relation to general philosophy. It contained enough ideas about university planning to keep busy for decades ahead of the staff of several research institutes in higher education. But, most significantly, it placed these ideas in a context which is intricate, difficult, vast, and all-embracing, like the tight, technological world into which we are now immerging. In sum, Mr. Fuller’s talk had such a pronounced effect on all those engaged in planning the development of Southern Illinois University that it is now being issued as a book, with the hope that it will stimulate and influence others who must attack similar problems of comprehensive planning.