| "A map of the world which doesn't include Utopia isn't even worth glancing at." Oscar Wilde |
| "The only complete reading is that which transforms the book into a simultaneous network of reciprocal relations." J. Rousset |
This document is a study of the comprehensive designer Buckminster Fuller, an outstanding character of the 20th century, and a kind of practical visionary.
Fuller's remarkable career as an inventor, architect, designer, cartographer, writer and theorist amounts to a design syllabus in itself, even if his own conclusions and solutions are not accepted and applied. Many people would argue that life might be vastly improved if his designs were better known and implemented.
This presentation of his ideas is not intended as a slavish devotional exercise, nor a piece of cynical criticism. Part of the plan here is to investigate the logic of synergetics. At this stage the account is verbal, not visual, but what is important in geometry is the logic rather than the pictures.
As originally conceived, THE FULLER MAP was intended to help designers and design students in the following ways:
The text is a work-in-progress, begun in August 1991, and originally written to meet the structural requirements of John Wood's IDEAbase system. It was compiled and edited as an experimental, dynamic, interactive, screen-based document. It was not, therefore, intended as a completed linear text to be printed onto paper or other static medium.
That project is described in Mapping The Mapper, a paper co-written by John Wood and Paul Taylor, originally published as part of the 'Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture', Syracuse University, New York, September 1993. This was subsequently re-published as a chapter in "Computers, Communications and Mental Models", eds. Donald Day & Diane Kovacs, London, 1997.
For more details about IDEAbase, contact John Wood [ ] at the Department of Design Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW.
Paul Taylor has given lectures on Buckminster Fuller's work to design students and artists at Goldsmiths' College and other institutions. For further information please contact:
Below are links to tables of contents for the separate Books. The reader may prefer to follow links internal to the listed texts, rather than work through the tables, given the arbitrariness of the sequences. These lists will be expanded as time and energy allow.
Alternatively, the INDEX can be used. This is just the total contents in alphabetical order.
There is also a SEARCH facility.
(For suggestions to aid site navigation, see How to navigate this site.)
THE FULLER MAP is far from complete, and makes no claims to comprehensiveness at this stage (if it ever will). Apologies in advance for all omissions, blunders and obsolescences.
© Paul Taylor 2002