"Many people have asked if the Bauhaus ideas and techniques have had any formative influence on my work. I must answer vigorously that they have not." (Reader, p.44)
This opening sentence of "Influences on my Work" (1955) introduces a fierce attack on the inadequacies of the Bauhaus school of architecture. The gist of his argument was that the Bauhaus designers "only looked at problems of modifications of the surface of end-products, which end-products were inherently sub-functions of a technically obsolete world." (Reader, p.66)
Fuller says much more besides this, of course, and the criticisms are worth reading, not least because the Bauhaus and the International Style still receive infinitely more respect and attention than his own Design Science.
These and other matters are discussed in the extremely informative book by Banham (1960), which also considers the parallels between Fuller's ideas and Futurism.
© Paul Taylor 2001