One of Fuller’s most popular works, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, is a brilliant synthesis of his world view. In this very accessible volume, Fuller investigates the great challenges facing humanity. How will humanity survive? How does automation influence individualization? How can we utilize our resources more effectively to realize our potential to end poverty in this generation? He questions the concept of specialization, calls for a design revolution of innovation, and offers advice on how to guide “spaceship earth” toward a sustainable future. Description by Lars Muller Publishers, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller

The masterwork of a brilliant career, and an important document of the crisis now facing mankind. Today we find ourselves in the midst of the greatest crisis in the history of the human race. Technology has placed in our hands almost unlimited power at the very moment when we have run up against the limits of our resources aboard Spaceship Earth, as the crises of the late twentieth century—political, economic, environmental, and ethical—determine whether or not humanity survives. In this masterful summing up of an entire lifetime’s thought and concern, R. Buckminster Fuller addresses these crucial issues in his most significant, accessible, and urgent work. Critical Path traces the origins and evolution of humanity’s social, political, and economic systems from the obscure mists of prehistory, through the development of the great political empires, to the vast international corporate and political systems that control our destiny today to show how we got to our present situation and what options are available to man. With his customary brilliance, extraordinary energy, and unlimited devotion, Bucky Fuller shows how mankind can survive, and how each individual can respond to the unprecedented threat we face today. The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future.

Known as a Leonardo da Vinci of the twentieth century, engineer, designer, inventor, and futurist Dr. R. Buckminster Bucky Fuller had a keen awareness that we re all in this together. Understanding that humans don t have a clue about how to operate our fragile Spaceship Earth, Buckminster provided insightful design science solutions to our most challenging issues, including war, overpopulation, housing, increasing inflation, health care, the energy crisis, and much more. For all its genius, Fuller s legacy has yet to be fully discovered. Noted Fuller expert L. Steven Sieden together with Gary Zukav, John Robbins, Lynne Twist, Jean Houston, and many other notable individuals offer inspiring quotations and explanations that make Fuller's life more understandable and accessible. They preserve a voice that calls upon each of us to shift our intellectual and technological resources from creating weaponry to creating sustainability. Winner 2013 COVR award - Gold"

With the appearance of Grunch of Giants, R. Buckminster Fuller consummates his literary canon, his panoramic lifetime survey of all aspects of the responsibility of human beings for their own destiny. This book is a modern allegory - his long-gestated myth-of the villainy of capitalism and the fecklessness of classic economics. For Fuller, the academic discipline of economics is irrelevant since it derives from an invalid assumption of scarcity. In fact, he has long argued that future historians of our era may subsume our business practices as a branch of mythology; thus it is not surprising that the word economic appears nowhere in his text. Fuller’s myth is no idle fairy tale, since he faces his question - the question of a technological imperative which only he could raise with the deadly seriousness of satire. That question is: Can our system of national political sovereignties and corporate profits survive the inevitable technology revolution required to obviate wars by effecting a worldwide rise in the standard of living. One of the functions of myth is to resolve contradictions in our culture. Grunch of Giants portrays the rising of multinational corporations in the paradoxical role of function both as the epitome of capitalistic selfishness and as the inadvertent vehicle for the dissolution of national political boundaries - the last deterrent to a one-world economy. The result is more subversive of the property and profit values of the capitalist system than anything dreamed of since Karl Marx. —E.J. Applewhite, collaborator with RBF on Synergetics and Synergetics 2, author of Cosmic Fishing: A Memoir of Working With R. Buckminster Fuller

This title, which complements the volume Your Private Sky: The Art of Design Science (see page 44), gives an authentic insight into the development of Fuller's architectonic, technical, & anthropological concepts. Fuller was the epitome of the poet as engineer, the thinker as designer, the artist as researcher. He left behind a voluminous quantity of writing, including texts of visionary importance & penetrating linguistic force, as well as of urgent topicality. The book documents various aspects of Fuller's widely respected texts. These testaments were intended to be shared with the whole world, or, as Fuller coined it in 1950, with "Spaceship Earth."###3-7643-6072-0

Hailed as one of the greatest minds of our times, Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) is known as an American visionary. Designer, architect, engineer, inventor, and philosopher, he was undeniably one of the key innovators of the 20th century.This volume provides a visually rich and complete overview of Fuller's design and architectural production, situating Fuller's projects in their historical context. The book features never-before-published material from the Fuller archives that were recently donated to Stanford University.Michael John Gorman's essay offers an in-depth analysis of Fuller's work-focusing more attention on his innovative architectural projects than to other aspects of Fuller's "design science"-as well as an interesting perspective on post-war American society and architectural culture. Chapters include concepts of Fuller's philosophy, his manifesto for mass-produced housing, the role of mobile shelter in transforming behavior, geodesic domes, and Fuller's early experiments. Fuller's achievements, astonishing design, and production are fully documented using original and often unknown archival materials.

Buckminster Fuller, inventor, thinker and architect, was one of the best known Americans of the twentieth century. Often compared to Leonardo da Vinci and called "the planet's friendly genius," he was the inventor of the geodesic dome, the man who coined the term "spaceship earth," and an educator without parallel. Yet, most of his books are out of print today. To remedy this situation, his longtime friend and architectural partner, Thomas Zung, has compiled a Bucky Fuller reader. This anthology consists of chapters selected from twenty of Bucky's many books, each with a new Introduction by such notables as Arthur C. Clarke, Steve Forbes, Calvin Tomkins, Dr. Martin Meyerson, Sir Harold W. Kroto, Arthur L. Loeb, E. J. Applewhite, and others. Altogether, this book provides an overview of a remarkable intellectual career and the best possible introduction to the man and his thought. Bucky Fuller was one of the most original thinkers and builders that America has ever produced, and this book makes his work available to a new generation at the beginning of a new millennium.

In this book, leading scholars in architecture, design, history, and communications discuss the work of R. Buckminster Fuller in the context of the larger social and cultural patterns of the twentieth century.

This book collects some of R. Buckminster Fuller’s most important recent writings on the subject of spaceship Earth: the big, interconnected, total system that is “the only one we’ve got.” These articles stress the need for considering our planet as a whole, rather than breaking it into its parts—as most of us continue to do. This theme is crucial to the thinking of Bucky Fuller, who, in addition to his many other appellations, has been called the “godfather” of the Whole Earth Catalog. “Humanity is acquiring the right technology for all the wrong reasons—and only as driven by looming wars and the fear of being annihilated by the enemy. Humanity could acquire the technology for the purpose of total success and enduring peace. We say we cannot afford it in peace times, but technology … not only pays for itself but [leads] inadvertently to the acquisition of greater wealth.” —from “Earthians’ Critical Moment” in Earth, Inc. From backflap Earth, Inc.