Utopia or Oblivion is a provocative blueprint for the future. This comprehensive volume is composed of essays derived from the lectures he gave all over the world during the 1960’s. Fuller’s thesis is that humanity – for the first time in its history – has the opportunity to create a world where the needs of 100% of humanity are met. “This is what man tends to call utopia. It’s a fairly small word, but inadequate to describe the extraordinary new freedom of man in a new relationship to universe — the alternative of which is oblivion.” R. Buckminster Fuller. Description by Lars Muller Publishers, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller

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

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.

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

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

This study develops the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept. Stressing the similarites between East/West the book examines extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.

In a broad sense Design Science is the grammar of a language of images rather than of words. Modern communication techniques enable us to transmit and reconstitute images without the need of knowing a specific verbal sequential language such as the Morse code or Hungarian. International traffic signs use international image symbols which are not specific to any particular verbal language. An image language differs from a verbal one in that the latter uses a linear string of symbols, whereas the former is multidimensional. Architectural renderings commonly show projections onto three mutually perpendicular planes, or consist of cross sections at differ ent altitudes representing a stack of floor plans. Such renderings make it difficult to imagine buildings containing ramps and other features which disguise the separation between floors; consequently, they limit the creativity of the architect. Analogously, we tend to analyze natural structures as if nature had used similar stacked renderings, rather than, for instance, a system of packed spheres, with the result that we fail to perceive the system of organization determining the form of such structures.

Buckminster Fuller’s prophetic 1962 book “Education Automation” brilliantly anticipated the need to rethink learning in light of a dawning revolution in informational technology – “upcoming major world industry.” Along with other essays on education, including “Breaking the Shell of Permitted Ignorance,” “Children: the True Scientists” and “Mistake Mystique” this volume presents a powerful approach for preparing ourselves to face epochal changes on spaceship earth: “whether we are going to make it or not... is really up to each one of us; it is not something we can delegate to the politicians – what kind of world are you really going to have?” Description by Lars Muller Publishers, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller

And it Came to Pass – Not to Stay brings together a selection of Buckminster Fuller’s lyrical and philosophical best, including seven “essays” in a form he called his “ventilated prose” which address global crises and his predictions for the future. These essays, including “How Little I Know,” “What I am Trying to Do,” “Soft Revolution,” and “Ethics,” put the task of ushering in a new era of humanity in the context of “always starting with the universe.” In rare form, Fuller elegantly weaves the personal, the playful, the simple, and the profound. Description by Lars Muller Publishers, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller

New edition of Buckminster Fuller’s first work published in 1938, which was promoted by Albert Einstein. In 43 chapters the constructor, visionary, inventor, designer, creator of language, and spectacular performer rolls out the art of independent thought. Fuller lays out an enormous horizon and Nine Chains to the Moon is equivalent to a navigation across the world we live in: "What Is a House?", "Death and Life", "Longing Crosses the Sea", "Dollarability", "We Call it Earth", "Stomach Rhythms", "Ephemeralization"—from the microscopic to the automobile, to the house, to urbanity, to the image of the cosmos in constant movement. The title, said Fuller, is meant to stimulate open thinking: the 1938 world population, one person on the shoulders of another, will reach from the earth to the moon nine times!