R. Buckminster Fuller: World Man, edited by Daniel López-Pérez, presents a transcript of the 1966 lecture Fuller delivered at Princeton University School of Architecture (the first Kassler Lecture, discovered in the SoA archive in 2011). Also included is Stan Allen's interview with Robert Geddes, who as dean in 1966 brought Fuller to Princeton, an essay by Stan Allen, and a detailed glossary of terms.
Book description (from the back cover):
R. Buckminster Fuller: World Man presents the original typescript of Fuller’s never-before-published Kenneth Stone Kassler memorial Lecture. Delivered at the Princeton university school of Architecture in 1966 – a year before his masterwork took shape at Expo ’67 in Montreal – the lecture encapsulates his radical thinking at the height of his career. Reflecting on the severe challenges facing the global ecology, Fuller delivers an impassioned rallying cry to architects to shape their universe by responding to its underlying principles – a cry as relevant today as it was in the visionary designer’s own time.
From Daniel López-Pérez (editor):
For R. Buckminster Fuller, words and concepts were intimately related. “[T]he Number of the words in the dictionary grow,” he asserted in his “World Man” lecture, “because we have more aspects of subjects to consider.” Fuller saw language as an invaluable resource – as a tool to be used not only for sharing ideas with others but also for developing ideas. Language was not an end in itself but rather a discursive process, through which he created and explored new concepts. Iterative and evolving, like his models of nature’s laws, Fuller’s terminology never becomes static, his words and concepts move and extend from one area of relevance to another; from the scale of the human body, to that of the universe.
