This month’s Metropolis Magazine looks at the work of a quirky architect with grand ideas, Buckminster Fuller…one of the quotes from his friends and colleagues particularly struck me since it validates the notion that all knowledge is useful and has an impact in some form or another.
From Michael Ben-Eli, (student, collaborator, & founder of the sustainability laboratory):
“In the early 1970s, we teamed up with a group called Charas to teach street gangs in New York to build cement-and-paperboard domes in different places around the city. Fuller decided to give them a piece of land that he had in Woodstock, New York, and he asked me to teach them how to build domes. What was supposed to be a month’s effort turned out to be a year and a half or two. We ended up building a number of very nice experimental structures—and then the city, of course, destroyed them. But the kids never moved out of the city, and in the seventies and early eighties, a few were instrumental in renovating dilapidated buildings on the Lower East Side.”
Another interesting fact from the article:
The first annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge recently bestowed $100,000 on a proposal to turn Appalachia into a self-sustaining community .
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