Buckminster Fuller's Papers Are
        Moving, and His Heirs Hope for
        Revived Interest

        By JAMES STERNGOLD

            SANTA BARBARA, Calif., July 14 -- Perhaps the
            most illuminating impression one gets from a stroll
        through the Buckminster Fuller Institute, a cramped
        warren of offices in the balcony of an old movie theater
        here, is how familiar all the artifacts produced by this
        great thinker seem today.

        The geodesic domes,
        the Dymaxion maps,
        the tensegrity models
        and octatrusses, all
        Fuller inventions that
        at one time seemed
        radically new, have
        become ubiquitous in
        the late 20th century.
        Though the
        terminology may still
        be obscure to some,
        his designs are
        common in everything
        from playgrounds to giant shopping mall roofs to soccer
        balls. Indeed, Fuller's clever geometric vocabulary has
        so insinuated itself into the grammar of contemporary
        design that it takes a few moments to realize that some
        of the objects at the institute -- a Balinese woven
        basket, a turtle shell, a spiky stuffed puffer fish -- that
        Fuller had collected and studied sprang from sources
        other than his awesomely original mind.

        It is just as revealing, though, that one of the least
        familiar images at the institute may be that of R.
        Buckminster Fuller himself. The kindly-looking old
        man in a business suit with close cropped white hair
        and thick glasses, the man who graced the cover of
        Time magazine in 1964 as a towering genius and who
        was popularly known as Bucky, has slipped, much like
        the institute, from the public's mind.

        That is one of the reasons that Fuller's daughter,
        Allegra Fuller Snyder, and his grandson, Jaime Snyder,
        have just agreed to transfer the enormous archives at
        the institute, hundreds of boxes of letters -- he seems to
        have saved nearly every one he ever wrote or received
        -- manuscripts, photographs, blueprints and videotapes,
        to Stanford University in Palo Alto after several years
        of planning and negotiations.

        The transfer seems unlikely to resuscitate Fuller to the
        cult status he had when he wrote "Operating Manual for
        Spaceship Earth" and was embraced by the Whole
        Earth Catalogue and its followers in the 1960's. But the
        family hopes the move -- partly a sale and partly a
        donation of the archives -- will foster renewed interest
        in his extraordinary and at times deeply subversive
        ideas about everything from home construction (he
        designed a cheap prefabricated house that was
        suspended from a mast in the 1920's) and automobiles
        (in the 1930's he made a three-wheeled cigar-shaped
        car that went 120 miles per hour on a 90-horsepower
        engine) to political organization, (he thought military
        expenditures a colossal waste and felt governments
        frustrated a more even distribution of wealth).

        In short, his descendants say it may again be time for
        people to be exposed to a romantic visionary who had
        few commercial instincts, little use for accepted
        wisdom and extraordinary foresight.

        "He felt he was surfing history in a sense, trying to
        anticipate the trends," Ms. Snyder said. "Now some of
        those waves have come in. There's also a different kind
        of chemistry today, especially among young people, and
        that opens doors to his thinking once again."

        The intellectual exile into which Fuller's ideas seemed
        to slide and the spark of new interest in his prodigious
        work, which Stanford hopes to enhance by organizing
        and cataloguing his archives, is a commentary on
        shifting fashions in ideas.

        By the time he died in 1983 at 87, Fuller and his work
        were already falling out of favor, Ms. Snyder said. He
        seemed out of step with a time when there was
        suspicion of anyone who rejected traditional thinking
        so cheerfully and thought in such grandiose terms. The
        earth was almost too small a unit, and he frequently
        spoke of the universe and man's place in it. His selfless
        creed was that people should gather not wealth but
        information and knowledge with the purpose of sharing
        it to make society more successful by improving living
        standards.

        He hewed to an absolute ethic of technological
        efficiency, of producing more with fewer resources, a
        motivation that created astounding results but that he
        regarded as the minimum society should expect if
        people liberated their minds as he had. In 1957 a large
        geodesic dome auditorium was built so swiftly in
        Honolulu that 22 hours after the parts were delivered a
        full house of hundreds of people were happily taking in
        a concert.

        But when Ronald Reagan became President, the country
        took a sharpturn to the right and the reputation of Fuller,
        who had became identified with the counterculture of
        the 1960's, suffered.

        Ms. Snyder and other experts on Fuller said that, though
        he had been embraced by many 60's radicals, his work
        had always been pragmatic, positive and apolitical.
        Still the country's drift to the right seemed to leave him
        tainted.

        E. J. Applewhite, who collaborated with Fuller on his
        two-volume behemoth, "Synergetics: Explorations in
        the Geometry of Thinking," said that Fuller was even
        more radical than many so-called 1960's radicals, but
        not because of his life style, which was fairly
        conventional. He was from an old New England family
        and, though twice thrown out of Harvard as a youth,
        nearly always wore business suits and spent much of
        his career teaching at universities. His grandson, Jaime
        Snyder, recalled being taught table manners by Fuller at
        fine restaurants.

        What was so unusual about Fuller, Mr. Applewhite
        said, was that he was completely apolitical and
        believed not in philosophies but in principles for
        problem-solving. What he disliked were impediments
        to technological solutions of common problems. Chief
        among those impediments, in his view, were tradition
        and cultural legacies, which thwarted the clear-eyed
        thinking needed to invent efficient ways of improving
        people's lives. He said change was not only good but
        also essential to saving the earth.

        "I don't know what I am," he once said. "I know that I
        am not a category. I am not a thing -- a noun. I seem to
        be a verb, an evolutionary process, an integral function
        of the universe."

        His free thinking appealed to a new generation eager to
        break old intellectual models and enticed by the
        liberating promise of all kinds of change.

        "Young people, dropouts loved him because he said
        you don't have to earn a living," said Mr. Applewhite,
        who collaborated with Fuller for several decades even
        though he had spent his career working for the Central
        Intelligence Agency, which Fuller loathed. "But these
        people generally ignored the rest of what he said,
        which was that you have to just do what has to be done.
        Just see what the needs of society are, and fill them."

        His thinking was so eccentric that he was often
        regarded as something of a crackpot until his ideas
        started to prove themselves and found their way into
        common use. No one ever took him up on his idea of
        covering Manhattan with a dome, for instance, (he
        believed the savings in snow removal alone would pay
        for the structure), but the United States pavilion at Expo
        '67 in Montreal was in a memorably giant geodesic
        dome and his octatrusses, a lightweight, strong
        honeycomb of a structure that can span great distances,
        are common at shopping malls and convention centers.

        He ultimately had 25 patents, wrote 28 books, received
        47 honorary doctorates and was awarded the
        Presidential Medal of Freedom. He invented not only
        objects (he called them artifacts) but words as well
        with an eye to literalness. For instance, he called
        people earthians, referred to sunsets as sunclipses and
        prefaced the names of many of his inventions with the
        term Dymaxion, a combination of dynamic, maximum
        and tension. Globalization, now a popular concept, was
        an idea he championed, along with the development of
        wind, solar and wave power. In turn, his name graced a
        major scientific discovery: when a new type of carbon
        molecule was discovered in 1985 that resembles his
        geodesic dome, they called it a buckyball.

        Toward the end of his life, ever eager to share his
        vision, he recorded a 42-hour program on video,
        "Everything I Know," a precise catalogue organizing
        his thoughts. It typified his earnestness and his
        unshakable confidence that mankind could accomplish
        any practical task, assuming people had the patience to
        sit through the exercise.

        Some of his disciples have continued to work on his
        ideas, and in Europe he still is a celebrity, at least in
        some circles. There is a huge exhibition on him, "Your
        Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller and the Art of
        Design Science," at the Zurich Museum of Design. Ms.
        Snyder said no show of that breadth has ever been
        mounted by a museum in the United States.

        His descendants are hoping that the transfer of his
        archives to Stanford, where they will be more
        accessible, will allow a new generation to discover
        Fuller. His grandson said he believed Fuller
        represented a positive, optimistic side of the 60's that
        has been obscured by current cultural debates.

        "The utopianism he stood for was emblematic of the
        60's," Mr. Snyder said. "I think Bucky, in the best
        sense, really believed in progress. In that sense, the
        whole 60's thing hasn't gone away. It's sort of gone
        underground, and some of these ideas may be coming to
        the surface again."