Relevant History

Fuller online

Before I became a futurist, I spend some time at Stanford, working with the Buckminster Fuller collection. One of the things I worked on was digitizing the massive audio and video holdings, which consist of several thousand hours of Fuller's lectures, seminars, and other events.

Back then (in 1999 and 2000), digitizing the stuff looked really hard, and making it publicly available seemed pretty daunting. What a difference a few years make. Now, Stanford's put a big slice of the Fuller audio and video online. Really amazing stuff, particularly in the 1950s, when Fuller was in the habit of turning on a tape recorder when he thought he was doing something interesting, not just when he was about to give yet another lecture.

Technorati Tags: history of science, Stanford University, STS

Happy birthday Bucky

Buckminster Fuller was born today.

Technorati Tags: culture

Lloyd Kahn's latest book

I first read Lloyd Kahn's Domebook years ago, when I was first working on the Bucky project. Domebook and Domebook 2 are remarkable books, amazing cultural artifacts that reflect the idealism of the communitarian strand of the counterculture. Now, he has a new book about building:

For Lloyd Kahn, the hand-built home is still where it's at

Before McMansions, before the counterculture was granite and marble, there was Lloyd Kahn, champion of the hand-built house, a road-kill-skunk skin warming his chair, a chin-up bar suspended from the rafters.

For 35 years, Kahn, 69, has been a steadfast chronicler of offbeat owner-built shelter: straw and mud houses, solar-powered houses, geodesic domes beloved by hippies (of whom Kahn was one) and made from chopped-up cars pounded into submission and bent into triangles....

Now, from his home down a brambly dirt road with no name in Bolinas, the self-consciously reclusive coastal village in Marin County, comes "Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter," his latest ode to humankind's ability to create, often out of nothing, expressive and in some cases profoundly bizarre dwellings.

Dispersal and the American dream

This morning I came across Margaret O'Mara's winter 2001 essay on dispersal and the aftermath of September 11th. It's a bit similar to what Steven Johnson wrote in Wired at the time, but more historically-grounded: what's especially interesting is how she connects dispersal to the growth of suburban high-tech industries and regions, like Silicon Valley.

I could kick myself for not seeing the connection myself. I've always been interested in how Bucky made use of the dispersal movement in his refashioning in the 1950s, but never followed the story out into industry, and tried to figure out what impact it actually had on industrial location and growth. Not that I'm competent to do that kind of thing, anyway. So it's good that someone can make the connection.